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NAIROBI, Jan 17 (AFP) - Supporters of Burundi's former interior minister, Leonard Nyangoma, who are fighting the current government, on Tuesday called for an international intervention force to protect "democratic institutions".
At a press conference in the Kenyan capital, Nyangoma's aide Jerome Ndiho, said that if a force of "at least 5,000 men" is not deployed, the armed wing of his movement will have "no other choice but to step up popular resistance".
The movement, the National Council for the Defence of Democracy (CNDD) and its armed Forces for the Defence of Democracy (FDD), charges that the coalition government of Hutus and minority Tutsis "is maintaining bases for the civil war in the country", Ndiho said.
He accused former president Pierre Buyoya, a Tutsi, of manipulating the majority Hutu party, the Front for Democracy in Burundi (FRODEBU), by means of the "mono-ethnic Tutsi army in rebellion against democratic institutions".
President Sylvestre Ntibantunganya, a Hutu FRODEBU member, was "completely under the sway" of Buyoya, and his party was "terrorised by the army", Ndiho alleged.
Nyangoma, who lives in exile in Zaire, is a dissident from FRODEBU and opposes a power-sharing agreement signed in September last year between the Hutu majority and the Tutsi opposition. The pact was aimed at preventing the central African country from plunging into an ethnic bloodbath of the kind that wracked neighbouring Rwanda last year.
Both highland nations have a history of massacres between Tutsis and Hutus.
Last October, the murder of Burundi's first elected Hutu president, Melchior Ndadaye, in a foiled military coup bid sparked off the massacre of tens of thousands of people, but the government survived.
The CNDD spokesman claimed that the power-sharing pact was "confirmation" that the coup bid had in fact worked.
The current government in Bujumbura considers that Nyangoma is a "warlord" out to destabilise the country and is responsible for a spate of attacks and massacres in recent months.
The CNDD claims that the FDD has some 30,000 men at arms inside the country and denies that they include members of Rwanda's former government army, ousted by Tutsi-led rebels in July last year after three months of civil war. These troops are also based in exile in neighbouring Zaire.
Ndiho declared that Nyangoma has asked UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali to replace the special envoy of the United Nations to Burundi, Ahmedou Ould Abdallah.
He alleged that Abdallah had failed in his "duty to be neutral by tacitly backing the blackmail by the Tutsi opposition and the army".
sa/nb AFP AFP
