{jcomments on} 14/5/1997 -©D.C.I.M.I news 1997

The Spokesman’s Office COMMUNIQUE N°85

The 43 students of Buta were armed/The negotiation-process is at risk of being interrupted

1. The CNDD would like to underline that the “43 students and school workers” shot on April,30 1997 while fighting in the Buta seminary were all Tutsi militia members armed by BUYOYA’s army. The other students and workers were spared and fled because they were true civilians without weapons.

2. The Buta opening hostilities were started by a seminary teacher who suddenly began to shoot towards a group of the Forces For The Defence Of The Democracy (FDD) passing by, walking and singing on the road to the city of Bururi. It was at 5 a.m. The FDD had to defend themselves against the armed teacher and the armed students and school workers who came up to assist the teacher.

3. The CNDD, once again, warns that the BUYOYA policy of distributing weapons to civilians turns them into militia by which they ,consequently, become strategic targets.

4. The CNDD disavows all acts of violence against unarmed civilians. That is why it requests that BUYOYA’s army, in rebellion against democracy, stops its mass killing of innocent Hutu civilians whenever his troops are ambushed and defeated by the FDD.

5. BUYOYA’s army also has to abandon it’s human-shield tactics, forcing Hutu civilians to preceed the soldiers during attacks on the FDD.

6. The negotiation-process is at risk of being interrupted if BUYOYA maintains the ongoing NAZI-like concentration camps. Indeed, these NAZI-like death camps are a result of the uprooting of up to 800 000 Hutu farmers from their farming plots, regrouping them into strategic Nazi-like encampments. Death by forced lack of shelter, food, drinking water and by epidemics such as typhoid, cholera and dysentery, thus awaits the victims including children, pregnant women and the aged. The CNDD confirms the World Health Organization (WHO) report presented on March 11 to the UN, stressing that “up to 800 000 people have been incarcerated in camps in which they are now dying of typhoid fever and other diseases at the rate of 1000 per day”.

7. The Buyoya military junta has the goal of placing at least 1 million people in such death camps, targetting those Hutu populations living near cities, towns, or market centers, with the aim of creating a no-man’s-land buffer zone between the urban areas under its control and the rural sea of the Hutu population. This is the implementation of the genocidal and apartheid SIMBANANIYE PLAN.

On behalf of the CNDD, Jérôme NDIHO, member of the Executive Committee, And Spokesman