press conference by Secretary-General’s special Representative for burundi

(Delayed for technical reasons, issued on 20 September 2005.)

The new Burundi Government represented a “clean sweep” for the country due to its full respect for the ethnic and gender power sharing prescribed in its Constitution, Carolyn McAskie, Special Representative of the Secretary-General and Head of the United Nations Operation in Burundi (ONUB) said at a Headquarters press conference on Monday.

She said Burundi had gone through a very useful and helpful transition process and that the last of a series of elections would put village councils in place at the end of the week.  However, if any lesson could be learned from past post-conflict situations, it was that the international community could not now walk away.  Burundi needed the full force of international support to ensure the consolidation of all the gains it had made.

The economic situation had been deteriorating drastically over the past decade, she said, pointing out that Burundi used to be self-sufficient.  Half its population was now undernourished and most of its social structures, including those for education and health, had been completely destroyed and the Government had very little capacity.  Hopefully, the country would benefit from the creation of a new United Nations Peacebuilding Commission as its first client.  If that Commission could fulfil its promise of bringing flexible mechanisms and early financial assistance to countries emerging from war, Burundi could be an example of a successful post-conflict country.  The “tragedy of statistics” was that 50 per cent of such countries lapsed back into conflict within five years, but that could easily be prevented in Burundi’s case if the international community was willing to make the required effort.

She said that one of the ways to make that happen was to bring all Burundi’s partners –- the African Union, the United Nations, the Great Lakes region and the donors -– together in the “Burundi Partners Forum”, a mechanism that would meet regularly to support the Government in its peacebuilding and reform efforts.  During last week’s World Summit in New York, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan and President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda had chaired a first meeting, in which the high-ranking participants included the Presidents of the United Republic of Tanzania, South Africa, Gabon and Kenya, as well as the Prime Minister of Ethiopia, the Chairman of the African Union and high-level representatives of such key donor countries as the Netherlands, Belgium and the United States.  They would be working for what should be “the very first true success story of the Great Lakes Region”.

Responding to a question about the resources needed, Ms. McAskie said that donors and the new Government were establishing priorities to be presented at a donors’ conference to be held probably by the end of the year.  Much of the $1 billion pledged during the 2004 Development Forum on Burundi hosted by Belgium had come through.  Moreover, the country had qualified under the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Debt Initiative and had been asked to join the East African Community, which would bring in trade.

Asked about the situation of women in the new Government, she said the new constitution required that 30 per cent of women participate in the legislature.  Even though not enough women had been elected, a number of them had been appointed to parliament in order to meet ethnic and gender requirements.  Women had also been appointed to senior Government positions in a sea change for Burundi, considering that during a 1999 meeting of the Arusha peace talks male delegates had been overheard saying that women should not be part of the process.  But now a woman was Vice-President and another was President of the National Assembly.

In response to another question, about the economic situation, she said that even by African standards, Burundi had a very high rural/urban ratio, whereby 85 per cent of the population worked in the agrarian sector and there was little in the way of a middle-economy sector.  Burundians lived on their own hills with little interaction with people from other hills, which was one of the questions that must be addressed.  Another problem was the homecoming of hundreds of thousands of refugees, mainly from the United Republic of Tanzania.  Land inheritance would be an issue, as a lot of returning refugees would include female-headed households who would not get access to their lands because of inheritance laws.  Those laws would have to be adjusted.

Asked if the refusal by the Front national de liberation (FNL) to accept the new Government would be a drag on donor commitments, she replied that if the diplomatic approach towards the faction did not succeed, the Government would be tempted to go after it militarily, which would not work.  There was a need for a well-developed strategic approach, the most important element of which would be the Government of the United Republic of Tanzania, which had maintained open lines.  As that Government had launched the Arusha peace process, it was determined to see the process through to the end.  After all, Tanzania had hundreds of thousands of Burundian refugees on its territory, including FNL members.  Helping the Tanzanian Government to complete the peace process was one of the most important things on which the international community should focus.

The FNL was extremely isolated from “realpolitik” and did not understand that the game was over, she said.  They had been fighting for the liberation of the Hutu people, but the largest Hutu rebel movement had now been elected through an “impeccable” democratic process.  There was nothing left to fight for and the population was no longer interested.

She added that the FNL could become a political party, but that would be meaningless.  Burundi had become part of the “tripartite process” to deal with negative elements in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo in order to strangle the FNL’s resources in the hope that they would come home.  The faction’s rank-and-file membership could be brought into the disarmament process but the leadership would have to be offered something.

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For information media • not an official record