“People are dying every day, dead bodies are being dragged on the streets every day”, Kagame said.
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“The recurring violence and killings in Burundi must stop”, UN chief Ban Ki-moon said Friday, while France denounced a recent wave of “hate speech” in the tiny, landlocked nation and called for a UN Security Council meeting on Monday to discuss the deteriorating situation.
Relations between the two neighbours are tense, with Bujumbura accusing Kigali of backing opponents of President Pierre Nkurunziza’s controversial third term.
At least nine people were killed in an overnight attack at a bar in the latest violence in Burundi’s capital, witnesses said Sunday, as security forces went door-to-door to disarm civilians in neighborhoods seen as opposition strongholds.
At least 200 people have died in the latest turmoil and 200,000 have fled the country, stoking fears violence gripping the the central African country could spin into mass bloodletting and even genocide.
Hundreds of police and soldiers ringed the opposition flashpoint Mutakura district of the capital Bujumbura early today to start a widely feared crackdown on “enemies of the nation”.
The people of Rwanda and Burundi have close ties, and have taken turns sheltering in their neighbour when trouble has spiked, including during Rwanda’s 1994 genocide, when at least 800 000 mainly Tutsi people were killed by extremist Hutu militias.
Obama said the violence in Burundi “worsened significantly” during Nkurunziza’s election campaign. Kagame said Nkurunziza was allowing his people to die. Two others who fled the scene later died in a hospital, witnesses said.
Gunmen launch deadly attack in capital as people flee city over fears of a bloody government crackdown on resistance.
“The security forces are there and will stay until peace is restored”.
Xinhua new agency quoted local administrator Bosco Girukwishaka as saying the incident occurred at Au Coin des Amis, a bar in the Kanyosha area south of Bujumbura, and that the gunmen ordered the “bar cashier and all the people who were taking drinks to give them all the money and other valuable objects that they had”. The U.S.is “particularly concerned” that the recent “inflammatory rhetoric” of a few government officials and Nkurunziza’s planned security crackdown this weekend “are increasing the risk of an outbreak of mass violence in Burundi”, said U.S. State Department spokesperson John Kirby in a statement Saturday.
But Nyamitwe said the government was trying to suppress “acts of terrorism, as with Al-Shabaab in Somalia”, referring to the Islamist insurgents that Burundi troops are fighting as part of an internationally backed African Union force.
“It is unbelievable to see that a government that wants to put an end to terrorism is criticised instead of being encouraged”, he added.
Rwandan President Paul Kagame.
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And the Brussels-based global Crisis Group said the language was “chillingly similar” to that used in Rwanda before the genocide of 1994.
