ITEKA LEAGUE DECLARATION ON THE PRESIDENT MANDELA STAND
IN RELATION TO “POLITICAL PRISONERS”.
1° The Burundi human Rights League ITEKA carefully monitors the Arusha inter-Burundi negotiations developments.
2° The League has been more than happy at the time when President Mandela was designated mediator in the Burundi conflict and is as well happy about the commitment that the President demonstrated right from the beginning particularly through visits he has just completed to Burundi.
3° On April 20, 2000, at the time of the first visit, the League ITEKA expressed its satisfaction through a letter sent to the Mediator himself. Through the same letter, the League had however deplored the fact that the mediator was not to meet particular groups of people such as the displaced and the regrouped, prisoners, people opposed to Arusha negotiations and many others opposed to the Arusha peace process.
4° The League is happy to see that all of the above complaints were answered during the mediator’s last visit to Burundi on July 12 to 14, 2000 through which the mediator visited prisoners, displaced and regrouped populations as well as the civil societies and the military. Nonetheless, the League would have been happier if the mediator had given more time to the civil societies, the only one party not involver in the Arusha negotiations.
5° As for the mediator’s position on prisoners, the League would like to inform the public on the following :
5.1. Burundi people were expecting to hear appeasing words from the mediator ; words to make rightfully jailed and condemned prisoners hearts seek for repentance ; words to make unjustly jailed and condemned prisoners feel the starting of hope for their liberation. The League ITEKA however, has been surprised and seriously shaken by the mediator's Mandela stand stating that all would be prisoners for ideological or political party reasons are political prisoners and should be let free for the restoration of peace in Burundi.
5.2. The League ITEKA is more than surprised since such a speech tends to support in the eyes of the world the impunity, a major challenge to Burundi and the same impunity has covered the most odious crimes that happened to Burundi for the last four decades.
5.3. It is the League ITEKA's belief that, politics even in its expression of conflicts, cannot be allowed for the sake of claiming any right to be used as a crime such as war crime, crime against the humanity and the genocide when horror and immoral character are known to every one and the moral obligation for its abolition has been established by the entire world society and international law - Therefore, to accept crimes as means of political claims would mean to legitimate the nature and logic of crimes committed for the last four decades in Burundi and this would come to perpetuation of conflicts.
5.4. The League ITEKA considers that the ongoing peace negotiations are at a critical stage where the mediation and involved parties must avoid by all means counter productive attitudes contrary to the principals and universal values of the human rights, International Conventions pertaining to the Civil Rights and Politics, to the economic, social and cultural as well as the convention on the imprescriptibility of crimes of war and crimes against the humanity.
5.5. The League ITEKA considers that that national reconciliation will not be possible without a fair justice establishing responsibilities in the crimes and damages caused and avoiding globalization.
6. For all those reasons, the League ITEKA asks the mediator to :
- reassess his position on matters of amnesty of prisoners accused of blood shading ;
- to privilege positions that are not reviving the ethnic hatred and private vendetta and encourage justice of universal moral which does not tolerate any loss of life for whatever reason even political ;
- continue to involve himself in the pacific resolution of Burundi conflicts taking into account Burundi specificity and the dispositions of national and international instruments for human rights protection.
For League Iteka
Pie Ntakarutimana
President