A group of 40 Burundian students started university classes this week in the capital, Bujumbura, after becoming the first returnees to be granted scholarships by the United Nations refugee agency. The new students at Université Lumière in Bujumbura were selected to receive scholarships by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which helps to administer the German-funded DAFI scholarship programme.

Life is getting tougher and tougher for Burundi's 12,000 urban refugees and asylum seekers. Amid rising prices and dwindling opportunities to make money, hundreds of refugees have left the capital, Bujumbura, over the past two years and moved to refugee camps where they can get assistance and free schooling for their children.

Extreme incidents of violence in post-Colonial Africa have frequently been explained through the discourses of tribalism and ethnic hatred. A variant of this narrative is the obsession with Africa’s ‘failed’ and ‘collapsed’ states that are said to be paralysed by kinship and ethnicity-based patronage politics. However, systemic violence has far more entrenched structural causes and the scholarly eye searches for these underlying conditions.

As representatives of national and international human rights organizations working in Burundi, we urge you to extend the mandate of the Independent Expert on the situation of human rights in Burundi. He has been and should continue to be an effective counselor to the Government of Burundi, a firm support to Burundian civil society organizations, and a passionate voice for victims of human rights abuses.

The release of detainees suspected to be members of the Palipehutu-Forces for National Liberation (FNL), Burundi's last rebel group, would remove a major impediment to the ceasefire between the group and the government, sources said. The FNL has repeatedly demanded the release of its detained members as a pre-condition for implementing a ceasefire with the government, according to local observers in the capital, Bujumbura.

This latest briefing from the International Crisis Group, points out that disarmament has barely started, and no consensus has been reached on integrating former rebels into state and security institutions. Burundi cannot afford to have wasted three years in legislative gridlock and then move directly towards the preparation of the 2010 elections without delivering peace dividends.

The Burundi government and the rebel Palipehutu-FNL on Wednesday committed themselves to lasting peace through the Magaliesberg Communique, on the Burundi Peace Process. The Group of Special Envoys on Burundi, with Safety and Security Minister Charles Nqakula heading the facilitation team, welcomed the commitment of both parties to build confidence and move the peace process forward.

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/379/48640water.jpgIf women had control over water as resource "they would be better placed to manage its use, especially in agriculture, which is the principal economic activity in Burundi, and is controlled by women." Concilie Gahungere looks at the access to water in Burundi in relation to gender.
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Mrs Immaculee S. lives in Gikungu Rural location, which falls in the urban Gihosha district. She is 65 and lives alone with no children or domestic help. Even though she lives close to a residential area, she has no access to clean water. Everyday, she takes a 10-litre jerrican, and goes off in search of water. With her jerrican, she begs her neighborhood “bosses” for a little water. With an air of resignation, she describes how her neighbors receive her: “sometimes they open their big gates, and other times they look at us through the gate, without opening it”. She says the administration must look into providing clean water for the poor and the old. “We are old and poor, we neither have the money to pay for water, nor do we have young children to look after us”, she laments.

Mrs. Immaculee is one of many Burundian women without access to clean water. Article 15 of the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa stipulates under the right to food security, that states must ensure women’s access to adequate and safe nutrition. In this regards, it sets in to necessary mechanisms to:

- provide women with access to clean drinking water, sources of domestic fuel, land, and the means of producing nutritious food;

- establish adequate systems of supply and storage to ensure food security.

Mrs Odette Kayitesi is the former minister for environment. In her view, the Burundian woman’s access to clean water is a critical issue that has been debated for a long time and is still not resolved. The access water, Burundian women have to travel long distances. Often, she covers these huge distances to obtain water that is, in the final analysis, not fit for drinking. She is sometimes forced to draw water from streams for all her home needs, including drinking.

Mrs. Kayitesi laments that the lack of water points within easy access has grave hygiene consequences for the family, both in terms of the transmission of disease, and the future of the girl child. Young girls are forced to abandon the education in order to help their mothers seek out water for household use.

In Burundi, some regions have very few water sources or catchment areas. Even where there is water, the difficulty lies in making it easily accessible. This is the case in the North, the East and the North-Eastern regions. On the other hand, the central plateaus, and the Munirwa regions have sufficient water supply.

WATER ISSUES IN THE CITY

Women living in the city are not spared either when it comes to lack of clean drinking water, states Kayitesi. Some women are forced to draw water from the rivers that criss-cross Bujumbura, such as the Ntahangwa and the Rusizi. In Kayitesi’s view, there is a problem of lack of sensitization, because too many women are still underestimate the importance of clean drinking water. Another problem is that many women in poor neighborhoods do not have the resources to obtain clean drinking water. The cost of living on Burundi is very high, and more so for the poor.

WOMEN AND WATER MANAGEMENT

Our sources indicate that based on the available data, the percentage of the population with access to clean drinking water is very low. During the recent African Water Week held in Tunis, it was noted that only a small percentage of the population have access to clean drinking water and that countries have to intensify efforts by increasing drilling for clean water. Governments have been asked to meet new targets in the 2020-2025 period.

Kayitesi calls on citizens to maintain water point, noting that the population still does not take enough responsibility in protecting what already exists in the interests of sustainability.

Solange Habonimana, former chairperson of CAFOB (Collectif des Associations et ONG féminines du Burundi), agrees that Burundian women have inadequate access to water. In cases where women have access, they have no control or decision-making power. If women had decisive control over the resource, she would be better placed to manage its use, especially in agriculture, which is the principal economic activity in Burundi, and is controlled by women.

*Concilie Gahungere is the coordinator of CAFOB (Collectif des Associations et ONG féminines du Burundi). This article was translated from French by Joshua Ogada.

*Please send comments to or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/

The exiled leader of Burundi's last rebel group returned to the capital on Friday to begin implementing a stalled deal seen as the final obstacle to peace in the tiny central African country. Agathon Rwasa, leader of the Forces for National Liberation (FNL), arrived at Bujumbura airport with the South African mediator for talks between his ethnic Hutu group and Burundi's ethnically mixed but Hutu-led government.

Burundian police and judicial officials should immediately release the scores of persons still detained solely as suspected members of a movement long opposed to the government, Human Rights Watch has said. They should also instruct security forces to cease such arrests. More than 300 alleged members of the Party for the Liberation of the Hutu People-National Liberation Forces (Parti pour la Libération du Peuple Hutu-Forces Nationales pour la Libération, Palipehutu-FNL), many of them civilians, have been arrested throughout Burundi since mid-April.

Despite a marked improvement in the security situation in Burundi in recent years, some 100,000 internally displaced people (IDPs) remain in settlements throughout the country, in addition to an unknown number living with host families. Many IDPs seem to have to a large extent integrated into the communities of neighbouring towns and villages, but there is little information on their situation, their needs or their aspirations.

There is a country in Africa which, in a few years, has achieved more peace than most formerly war-ravaged countries around the world - much more than Bosnia, Kosovo, Somalia, or Afghanistan. There was a comprehensive ceasefire and a power-sharing among former fighters, tens of thousands of whom have been disarmed and re-socialized. Thanks to peaceful, free and fair elections and a new constitution, it has a democratic government for the first time in its history, and it has leadership and one with many women. Its human rights record has improved markedly.

Burundi's army said on Thursday it had killed 50 fighters from the country's last active rebel group in renewed clashes outside the capital Bujumbura. The attack came barely a day after leaders of the Forces for National Liberation (FNL), an ethnic Hutu guerrilla group, said they would drop an amnesty demand and return to the tiny coffee-growing country to implement a long awaited peace deal.

The Burundian military has announced the deaths of at least 11 fighters from the National Liberation Forces (FNL) in fresh fighting near the capital Bujumbura. The clashes on Monday between the government and the FNL comes after the United Nations warned of sanctions unless a ceasefire is observed.

Rebels from Burundi's last active guerrilla group fired mortar bombs at government positions in clashes that killed 10 rebels and four soldiers, an army spokesman said on Friday. The fighting, which started late Thursday and continued into Friday morning, was centred on the rebel stronghold of Bubanza some 50 km (30 miles) northwest of the capital Bujumbura, the military's deputy spokesman Colonel Justace Ciza said.

Supreme Court in Burundi has sentenced the former Chairman of President Pierre Nkurunziza's ruling Forces for the Defence of Democracy [FDD] to 13 years behind bars. Hussein Radjabu had been found guilty of attempting to “recruit former rebels with the aim of destabilising the state" and insulting President Nkurunziza, referring to him as an "empty bottle."

The number of Burundians that have returned to their homeland from neighbouring Tanzania with the help of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reached the 300,000 mark last month, the agency has reported. In addition, tens of thousands of Burundian refugees have also returned home on their own – mainly from villages in the north-western Tanzania – bringing the total number of returnees to 389,000.

The UN refugee agency's introduction last August of cash grants for Burundian returnees appears to have both encouraged more people to go back home and eased their reintegration. In the months since the 50,000 Burundian Francs (about US$45) grant per person was introduced for Burundians in Tanzania, some 35,000 refugees have returned to their country.

In Burundi, land is a source of power. Many members of the Batwa pygmy community blame their subordinate status on the fact that they do not own property. Having once enjoyed a symbiotic relationship with the rainforest environment, most Batwa today have been squeezed out of their hunter-gatherer existence and work as casual labourers on other people’s land.

On 1st February 2008, as its 40th session came to an end, the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) adopted its concluding observations, having examined the combined second, third and fourth periodic report of Burundi regarding the implementation of the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women.