Listen to the cries of Burundian children

Editor, RE: “Youth call for proactive intervention in Burundi” (The New Times, December 29). The conditions of life of these children (in the camp) should be a wakeup call to the international community to address the root cause of their plight. The lack of consensus in the East African Community, the African Union as well as the UN security Council on how to react to mass atrocities in Burundi, including the recent horrific massacres of the youth in the mostly inhabited Tutsi districts in Bujumbura raises once again the question of the utility of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine, which was unanimously embraced with so much hope and fanfare by heads of state and government at the World Summit in 2005. More recently, the first Vice-President of Burundi publically said that whoever opposes the illegal third term of Pierre Nkurunziza does not deserve to live, comparing Nkurunziza to a king in a country where the absolute monarch was abolished fifty years ago, and proposed to them to choose between exile or death. The language of this small albeit representative sample of the mindsets of Burundi’s people currently in power reminds all of us of the broadcasts of Radio Télévision des Mille Collines (RTLM), which spurred on the perpetrators of the Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda in 1994. The doctrine of “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) holds that when a sovereign state fails to prevent atrocities, foreign governments may intervene to stop them. The world’s leading powers should avoid “a Srebrenica”—the massacre of Bosnians which UN forces failed to avert in July 1995 at best or another “Rwanda”—the Genocide against the Tutsi that claimed more than one million people at worst. The Arab League’s support for the intervention in Libya stopped Russia and China wielding their vetoes and the immediate goal of protecting Benghazi from massacre was achieved within days. Why can’t the EAC and AU emulate the same example and save the Burundi people from mass killings and help those children return home, attend school and live as other children in the world? Bela

Opinions

Listen to the cries of Burundian children