Bujumbura, Burundi - Fears are growing that political protests in Burundi could turn ethnic, threatening to plunge the country into another deadly Hutu-Tutsi conflagration.
Ethnicity is rarely discussed openly in Burundi, whose history is punctuated by ethnic massacres and where long-standing antagonisms between the majority Hutu and minority Tutsi have been suppressed rather than addressed, analysts say.
Beyond the street protests challenging the third term candidacy of President Pierre Nkurunziza, the bigger worry is that the current crisis could jeopardise the Arusha Agreement, which brought peace to Burundi after years of civil war.
The deal included an ethnic power-sharing formula that helped end fighting that raged from 1993 to 2006 between the mostly Tutsi army and predominately Hutu rebel groups.
The Arusha Agreement "was an institutional arrangement that created a power sharing agreement between the elites of the two ethnic groups," said Thierry Vircoulon of the International Crisis Group think tank.
"The challenge of the current crisis is to decide whether or not to maintain this institutional agreement," he said.
By sidestepping the two term limit mandated by the peace deal Nkurunziza and his allies risk undermining the foundation of Burundi's tentative peace. The move also confirms the suspicions of opponents, who believe Nkurunziza's ambition is to revise the constitution to erase Arusha's legacy of ethnic power-sharing.
Both the peace deal and the constitution "perpetuate ethnic quotas" in government institutions in order to "defuse" the ethnic question, said Christian Thibon, a Burundi specialist at the University of Pau and Pays de l'Adour.
Both are based "on a compromise, on the spirit of Arusha," that hardliners in Nkurunziza's CNDD-FDD - a Hutu rebel group turned ruling party - are now questioning.
Burundi is still haunted by memories of the civil war, which began when Tutsi officers launched a coup against Melchior Ndadaye, a Hutu and the country's first democratically elected president.
AFP
