Former Hutu rebel named to presidency
BUJUMBURA, Burundi – A former Hutu rebel leader was chosen by lawmakers as Burundi’s president Friday, culminating an internationally mediated effort that hopes to bring peace to an African nation wrecked by a dozen years of ethnic war.
Pierre Nkurunziza, the 40-year-old son of a Hutu father and a Tutsi mother, appealed for support from all Burundians to meet the challenges of healing ethnic divisions and rebuilding the shattered economy as he tries to get the last Hutu rebels to lay down their arms.
“I am like a small ant on the back of a big elephant. When the elephant does something, the ant rejoices as if the ant himself has done it,” he said.
Nkurunziza, who saw soldiers from the long-dominant Tutsi minority kill his politician father during ethnic violence in 1972, had been expected to be chosen president by Parliament under a power-sharing constitution adopted during three years of peace negotiations.
His Force for the Defense of Democracy was once Burundi’s largest Hutu-led rebel group and as a political party now controls both houses of Parliament.
In the final step of a sometimes unsteady peace process, 162 lawmakers voted for Nkurunziza, nine opposed him and two abstained. He was the sole candidate, but needed at least 151 votes to take office. He is to be sworn in next Friday.
The Hutu majority rebelled in 1993 after the country’s first democratically elected president, a Hutu, was assassinated by paratroopers from the Tutsi minority, which had controlled politics and business since independence from Belgium in 1962.
More than 250,000 people, mostly civilians, were killed by fighting in the country of 7 million. Hutu-Tutsi animosities have brought bloodshed elsewhere in the region, including the 1994 slaughter of a half-million Tutsis and moderate Hutus by militant Hutus in neighboring Rwanda.
Nkurunziza, a born-again Christian who has preached reconciliation since joining the peace effort, thanked leaders of neighboring nations, South African mediators and the international community for helping keep negotiations on track.