{A top Burundi opposition leader was sentenced to a year in jail yesterday for slander, the politician said, calling it a “political trial” to remove him ahead of elections.}
“This is a travesty of justice, a political trial to remove me from the political scene within a year of the general election of 2015,” Leonce Ngendakumana, president of the main coalition opposition group, told AFP.
He remains free pending an appeal.
Ngendakumana, president of the main coalition opposition party, was accused of claiming the ruling party was preparing a “genocide”.
Burundi, a small nation in Africa’s Great Lakes region, emerged in 2006 from a brutal 13-year civil war and its political climate remains fractious ahead of presidential polls due in June 2015.
Ngendakumana was accused of making “damaging allegations, false accusations and racist incitement,” in a letter he penned in February to UN chief Ban Ki-moon.
He accused the ruling CNDD-FDD of preparations similar to that which took place in neighbouring Rwanda before the genocide of 1994.
During the trial, prosecutor Eric Ndikumana had read excerpts of the letter, in which he said the politician had warned of “political-ethnic genocide in Burundi.”
Ngendakumana also likened the party’s Imbonerakure youth wing to Rwanda’s 1994 genocidal Interahamwe militia, and a radio station to Kigali’s Radio Mille Collines, which 20 years ago broadcast encouragements to kill.
Ngendakumana, chairman of the Democratic Alliance for Change (ADC), which includes nine opposition parties, was also accused of tarnishing the image of the ruling party and Rema-FM radio.
“The government of President Pierre Nkurunziza has once again demonstrated its commitment to neutralize the opposition, because I was one of the few opposition leaders not to be exiled” or stripped of their power, Ngendakumana said.
He vowed to continue his political battle, saying the “attempts to silence us are in vain.”
He was also ordered to pay a fine of a million Burundi francs — around 600 dollars or 475 euros — to Rema.
Prosecutors last month had called for Ngendakumana to serve five years in jail.
But senior Rema radio station official Daniel Mpitabakana told reporters they were pleased with the sentence.
“We are satisfied, because the court has demonstrated that we are not an incendiary station which incites hatred,” he said.
Rights groups including Amnesty have said the Imbonerakure group has strong links to the security service, accusing it of “perpetrating human rights abuses with impunity.”
The government has denied the report.
A United Nations official was expelled in April after a confidential note reporting the distribution of weapons by the government to the Imbonerakure was leaked.
AFP
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