East African leaders will meet in Tanzania on Monday to discuss the political crisis in Burundi, after the United Nations criticized elections held in the country this week and the U.S. condemned police abuses against protesters.
“It’s a summit on the situation in Burundi,” Richard Owora Othieno, spokesman for the East African Community Secretariat, said by phone Friday from the Tanzanian commercial hub of Dar es Salaam.
Burundi held parliamentary elections on June 29 having failed to create conditions for a “free, fair” vote, the UN Security Council said on its website Thursday. The U.S. government halted security assistance programs in the East African nation because of abuses committed by police during political protests, the State Department said by e-mail Friday.
Burundi has been roiled by unrest that’s left at least 77 people dead since April, when the ruling party named President Pierre Nkurunziza as its candidate in presidential elections to be held on July 15. Opponents say the bid to extend his tenure violates a two-term limit set out in peace agreements that in 2005 brought an end to a 12-year civil war. More than 100,000 people have fled to neighboring countries in the past three months.
The unrest in Burundi has the potential to destabilize the Great Lakes region that includes the Democratic Republic of Congo, Africa’s top copper and tin producer, and Rwanda, where the economy is still recovering from a genocide in 1994.
Source: Bloomberg
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