{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.}<\/p>\n
“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.<\/p>\n
He remains free pending an appeal.<\/p>\n
Ngendakumana, president of the main coalition opposition party, was accused of claiming the ruling party was preparing a “genocide”.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
He accused the ruling CNDD-FDD of preparations similar to that which took place in neighbouring Rwanda before the genocide of 1994.<\/p>\n
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.”<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
“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.<\/p>\n
He vowed to continue his political battle, saying the “attempts to silence us are in vain.”<\/p>\n
He was also ordered to pay a fine of a million Burundi francs — around 600 dollars or 475 euros — to Rema.<\/p>\n
Prosecutors last month had called for Ngendakumana to serve five years in jail.<\/p>\n
But senior Rema radio station official Daniel Mpitabakana told reporters they were pleased with the sentence.<\/p>\n
“We are satisfied, because the court has demonstrated that we are not an incendiary station which incites hatred,” he said.<\/p>\n
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.”<\/p>\n
The government has denied the report.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
AFP<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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