Burundi: former President Pierre Buyoya sentenced for the assassination of Melchior Ndadaye
Former Burundian President Pierre Buyoya at the European headquarters of the United Nations in Geneva on April 1, 2015. AP Photo / Keystone, Salvatore Di Nolfi
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The Supreme Court of Burundi sentenced former Burundian President Pierre Buyoya, along with 18 other relatives to life imprisonment, for the assassination of President Melchior Ndadaye which plunged the country into a decade of civil war which left more than 300,000 dead.
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Almost 27 years ago to the day, on September 21, 1993, Melchior Ndadaye, the first democratically elected Hutu president of Burundi, was assassinated.
Former President Pierre Buyoya, now High Representative of the African Union in Mali and the Sahel, is sentenced in absentia to life imprisonment for "an
attack against the Head of State, against the authority of the state and attack tending to bring massacre and devastation
”.
Eighteen other personalities of the Burundian high administration of his time, soldiers and civilians, were sentenced to the same sentence, while three others were sentenced to 20 years in prison for "complicity" for the same crimes.
Only one accused, the former transitional Prime Minister Antoine Nduwayo, is acquitted.
Only five of these personalities, including four former high-ranking army officers in prison for nearly two years, were in the box of the accused for
this trial which was held in Gitega
from November 2018 to last September.
All the others including Pierre Buyoya live abroad and are subject to international arrest warrants.
A verdict in the absence of the accused
The 21 defendants are also ordered to pay jointly to the Burundian State the equivalent of 45 million euros "as material and moral compensation".
The government intends to pay on the sale of all their property in Burundi that it seized two years ago.
The verdict was delivered Tuesday in the absence of the defendants and their lawyers who had not been notified.
One of them denounces an "
unfair trial which violated Burundian law as well as the Peace Agreement for Burundi
", signed in 2000 in Arusha and which had decreed immunity for all the protagonists of the Burundian conflict.
A senior executive of the party in power is delighted with a
"
historic trial which repairs an injustice
".
So far, only a dozen "executants" whose highest ranking was lieutenant had been convicted in 1998 for the assassination of President Ndadaye.
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