Nairobi, Mar 9: Former Burundi president Pierre Buyoya, the subject of a government arrest warrant, has urged the international community to intervene over what he termed breaches of the country’s peace accord.
The warrant against him was one such violation of the Arusha agreement of 2000 that ended a brutal civil war in Burundi, Buyoya claimed in a letter to the pact’s guarantors.
It also amounted to “a hindrance to the process of national reconciliation,” he warned in the letter seen by AFP on Saturday and authenticated by an African diplomat.
The document, dated March 1, was addressed to Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, who mediated the peace deal and supervised it, as well as fellow guarantors South Africa, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, the UN, African Union and the European Union.
In November, Burundi issued an international arrest warrant against Buyoya, 11 former senior officials and five civilians close to him over the 1993 killing of the country’s first democratically-elected leader, Melchior Ndadaye.
