Pierre Nkurunziza speaks at Wilson Center meeting
By Jim Fisher-Thompson, Washington File Staff Writer
Washington - Burundi's newly elected president, Pierre Nkurunziza, believes that including women at all levels of government will help contribute to a lasting peace in his country, ending decades of ethnic conflict in the tiny, land-locked African nation.
Nkurunziza was elected president August 19 as part of a United Nations/South African-backed peace process that observers hope finally will bring an end to the long-running cycle of violence in the Great Lakes nation that has killed 300,000 people.
On September 20, the new president told Africanists and diplomats at a meeting of the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, "After 40 years of crises in Burundi, and a history filled with massacres and interethnic conflict, Burundians are finally coming together" to work out their problems in a nonviolent, democratic way.
"We are no longer in a state of conflict," Nkurunziza said, and "women are playing a very important role" in the peace process. "With peace and the will of God, everything is possible. We cannot fail."
Speaking in French, Nkurunziza addressed an audience that included former Congressman Howard Wolpe, head of the Wilson Center's Africa Program, and Ambassador Johnnie Carson, senior vice president of the National Defense University.
Wolpe, who attended Nkurunziza's inauguration in the capital, Bujumbura, August 26, said, "Burundians on both sides of the political-ethnic [Hutu-Tutsi] divide have worked for peace and have made a new and hopeful beginning" for the nation.
Nkurunziza, a member of the minority Hutus, and his family are no strangers to violence. The 42-year-old former university lecturer almost was killed in 1993 when the Tutsi-dominated military attacked his campus and he fled in a car that was machine-gunned. Nkurunziza jumped from the vehicle and escaped into the bush, where he became a freedom fighter. Five of his six siblings died in the conflict that followed. His father, a former member of parliament and governor of two provinces, was killed in 1972.
Now, with the newly brokered peace, Nkurunziza declared, "our country has been very blessed." He said he saw a real chance for a lasting peace to take hold in Burundi as the result, in part, of a political opening that, for the first time, includes many women in the political life of the nation.
Women now make up an average of 36 percent of the staffs of all government institutions, the president explained. Seven out of 20 government ministers are women, including the ministers of justice and foreign affairs. "We also have a woman who is president of the National Assembly.
"We did not just do this to strike a balance," Nkurunziza told his Wilson Center audience. "They [the women] deserved it. ... It is a unique model for Africa," and for Burundi "this is just the beginning."
As for the election, Nkurunziza said, "It was conducted in a framework of integrity," made possible, in large part, because of "the spontaneous integration of former enemies" into the political campaign process, with security provided by "the newly well-trained defense forces."
After only three weeks in power, Nkurunziza said he especially was proud of advances made in education, including the enrollment of 550,000 children in school - 300,000 more than before. By 2008, the government hopes to add 350 new schools to Burundi's neglected educational infrastructure, he said, because "children are going to play an important role in the future of our country."
(The Washington File is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)