BUJUMBURA February 23rd (ABP) – The Prime Minister, Mr. Alain Guillaume Bunyoni, received in audience, on Tuesday, February 22, 2022 in his office, the Chairman of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (CVR), Mr. Pierre Claver Ndayicariye, who came to present to him the report of the achievements of the CVR for the year 2021.
At the end of the audience, the Prime Minister told the Burundian press that the government of Burundi congratulates the members of the CVR for having demonstrated an unequaled determination to better carry out their noble task of delving into the history of Burundi, to update the truth of the dark periods that Burundi went through, and more particularly the massacres that Burundi experienced in 1972 and beyond.
He specified that the report presented establishes by testimonies, the responsibilities of the State and its bodies in the massacres of 1972. According to him, those testimonies also give the very precise cartography on the mass graves which were used to bury the people who were massacred in 1972.
The report also establishes responsibilities with regard to the legal qualification of those acts that have been committed.
Mr. Bunyoni mentioned that the report demonstrates within itself that the categorization of those crimes is at two levels. The first level being that those crimes are qualified as a crime of genocide against the Hutu ethnic group in 1972 that must be announced by the authorities that were ruling the country.
Through the report, it has been demonstrated that those crimes were organized and piloted by government officials, with government means, with country personnel against a targeted ethnic group of the people of Burundi.
The second level was the qualification of crime against humanity which targeted certain people in the plains of the Imbo, at the level of the province of Rumonge, in the regions of Nyanza-Lac where certain people of the Tutsi ethnic group and even some Hutu were massacred without the government leading those acts.
The Prime Minister said that this report has been drawn up including all the tools and testimonies. It can be considered as a final report of this phase which concerns the events of 1972. These were tragic events that plunged Burundi into mourning.
He took the opportunity to say that the authorities of the country will treat that report to deduce from it, decisions and orientations which must accompany the process of pacification, reconciliation, improvement of peace and reconciliation in Burundi.