November 19, 2003 former Burundian President Pierre Buyoya
addresses a press briefing in Durban. Rajesh JANTILAL /
AFP
Burundi’s former president Pierre Buyoya has died in
Paris of Covid-19 at the age of 71, relatives said Friday, just
weeks after he resigned as the African Union’s special envoy to
Mali and the Sahel.
Buyoya, who was credited with helping push democracy in the
small African country but was accused of involvement in his
successor’s assassination, was hospitalised in Mali’s capital
Bamako on Wednesday, a family member told AFP.
“He was evacuated to Paris yesterday afternoon. His plane made a
stopover and arrived in France in the evening,” the family member
said, requesting anonymity.
“He died as the ambulance took him to hospital in Paris for
treatment” on Thursday night, the source added.
Several other relatives confirmed the death of Buyoya, who
served as the AU’s special envoy to Mali and the Sahel from 2012
until November this year.
He resigned in late November after being sentenced the month
prior to life imprisonment in Burundi over the 1993 assassination
of his successor.
He said it was “a political trial conducted in a scandalous
manner” and that he resigned “in order to have full freedom to
defend myself and clear my name”.
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Buyoya was sentenced in absentia over Ndadaye’s assassination,
along with about 20 military officials and civilians who were also
given sentences ranging from 20 years to life imprisonment.
– Coups and war – Buyoya, an ethnic Tutsi, came
from a modest background, making his start in the military before
rising to power in a coup in 1987.
During his first term he worked towards a more democratic system
in one of Africa’s smallest nations. He stepped down in 1993 in the
country’s first democratic elections in which he was resoundingly
beaten by Melchior Ndadaye, a Hutu.
But hardline ethnic Tutsi soldiers killed Ndadaye just four
months into his term.
His murder plunged Burundi into years of civil war between the
majority Hutus and minority Tutsis.
Buyoya became president again after a coup, ruling from 1996 to
2003.
In 2000, he signed the Arusha Accords, an agreement aimed at
ending the civil war which left an estimated 300,000 people dead
between 1993 and 2006. He stepped down in 2003 in line with the
accords.
Another Burundian former president, Pierre Nkurunziza, died in
June aged 55 of what the government said was heart failure — but
speculation was rife that he had contracted coronavirus.
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At the time, a medical source told AFP that Nkurunziza had
suffered “respiratory distress” before dying.
Unlike its neighbours, Burundi had taken few measures to stop
the spread of coronavirus under Nkurunziza, who claimed God had
spared the country from its ravages.
His successor President Evariste Ndayishimiye quicky declared
Covid-19 the country’s “biggest enemy”.
But the deeply isolated country has only officially reported a
single Covid-19 death since the start of the pandemic.
AFP
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