Daily Times

GENEVA: The top UN human rights forum agreed on Friday to set up a commission of inquiry to identify perpetrators of alleged international crimes in Burundi, including killings and torture, and ensure that they are brought to justice.

The 47-member state forum adopted a resolution submitted by the European Union by a vote of 19 states in favour and 7 against with 21 abstentions.

Burundi’s delegation took the floor after the vote to reject the resolution as containing “a lot of lies” about the situation in the central African country which it said had stabilised.

UN investigators looking into the alleged torture and murder of government opponents in Burundi have drawn up a list of suspects who should be prosecuted for crimes against humanity, they said.

The UN has verified 564 executions in the central African nation since April 2015 when President Pierre Nkurunziza sparked protests by saying he would seek a third term, the investigators said, calling that “clearly a conservative estimate”.The government called the report, by the UN Independent Investigation on Burundi (UNIIB), biased and politically motivated and denied all its allegations.

The investigators said they had received evidence of rapes, disappearances, mass arrests as well as torture and murder, and that there were probably many thousands of victims. “UNIIB found that the large majority of victims have been identified as people who were opposed or perceived to be opposed to the third mandate of President Nkurunziza or of members of opposition parties,” it said, adding: “There are worrying signs of a personality cult being built around the president.”

The list of suspects will be handed to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and be available in the event of any prosecutions. “The charges of the UNIIB investigators are politically motivated and based on anonymous, unverified testimonies,” the president’s media advisor, Willy Nyamitwe, tweeted. The government has sent the UN rights commissioner a 40-page rebuttal, he added.

UNIIB said a former senior army officer told investigators of the existence of lists of people to be eliminated. Witnesses named 12 senior members of the security forces – who report directly to the heart of government – responsible for disappearances. Some of the people who said they had been tortured reported being held in secret jails including at the homes of the president and a government minister. The government denied the existence of such death-lists and said the accusations came from “those who want to sow division and the panic within the defence and security corps.” “It is deplorable that the experts believed such gratuitous and diversionist assertions,” it said.