By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
FEBRUARY 4, 2016
KAMPALA, Uganda — A confidential United Nations report that became public this week accused the Rwandan government of secretly training rebels to overthrow the president of Burundi, a country rapidly sliding toward chaos.
The report said investigators had spoken with 18 Burundian rebels who claimed to have been trained inside Rwanda to use grenades, antitank mines and rocket-propelled grenades.
Accusations have been swirling for months that Rwanda was covertly backing rebels in Burundi, but until this report, written by a group of experts who monitor sanctions in the Democratic Republic of Congo, there had been little evidence to support those assertions.
Rwanda has vehemently denied the accusation.
According to the report, the Burundian rebels, who included six children, said they had been recruited from a refugee camp in eastern Rwanda last year and given fake Congolese identification cards so they could slip undetected into Congo.
The rebels said there were at least 400 recruits and that their instructors included Rwandan military personnel.
“They were transported around Rwanda in the back of military trucks, often with Rwandan military escort,” the report said. “They reported that their ultimate goal was to remove Burundian President Pierre Nkurunziza from power.”
Opposition groups have taken up arms, killing soldiers and government allies, while Mr. Nkurunziza’s security forces have been accused of rounding up young men and shooting them in the head. Badly mutilated bodies are now a common sight on the streets of Bujumbura, Burundi’s capital.
Rwanda is one of the smallest countries in Africa, but it has a powerful military. In the 1990s, the Rwandan Army led the charge to overthrow Mobutu Sese Seko of Congo, one of Africa’s most notorious dictators.
Since then, the Rwandans have been widely accused of backing various rebel groups in Congo in a quest to protect ethnic Tutsis (Rwanda is led by ethnic Tutsis) and to make money from Congo’s lucrative mineral trade.
Some analysts say Rwanda may be turning its sights on Burundi in an attempt to install a government more pliable to Rwanda’s interests. Others say the evidence is thin and that Rwanda would suffer if Burundi explodes in full-fledged civil war.
