Bir otokratın ardından: 1972 Soykırımından bugüne Burundi

Burundi Cumhurbaşkanı Pierre Nkurunziza geçen hafta başında vefat etti. Koronavirüs küresel salgını bağlamında Nkurunziza’nın ölüm nedeni üzerinde spekülasyonlar uluslararası kamuoyunda gündem olurken, adıgeçenin arkasında bıraktığı siyasi miras üzerinde pek durulmadı. Bu minvalde, Nkurunziza’nın akıbetinden ziyade, ülke nüfusunun yüzde 85’ini oluşturan Hutular ile yüzde 14’ünü meydana getiren Tutsiler arasındaki husumete, dolayısıyla ülkenin kaderine odaklanmak gerekiyor. 

Yazının devamı için tıklayınız.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Biden Administration’s Africa Strategy: Can rhetoric dictate reality?

Image
  Jonathan Ernst/Reuters " Why are we in Africa? " former US President Donald Trump  asked  then-National Security Advisor John Bolton back in 2018. We do not know whether Bolton responded to the question. But he could have mentioned rivalry with Russia and China, the recognition of Africa’s geopolitical significance, the pursuit of US national interests, the endeavor to help African countries’ development aspirations, the fight against terrorism, the promotion of democracy and good governance, and the reinforcement of US trade and investment. While each of them could arguably be a reasonable answer to the question, the US’s longstanding policy towards Africa is to try implementing all of these policies simultaneously.  The Biden administration’s new US strategy for Africa is not immune from these contradictions.  Announced   last week by the Secretary of State Antony Blinken, the strategy outlines four priority areas, namely the respect for the sovereignty...
Read more

Africa's debt yoke

Image
  “ The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. […] Then Sisyphus watches the stone rush down in a few moments toward that lower world whence he will have to push it up again toward the summit. He goes back down to the plain. ”  * This endless punishment of Sisyphus in ancient Greek mythology reminds us of the development endeavor of African countries and, as part of it, the spiral of foreign debt they are in. African countries are now on the eve of a major  debt crisis  due to accumulating impact of the global pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. However, this is not the first time they faced an immense debt burden. It was first piled up in the 1960s and 1970s in the ensuing two decades of their independence. The borrowings in this period were due to the global  abundance  of liquidity, as well as the deliberate effort to make African countries financially...
Read more

Guerrilla keyboards

Image
Source: Free Press They were African journalists known as “ guerrilla typewriters ”. The reason they were called as guerrillas was not because they took up arms to overthrow government, but because they stood up with their pens   against the authoritarian regimes   in Africa. Guerrilla typewriters gathered at the “Promoting an Independent and Pluralistic African Media” seminar, which was organized by UNESCO in Windhoek, N amibia on 29 April-3 May 1991. They undersigned “ Windhoek Declaration ” calling for free, independent, and pluralistic media in Africa. The declaration spearheaded   other regional seminars   and became a benchmark for press freedom in the following decades. It also inspired the United Nations to designate 3 May as the   World Press Freedom Day . It is certain that this initiative, at the very beginning of the democratization wave of the 1990s, had an impact on securing and advancing press freedom in Africa. Yet, press freedom suffers from ser...
Read more