Burundians want truth and reconciliation body: official
Dec 16, 2010
from the article by AFP:
Four out of five Burundians want a truth and reconciliation body to probe crimes during four decades of unrest, an official said Tuesday.
"We asked the population and found that more than 80 percent were in favour of a truth and reconciliation commission and a special tribunal for Burundi," Festus Ntanyungu, the chair of the committee looking into the issue said.
He told journalists that his six-member committee on Tuesday handed its findings to President Pierre Nkurunziza and will also present them to the UN and to civil society groups.
The committee, made up of two government representatives, two UN officials and two civil society members was set up in November 2007. It was supposed to produce its report after six months of consultations.
....The commission will investigate not only the civil war years of 1993 to 2006 but will go back at least as far as 1972, when large-scale inter-ethnic massacres started in the small central African nation.
A UN official in Burundi Amadou Ousmane attending Tuesday's ceremony said the points that still need to be resolved included "the prosecutor's independence, the relationship between the commission and the special tribunal and the issue of an amnesty for crimes committed".
