Burundi General Claims to Oust President Pierre Nkurunziza

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/14/world/africa/general-claims-to-oust-president-of-burundi.html

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NAIROBI, Kenya — An army general in Burundi announced on Wednesday that the military had ousted President Pierre Nkurunziza, setting off celebrations in the streets among protesters who had been trying to block the president’s bid for another term.

“President Pierre Nkurunziza is removed from office,” Maj. Gen. Godefroid Niyombare said in a broadcast on a radio station in the capital, Bujumbura.

In explaining the coup, General Niyombare said the president had killed opponents and protesters, overseen a corrupt government and — by seeking a third term — had disregarded the 2000 peace agreement and the 2005 Constitution to end the country’s civil war.

It was not immediately clear whether the general had the backing of the army, or whether a coup had been carried out successfully.

But soon after the announcement, police officers who had been clashing with protesters in downtown Bujumbura began withdrawing, while demonstrators honked car horns, took photographs and cheered. A popular radio station that had been shut down by the government went back on the air.

Mr. Nkurunziza was scheduled to be out of the country on Wednesday, attending a conference in Tanzania with other East African leaders to discuss the unrest in Burundi. News agencies reported that an aide to the president had dismissed reports of a coup, saying that any claims that the president had been ousted were “a joke.”

Hundreds have been demonstrating in the capital for more than two weeks against the president’s bid for a third term. Violence surrounding the protests has left at least 20 people dead. In a statement on Wednesday evening, the State Department called for “peaceful, timely, credible and transparent elections.”

A witness said that the protesters reached the city center for the first time on Wednesday, and that the police used live ammunition and tear gas against them.

The protesters say that Mr. Nkurunziza, who took office in 2005 and was elected to a second term in 2010, cannot run in the presidential election next month because the Constitution allows only one renewal of a president’s mandate.

Mr. Nkurunziza’s supporters say his first term should not count toward the constitutional limit because he was not directly elected in 2005; rather, he took office as part of the Arusha peace agreement to end the country’s long civil war.

The war began in 1993, when the first president to be elected from the country’s Hutu majority, Mechior Ndadaye, was killed by troops from Burundi’s Tutsi minority. An estimated 300,000 people died in the fighting.