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Command Responsibility and Impunity

Government soldiers operating in Bujumbura rural include units stationed at fixed military posts, who generally spend weeks or months in the same place and who often become known to the local population, as well as mobile units sent in for temporary missions who are rarely in any one place very long. Rebels may belong to the FDD led by Pierre Nkurunziza or to the FNL led by Agathon Rwasa. With different forces operating in the same area, those accused of abuses often claim innocence and assign the blame to their opponents, as in the case of rape at Kirombwe described above. The FDD accuse the FNL and vice versa. Even between the supposedly allied forces of the government army and the FDD, each side accuses the other of responsibility for abuses.⁵⁹

If perpetrators of crimes and their military units cannot be identified, then accountability becomes impossible. As one witness said, “We no longer know who is who. You can find government army soldiers even wearing Rwandan or Congolese uniforms. The mobile units behave like rebels and wear dirty and torn uniforms.”⁶⁰ 

In some cases government soldiers are identifiable because they wear uniforms that are more complete and in better condition, but this is not always the case. Some government soldiers also appear in the dirty, torn or partial military dress more often worn by rebels, perhaps in a deliberate effort to pass as rebels.  According to the Burundian army chief of staff General Germain Niyonyankana, all soldiers have complete uniforms available to them and are punished if they do not wear them. But he recognized that some soldiers have worn torn, dirty or incomplete uniforms, “particularly when they behave like rebels.”⁶¹

Civilians frequently reported abuses by soldiers of mobile units and remarked on their apparent indiscipline. One reported seeing a soldier of such a unit insult and strike an officer, accusing him of fighting poorly against the FNL.⁶² One mobile unit, the 19^th battalion of the government army, calls itself the “Bakanongwe,” “Those Who [Dare Even to] Castrate Leopards,” a reference to their supposed ferocity.⁶³ Residents called them “barbarians” or “animals” when they described their brutal behavior, such as firing for no apparent reason other than to terrorize civilians nearby the health center in Kabezi on March 20, 2004.⁶⁴