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III. Events in Rutegama Commune

On October 3, 2007, the Commissioner General of the Internal Security Police (Police de la Sécurité Interior, PSI) sent approximately 100 officers from the 3^rd Rapid Mobile Intervention Group (Groupements mobiles d’intervention rapide, GMIR to Muramvya province in central Burundi. Ordinarily based in the capital Bujumbura, the GMIR is a specialized reserve that is supposed to provide rapid response to emergencies across the country. At the time of the human rights abuses described in this report, GMIR groups operated under the authority of the PSI.²According to police, the deployment was a response to an alarmingly high incidence of crime, including the theft of livestock and crops, as well as to recruitment and propaganda by the opposition National Liberation Forces (Forces de liberation nationale, FNL), which in July 2007 withdrew from talks with the government on the implementation of a ceasefire agreed in September 2006.³ 

The GMIR were deployed in several communes, including Rutegama, where they set up a post in the Kaniga health center several kilometers from the town center. Throughout October, with the cooperation of a local PSI police chief, they engaged in a heavy-handed policing operation that involved numerous breaches of Burundian law and the violation of international human rights standards. According to residents interviewed by a Human Rights Watch researcher, the police behavior was brutal and inspired fear. According to one victim, “Everyone in Rutegama is afraid. When people see the truck from Kaniga coming, they flee.”⁴ An officer of the GMIR police told the Human Rights Watch researcher that the policing strategy was deliberately intended to intimidate local people.⁵

A Campaign of Raids and Arrests

Starting on October 8, GMIR officers under Commander Désiré Uwamahoro began carrying out searches and making arrests in Rutegama and neighboring communes. Although officers had appropriate warrants from the Muramvya prosecutor for most of these searches, they carried out many of them at night and without the presence of a judicial police officer, in violation of the Burundian code of criminal procedure.⁶ In addition, officers beat and otherwise ill-treated arrested persons, including businessmen, teachers, farmers, a demobilized combatant and a chef de colline, a local official responsible for governing a small administrative unit. Many of the victims told the Human Rights Watch researcher that police officers accused them of FNL membership, which is not a crime in Burundi,⁷while others said they were accused of illegally possessing arms.⁸

One of the first men arrested by the GMIR described how his family was awakened at about 2 a.m., when everyone was sleeping:

I heard someone knocking on the door, saying, “Open the door.” I was very scared. My family was asking, “Is it bandits?” I got up and said, “Who is it?” They said, “We’re the police.” My wife asked why they were there. They kept knocking and saying, “Open up.” They broke down the door, came in, and said, “Put your hands up.” I did so. There were about 50 of them, with guns and grenade launchers.

When they approached me, they told me to get all the guns that I had in the house. I said I didn’t have any weapons. They started to slap me. They searched through the house, but didn’t find anything. They approached my wife, who was naked in bed. They slapped her and told her to find the weapons. She said she had never seen weapons in the house. They handcuffed me and made me leave the house, saying I had to show where I had hidden the weapons and that I would show them after I was given a good beating. ⁹

A police officer stationed at the Kaniga health center, along with several victims, told a Human Rights Watch researcher that detainees were designated for arrest “arbitrarily” by the local security police chief, Nestor Niyokuri, and by the Rutegama communal administrator, Josias Ndikumagenge.¹⁰ The GMIR unit took the detainees back to their post at the health center, a building consisting of one large room and several small rooms of about two by three meters each. As many as ten detainees were held in each of these small rooms.¹¹Human Rights Watch identified 22 detainees, but according to one GMIR officer who was present, as many as 50 persons may have been detained at the health center throughout the course of the month.¹²

By detaining persons for periods of time ranging from several days to more than three weeks, GMIR officers violated Burundian law which requires officers from all branches of the Internal Security Police to deliver detainees immediately after their arrest to the Judicial Police (Police Judiciaire, PJ).¹³GMIR officers also held the detainees at the health center, not at an official place of detention.¹⁴There was a jail at Rutegama center, to which any suspects should have been transferred immediately after their arrest.

GMIR officers interrogated the detainees, a further violation of Burundian law.¹⁵ Investigating crimes is a function of the Judicial Police, who question suspects and provide evidence to the prosecutor (Ministère Public).¹⁶ Many victims assumed a person taking notes during their interrogation was a judicial police officer (Officier de la Police Judiciaire, OPJ), but an officer present at Kaniga, as well as the commissioner general of the PSI who ordered the deployment, told the Human Rights Watch researcher that no judicial police officers were present.¹⁷ 

Interrogation, Torture and Ill-Treatment

During interrogations GMIR officers tortured, beat, and intimidated detainees to coerce them into giving information. All 11 former detainees interviewed by Human Rights Watch reported that they had been beaten by police officers. Four said they were also subject to mock executions or death threats. When asked about the treatment of other detainees, one victim said, “Everyone at Kaniga was beaten… every time the police walked passed a detainee, they would hit them.”¹⁸

According to one man, an officer whom he presumed to be a judicial police officer arrested him on October 8 and took him to the health center, where he was held overnight.

He asked me if I was a member of the FNL. I said that I used to be, but that I haven’t been a member for a long time. The OPJ wrote a statement and made me sign it, saying I used to be a member of the FNL but that I no longer was involved.

The OPJ then beat me with a wood baton and a club. I was beaten on my hands, face, buttocks, backs of my legs, and my back. I still have problems walking and I have scars on my legs. When I was freed, they told me to quit the FNL and not to help the FNL when they ask for help.¹⁹

Another person arrested on October 13 recounted:

They put rocks in our mouths while beating us… They have a system. Five or six police take you and lift you 50 centimeters off the ground. They hold you by the arms, legs, and head, and others beat you. They did this to me. Everyone had trouble sitting because we were all beaten on the buttocks. I received more than 50 baton blows in the buttocks… I eventually lost count.²⁰

Two other victims showed a Human Rights Watch researcher scars on their backs and stomachs that they said had resulted from the beatings two weeks previously. Another man said that he had urinated blood for days after being beaten.²¹ 

One of the first men arrested on October 8, another who assumed that judicial police officers were involved, also described torture and ill-treatment, including being subjected to death threats:

When we arrived at Kaniga, they made me lay down on my belly in a puddle in the corridor. A judicial police officer … came and called over two other police. The three of them beat me seriously, with batons, all over my body. I had serious injuries afterwards, and could not sit down for two weeks. They turned me over and beat me on the stomach, saying I should admit I had weapons.

One of the police put a pistol to my head, and another started digging a hole in the field right outside. They were trying to intimidate me, to terrorize me. I said, “Do what you want, I have nothing to say to you other than what I’ve already said.” Then they accused me of being a member of the FNL, and I denied it. They continued beating me to try to get me to admit it. When they got tired of beating me, I fell asleep there in the corridor. Every morning for the next few days, they beat me.²²

Two men told the Human Rights Watch researcher that in addition to being beaten, they were also subjected to mock execution. One man said:

After beating me, the police took a pistol and said they were going to kill me. I was lying on the ground. A police officer shot at the ground next to my ear.²³

Another recounted:

They said I should confess to having a weapon and being a member of the FNL… They beat me with a club and a baton.  They threatened to shoot me. I was sitting in a chair and they shot so that the bullet went right past my head and into the ground.²⁴

Burundi is a party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights,²⁵ the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights²⁶ and the UN Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT), all of which prohibit torture. Under CAT, torture is defined as “any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person” with the consent or acquiescence of a public official in order to elicit a confession or information, or for purposes of punishment or intimidation.²⁷ Systematic beatings, sometimes on a daily basis for several days and mock executions fall within the scope of that definition.

Paying for freedom

Some persons who had been detained for periods ranging from hours to days were released if they were willing and able to pay bribes to police officers. As one recounted:

One day they asked me if I wanted to go home. They suggested my wife send someone with a “message”–a code word for money–so that I could leave. I agreed, and sent someone to my family, to ask them to sell a goat or a cow in order to have money. They targeted me because they knew I had resources. My wife came and brought 120,000 Burundian francs (Fbu),²⁸ and I was freed. I gave the money to (a police officer named) Apollinaire.²⁹

One former detainee reported that a police officer asked him for 20,000 Fbu.³⁰ When he could provide only 14,000 Fbu, he was not released. The police officer told him he would be freed if he produced another 6,000 Fbu.Unable to do so, the victim was transferred to a Muramvya jail and detained there another three weeks in violation of Burundian law, which requires detainees to be charged and presented to a prosecutor within one week of having been arrested.³¹ At least three other detainees were also transferred to jails in Muramvya; one said that even though he had paid the bribe requested by GMIR officers, he was still transferred to a Muramvya jail and was freed only after paying a second bribe to a judicial police officer there.³²

None of those arrested in October was charged with any criminal offence. All were released after periods of detention–some after a few hours, most after a week or so, but a few after nearly a month.

Police Brutality and Intimidation of Local Residents

Meanwhile, residents, including a police officer, who complained about police conduct were themselves abused by the police. On October 25, for example, a judicial police officer spoke about the abuses at Kaniga during a workshop on police conduct that was organized by the Burundian human rights organization Association for the Protection of Human Rights and Detained Persons (Association pour la Protection des Droits Humains et des Personnes Detenus, APRODH.) Upon returning to Rutegama that evening, he was confronted by GMIR officers who beat him and detained him overnight at the health center.³³ A woman who witnessed his arrest and challenged the police about their conduct, told the Human Rights Watch researcher that in response to her question she was beaten in Rutegama town center by the Rutegama chief of security police, Nestor Niyokuri. She later filed charges against him.³⁴

Three other persons also told the Human Rights Watch researcher that GMIR officers and Nestor Niyokuri beat them in the town center on or about October 26, after they questioned police conduct or, in one case, approached police officers while they were beating another person.³⁵ One victim recounted:

I went to a bar [in Rutegama]… A police officer from Kaniga came and was talking to [a woman]. I saw that the police officer was harassing [the woman] and I intervened and said he shouldn’t do that. He said it was none of my business… I left, but the police officer followed me. Outside the bistro, the police officer hit me on the cheek, and I fell on the ground. 

Just then, a vehicle arrived with the police from Kaniga and the Chef de Poste. They all started beating me. There were about 8 or 9 people who beat me. They kicked me on the neck, and used their hands and feet. They were beating me just because I had stood up for [the woman].³⁶

During the period when the GMIR officers were active in Rutegama, other locally-based security police officers also tried to intimidate residents. According to one resident, Provincial Internal Security Police Commissioner Viateur Muco “came to my house and asked me why I was an FNL sympathizer… Later, a neighbor told me that my name was on a list of people who were to be arrested. I wasn’t arrested, but I am still afraid.”³⁷ Another resident said the same official warned him to stop doing things that the police did not like and “asked me if I had information on the FNL. I said I didn’t know anything abut them. He said ‘If you try to join them, we’ll arrest you immediately.’”³⁸ As mentioned above, according to the ceasefire agreement signed between the Government of Burundi and the FNL in September 2006, being a member of the FNL is not a crime.³⁹