Coup Confusion Rocks Burundi

BUJUMBURA, Wednesday - A little known group seized Burundi state radio and announced a military takeover today but loyalist troops quickly ringed the station and said they were ready to use force to crush the attempted coup. A senior military officer said troops opposed to the attempted takeover had surrounded the building and opened negotiations with the coup leaders inside to surrender. "We are surrounding the whole radio station and we are trying to negotiate with them to see if they surrender," the senior officer said, declining to be named. "If they don't surrender, we will be obliged to launch an attack." Announcing the attempted coup, the radio earlier said the government had been overthrown by a group of soldiers led by a relatively unknown lieutenant. "The government which is killing people is over and the government of Buyoya is over now," the radio said in a brief announcement, referring to President Pierre Buyoya. It said parliament had been suspended and the borders and airports closed. But within hours officers loyal to Buyoya arrived at the station to try to put down the coup bid. The city itself was quiet but tense, as fearful residents hurried home. The radio went off the air on yesterday evening, but putschists remained in control of the airport and the radio station. Residents reported a brief outbreak of gunfire around the radio station shortly before the announcement. Buyoya was out of the country attending a meeting with ethnic Hutu rebels in Libreville, Gabon. Burundi peace mediator Nelson Mandela said Buyoya had told him he was still in charge. The radio station said Buyoya, the leader of the Tutsi-dominated government and a key figure in the country's seven-year-old civil war, had been replaced by a hitherto unknown group, the National Youth Patriotic Front. "The National Youth Patriotic Front is created which is the supreme organisation which controls the country," the radio said. "This National Youth Patriotic Front is headed by Lieutenant Pasteur Ntarutimana." There was no word on the ethnic affiliation of Ntarutimana, but analysts said he was almost certainly a member of the ethnic Tutsi minority with the support of the Tutsi-led army. "The mystery is, who does Lieutenant Pasteur Ntarutimana represent?" said Alison des Forges, a senior consultant with Human Rights Watch by telephone from Brussels. Burundi has a long history of coups, all of them led by soldiers from the ethnic Tutsi minority. The civil war began in 1993 when the country's first democratically elected president, Melchior Ndadaye, a Hutu, was assassinated by Tutsi troops, and Buyoya, a Tutsi major, himself took power in a 1996 coup. The radio also said the coup leaders supported the peace accords signed by Buyoya and opposition groups from both Tutsi and Hutu communities in Arusha, Tanzania, last year under the mediation of Mandela, the former South African president. Several hours after the coup bid began, it remained unclear who was really in charge. "As far as President Pierre Buyoya's office is concerned, there is no coup in Burundi," Mandela's spokeswoman told Reuters in South Africa. "Government activities have not been affected but some armed men are occupying the radio station," she said. There had been rumours of a coup in Burundi as Buyoya's support base shrank rapidly. Some people were unhappy with his apparent reluctance to step down as president under the Arusha deal. Ends