* Opponents say a third term violates the constitution
* Protests in the capital have run for more than a week
* Crisis unsettles region with history of ethnic conflict (Recasts with comments by presidential spokesman)
By Patrick Nduwimana
BUJUMBURA, May 6 (Reuters) – Burundi’s president said on Wednesday that, if elected for a third term in June, it would be his last and he would not run for office again after that, his spokesman said on Wednesday.
President Pierre Nkurunziza’s decision to run for a third term has triggered protests in the past week. Protesters say the constitution limits the president to two terms he has served.
The constitutional court ruled his first term did not count because he was picked by lawmakers not elected by a vote. But the opposition say the court is biased and have vowed to keep protesting until he backs down.
The row has plunged the nation into its worst crisis since the end of a 12-year civil war that pitted rebels from the majority Hutu ethnic group against the then Tutsi-led army.
East African foreign ministers met Nkurunziza in Burundi on Monday to discuss crisis, which has stoked tensions in a region with a history ethnic conflict and driven almost 40,000 Burundians to flee to neighbouring states.
“He told them (the ministers) that if re-elected he would not seek another term,” presidential spokesman Gervais Abayeho told Reuters, adding the president would deliver the same message in an address ready for broadcast later on Wednesday.
Nearly 40,000 Burundians have fled to neighbouring Rwanda, Tanzania and Democratic Republic of Congo in the past month as tensions have ratcheted up over Nkurunziza’s third-term bid, the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR said.
The tensions particularly worry Rwanda, which has the same ethnic mix as Burundi and suffered a 1994 genocide that killed 800,000 people, most of them Tutsis and moderate Hutus.
PROTESTERS INJURED
Burundi’s Red Cross said 16 people were injured in protests held in different parts of the capital on Wednesday. Protests have shown little sign of spreading beyond Bujumbura so far.
Civil society groups say the death toll has reached at least 12 people since protests erupted after Nkurunziza, a former leader of a Hutu rebel group, announced his decision on April 25 to run again. Police put the death toll at half that number.
Presidential challenger Audifax Ndabitoreye was arrested at a hotel in the capital Bujumbura where the east African ministers held meetings on the crisis. It was not immediately clear if he was participating in the talks.
Ndabitoreye, who is not affiliated to the main opposition parties and wants to run as an independent, told reporters as he was led away by police that he was arrested for “participating in an insurrection movement”.
“I am a victim because I have been protesting clearly against the third term for Nkurunziza which is illegal and unconstitutional,” he said.
The government calls protests an insurrection and has detained scores of people. Nkurunziza told the ministers he was ready to release those under 18 and would also give an amnesty to others if protests stopped, the presidential spokesman said.
“All lights are blinking in Burundi. All alarms are going. So where’s the fire brigade,” Jan Egeland, the head of the Norwegian Refugee Council and former top humanitarian official for the United Nations, told a news conference in Geneva, calling for international action.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said this week in Nairobi during a regional trip that running for a third-term “flies in the face” of the constitution. Washington has said it would take measures against any individuals responsible for violence.
Britain’s Foreign Office noted in a statement: “Reports of intimidation against members of the constitutional court do not give the impression of an independent court that was able to come to an impartial decision.”
A senior member of the court was reported to have fled the country this week. The government dismisses charges of intimidation and says it allows free speech.
(Additional reporting by Tom Miles in Geneva and Edmund Blair in Nairobi; Writing by Edmund Blair and Edith Honan; Editing by)
Demonstrators, some carrying machetes and stones, shout as police dismantle a barricade in the Kanyosha district of Bujumbura, Burundi, May 6, 2015.
Burundi’s capital was rocked by demonstrations for a ninth day Wednesday as opposition supporters continued to protest a controversial decision by President Pierre Nkurunziza to run for a third term.
More than a dozen people were injured after protesters erected roadway barricades and set tires on fire in neighborhoods throughout Bujumbura, the Burundi Red Cross said Wednesday. In the Kinondo neighborhood of the capital, police fired shots into the air to disperse demonstrators who had been staging a sit-in.
The Red Cross said at least nine people have been killed in violent confrontations with the police since last week and scores have been wounded. Burundi police said the death toll is half that number.
Neighborhood protests
Musaga, about a 10-minute drive from central Bujumbura, is one of the poor suburbs hit by violent protests.
Here, youths armed with stones and sticks have lit bonfires on the road. Some of them surge when they see VOA reporters approach, demanding identities.
The protesters’ leader is a suspicious man, especially as tensions are running high.
He says the protesters are blocking the road so police and the ruling party’s youth wing, the Imbonerakure, cannot access their neighborhood.
“Imbonerakure, we have all chased them away from here; they are not here,” he says. “These youths work with the government, and they are militias.”
The situation is the same Wednesday morning. One of the protesters says, for safety, they are inspecting vehicles and visitors.
“Civilians are allowed to pass, but we check their cars if they are carrying criminals. We are doing so because they can bring in criminals, police and weapons. That’s why we are checking all these vehicles,” the protester from Musaga says.
On Wednesday in Kanyhosha, another neighborhood, protesters and youths supporting President Nkurunziza attacked each other. Nkurunziza supporters say the protesters attacked their party office and broke windows.
When a VOA reporter visited the area, there was a heavy presence of both police and the army in the streets.
Youth group accusations
The president’s opponents have accused the youth group, Imbonerakure, which means “those that see far,” of attacking protesters and working with the police to suppress the demonstrations against Nkurunziza.
Nikiziza David, a member of the youth group, says the Imbonerakure, like the protesters, have a stake in the country.
“We don’t accept this; this will create a lot of troubles. We are also Burundians; we like and love our country. Why are they using other many efforts to disturb our calm? This is our office of governance,” David says.
Imbonerakure leader Dennis Karera denied to VOA the allegations against the group but admits some members were involved in criminal activities.
“They can be wrong, and they can also be violent, but they are doing so as an individual, not as Imbonerakure,” he says. “You are supposed to differentiate between these two. We have to punish him according to the law.”
Demonstrations continued Wednesday in neighborhoods like Musaga, and many roads are still closed in Bujumbura.
Fleeing violence
Meanwhile, the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR said nearly 40,000 Burundians have fled to Rwanda, Tanzania and the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the past month, because of the political violence.
The demonstrations have plunged the African nation into its worst crisis since an ethnically charged civil war ended in 2005.
Jan Egeland, the head of the Norwegian Refugee Council and the former top humanitarian official for the U.N., called for international action to avoid a catastrophe in Burundi. “All lights are blinking in Burundi. All alarms are going. So where’s the fire brigade?” he asked at a news conference in Geneva Wednesday.
With protesters refusing to back down, government ministers from East African Community nations, including Rwanda, Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda, traveled to Burundi Wednesday to help seek a solution to the unrest, said Edwin Limo, a spokesman of Kenya’s foreign ministry.
On Tuesday, Burundi’s constitutional court had validated Nkurunziza’s bid for a third term, but the deputy president of the court, who fled to Rwanda ahead of the ruling, called it unconstitutional.
Opposition leader Jean Minani said Wednesday that the ruling had not come as a surprise to him as it just showed that the constitutional court was under the control of the ruling party, CNDD-FDD.
FRENCH VERSION
