Burundi police fire tear gas, beat protesters

Burundi police on Tuesday fired tear gas and beat protesters who were demanding President Pierre Nkurunziza withdraw his bid for a third term, in a resurgence of unrest that has stoked fears of ethnic conflict in Africa's Great Lakes.

A Reuters photographer said at least eight protesters in a suburb of the capital Bujumbura were dragged off by police. Some in the crowd of flag-waving and chanting protesters responded by pelting officers with stones and rocks.

Rights groups say at least 20 people have died in three weeks of clashes between security forces and protesters who say Nkurunziza's ambitions violate the constitution and a peace deal that ended an ethnically fueled civil war in 2005.

Laying the same charges against the president, a group of renegade generals tried and failed to overthrow him last week. The government said late on Monday it would treat any future protesters as accomplices in the failed coup.

But crowds gathered again in the capital's suburb of Nyakabiga on Tuesday, shouting: “We will not stop until he gives up the third term.”

Diplomats say the longer unrest continues, the more chance that a conflict, which up until now has been largely a struggle for power, reopens old wounds in a region with a history of ethnic violence.

South Africa said earlier on Tuesday that next month's election should be postponed indefinitely until political stability returns to Burundi, as regional leaders scrambled to contain the impasse and a potential humanitarian crisis.

More than 110,000 people have fled to neighboring Rwanda, Democratic Republic of Congo and Tanzania, where cholera has been found among refugees sleeping on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, waiting evacuation by boat.

The failed coup has heightened fears the crisis in the landlocked nation of 10 million could split the army, the central pillar of unity after the civil war, which had largely pitted majority Hutus against minority Tutsis.

Until recently, Nkurunziza, a former rebel leader with mixed parentage, had been seen as a bridge between the main groups in a region that has been an ethnic powder keg for the last half-century.

Neighboring Rwanda, which shares a similar ethnic mix, suffered a genocide in 1994 in which 800,000 people, mostly Tutsis and moderate Hutus, were killed.

The protesters in Bujumbura stressed they were against both Nkurunziza and the attempted coup, and denied any links with the plotters.

Reuters