Editor,

RE: "Burundi rebels announce force to oust president” (The New Times, December 23). "When injustice becomes law, resistance become a duty”, as one once put it.

The free world should strongly support Burundi’s freedom fighters who decided to stand up against murder by government, police, and its associated militia. Burundi’s civil population deserves more attention from the civilized world.

After Nkurunziza decided to indiscriminately kill Burundi’s children starting with the 12-year Komezamahoro who was shot dead while on his knees pleading for mercy for a sin he never committed, and the arrogant reply to the AU’s PSC decision to send peacekeepers to help protect Burundi’s civilian population against an undisciplined police, the military and militia comprising his own Imbonerakure as well as the remnant genocidal Interahamwe (blamed for the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda), it was about time that Burundi’s civil population organise itself in a resistance movement to resist the illegally established government that disrupts civil order and stability.

Civil resistance and nonviolent resistance that started in April to protest against the violation of the Constitution and the Arusha Peace Accord that ended more than ten years of civil war showed limits and ended up giving Nkurunziza time to organise more repression targeting the youth.

As part of the government’s effort to intimidate and instill fear in people so as to force them to accept brutality and murder by police and its militia, many brave resisters have been recently killed in their own houses, others are tortured in prisons without the hope of a fair trial one day.

Today, time has come for freedom fighters to use the same force and means that Nkurunziza has been using because there is an urgent need to prevent further killings that may end up in genocide if we have to go by recent history in the region.

Burundi rebels are the moral equivalent of those who ended apartheid in South Africa and those who halted the Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. They deserve the same international support bestowed to the former rather than the indifference shown towards the latter.

Bela