Editor,

RE: "Burundi crisis: Nkurunziza’s intransigence” (The New Times, February 29).

I can identify with the views Mr. Lonzen Rugira makes here with one large proviso. The African Union mission did not capitulate, because you only do so if your end position is contrary to the one you held before you engaged your counterpart.

That isn’t the situation in this case as many, perhaps the majority of the members of the high-level AU team, were already in Nkurunziza’s corner before they travelled to Bujumbura to meet with him.

In fact, some of them were the very ones who ensured the AU Summit countermanded the AU Peace and Security Commission’s decision to deploy a 5000-strong force to protect Burundian civilians against the depredations of the military, (in) security forces and the CNDD-FDD’s Imbonerakure militia.

To expect that a team involving such people would really confront the murderous government’s repression of Burundians is naive beyond compare.

With the decision to scrap the deployment of Maprobi, it was absolutely clear that the fix was in, and the choice of those to comprise the AU high-level team of heads of state and government pointed to the inescapable conclusion that this was really nothing else but part of Saving Soldier Nkurunziza operation by his friends.

The victims of the regime’s repression had absolutely no chance; they were callously thrown under the bus by the leaders of Africa. And so we are back to square one: as we have stated so many times before, only the people of Burundi can and will have to save themselves from the illegitimate regime’s killers, nobody else will.

Mwene Kalinda