Burundi vice president flees, students enter US embassy

Burundian students broke into the US embassy to escape police Thursday as one of the country's vice presidents announced he had fled to Belgium, escalating a political crisis in the central African nation days before key elections.

Ignoring armed US Marines watching from the roof of the US mission, around 200 students climbed under the gate and over the wall before sitting inside the compound with their hands raised.

The students sought refuge after police threatened to break up their camp outside the embassy compound where they had been sheltering for weeks, an AFP photographer said.

By late afternoon, the US embassy said around "approximately 100 students peacefully remain in the visitor parking lot," and urged the government to find a "peaceful resolution."
Two grenade blasts in the capital Bujumbura on Thursday wounded at least eight people, the latest in a string of such attacks since late April, when President Pierre Nkurunziza launched a controversial bid to stand for a third consecutive term.

Parliamentary elections are due to be held on Monday, ahead of the presidential vote on July 15.

Nkurunziza on Thursday launched his presidential election campaign to thousands of cheering loyalists, but his bid was dealt a fresh blow after one of his top deputies fled the country and urged him to quit power.

In a letter addressed to Nkurunziza, whose re-election bid has already sparked weeks of civil unrest, a refugee crisis and a coup attempt, second vice-president Gervais Rufyikiri urged the president to "put the interests of the Burundian people before your personal interests."

"Withdraw your presidential bid, because it violates the constitution," the letter said.

Rufyikiri told France 24 television he had sought refuge in Belgium.
"I left... because I was not able to continue to support the attitude of the president, his desire to lead the people of Burundi on the path of illegality," he told the broadcaster late Wednesday from Belgium.

Nkurunziza's re-election bid has been branded by opponents as unconstitutional and a violation of a peace deal that paved the way to end 13 years of civil war in 2006, raising fears that the current crisis could plunge the country back into widespread violence.

The reaction from Nkurunziza's camp was defiant -- wishing Rufyikiri "good riddance" and accusing him of links to coup plotters who tried but failed to oust the president in mid-May.

- 'Deaf' president -

"Good riddance to him, all the more so because investigations have proved that Gervais Rufyikiri was mixed up in the failed coup attempt," the president's communications advisor, Willy Nyamitwe, told AFP.
"Someone of his rank, who was involved in an attempt to overthrow democratically-elected institutions... his departure is good riddance for us," he added. "He can't say he fled because he left officially, with the president's authorisation and with expenses."

Rufyikiri had already been sidelined in the government, having joined other members of the ruling CNDD-FDD party earlier this year who had spoken out against Nkurunziza's attempt to stay in office for another five-year term.

In his letter, Rufyikiri said the president was pushing Burundi into a "real socio-economic crisis" and accused him of being "deaf".

"You yourself had frequently said 'In Burundi, there are the deaf'. History may well class you at the top of the list of this category, given the way you have turned your back on all those who have sent you messages advising you to abandon an unconstitutional third mandate," it said.

Several other top officials -- including members of the election commission and constitutional court -- have already fled impoverished landlocked Burundi, joining at least 100,000 ordinary people in a refugee exodus to neighbouring Tanzania, Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda.

Last week, the Burundian human rights group Aprodeh said that at least 70 people have been killed, 500 wounded and more than 1,000 jailed since late April, when opposition supporters took to the streets to protest Nkurunziza's re-election bid.