New deal paves way home for Burundians in Rwanda – UN refugee agency

Thousands of Burundian refugees could be on their way home from Rwanda under a tripartite agreement on voluntary repatriation signed yesterday by the United Nations refugee agency and the two governments.

The agreement, signed in the Rwandan capital, Kigali, provides an official framework for a repatriation operation that started at the end of June. The operation’s sixth organized convoy left from Rwanda to Burundi on Wednesday, bringing the total number of organized returns thus far to 2,155.

“The voluntary repatriation of thousands of Burundian refugees from Rwanda and Tanzania on a weekly basis is a vote of confidence given by the Burundian refugees to the positive political developments that have taken place in Burundi," the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Representative in Kigali, Panos Moumtzis, said in a statement.

Last week the UN refugee agency reported a dramatic increase in the return of Burundian refugees from Tanzania following orderly communal elections at the end of June. Those elections represented nearly the last step in a long transition to peace and democracy in this tiny Central African country that has been torn by decades of ethnic war.

Earlier today Secretary-General Kofi Annan congratulated Burundi on the election of Pierre Nkurunziza as its first post-transitional President.