NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) – Thousands of Burundi refugees are under pressure to go home where they risk being killed, tortured or raped, an international human rights group said Friday.
There is pervasive climate of fear in Burundi two years after Nkurunziza changed Burundi’s constitution and won a third term in office, which many opposed, said the rights group. More than 400,000 Burundians have fled the country fearing violence since April 2015 when Nkururunziza’s candidacy sparked weeks of protests and a failed coup.
Amnesty International said in a report that it interviewed 129 Burundi refugees in camps in Tanzania and Uganda, some of whom escaped persecution by President Pierre Nkurunziza’s government as recently as May this year.
Sixteen people told Amnesty that they were tortured or ill-treated while in detention, among them a young man who said he was detained for a week in May in Kirundo Province, northern Burundi, the report said. He said he was held in a tiny unlit room with three others, repeatedly beaten with batons, and made to eat his meals in the toilet next door, the report said.
“They tortured us to make us confess that we worked with the rebels. One day they tortured us in an atrocious way. They took a bottle filled with sand and hung it from our testicles,” he told Amnesty International.