Burundi government officials should halt their intensifying pressure on journalists, Human Rights Watch said. In the last few weeks, journalists have been summonsed by state prosecuting authorities for questioning with increasing frequency in response to radio broadcasts implicating state agents in alleged human rights abuses. Senior government officials, including three ministers, have stepped up public warnings against the media in recent days, threatening them with legal action.

Government-backed death squads have killed more than 300 members of Burundi’s former rebel group and opposition supporters in covert operations over the past five months, a rights group said. The group, Government Action Observatory, a coalition of civil society groups, said the Central African country’s regime and its proxies have waged a systematic campaign of extrajudicial killings against the former rebels, who went back to the bush after pulling out of 2010 polls over fraud claims.

Burundian troops killed 18 gunmen in fierce clashes, a government official said on Tuesday 22 November, stoking fears that a new rebellion may erupt in the central African nation. The coffee-producing country has enjoyed relative peace since the Hutu rebel group, Forces for National Liberation, laid down its weapons and joined the government in 2009 after almost two decades of war. But attacks on civilians and soldiers have intensified since elections last year were widely boycotted by the opposition.

Many teachers in the eastern Burundian provinces of Ruyigi and Cankuzo have fled their homes, fearing for their lives. Rumour has it that a plan, codenamed ‘Safisha’ and allegedly being carried out by the ruling CNDD-FDD party, aims to eliminate all opposition members. In the local dialect, ‘safisha’ means ‘to cleanse’.

Burundi President Pierre Nkurunziza has sacked six ministers from his cabinet for poor performance, his spokesman said. When he was sworn in for his five-year second term, President Nkurunziza said that each government official will report on tasks accomplished every six months, adding that those who failed to do so would be fired.

Burundi has retained the top position as the most bribery prone country in East Africa, according to the East African Bribery Index 2011. Burundi has a bribery prevalence level of 37.9 per cent up from 36.7 per cent in 2010, while Uganda and Tanzania have been ranked second and third at 33.9 per cent and 31.6 per cent respectively, both up from 33 per cent and 28.6 per cent in 2010.

Tensions between the Burundi government and the local press are bound to increase as several media defied an order not to investigate or discuss a recent massacre. While officials say the measure is 'temporary' and necessary to safeguard national unity and the course of justice, independent journalists are asserting their right to publish information in the interest of public accountability.

Burundian NGOs say at least 20 people have died as a national shortage of antiretroviral continues. 'Some have died, others have turned to traditional healers, and all of them [HIV-positive people] are discouraged,' said Jeanne Gapiya, who heads Burundi's largest HIV NGO, Association Nationale de soutien aux Seropositifs et Sideens (ANSS).

At least nine people have died in clashes between unidentified 'armed gangsters' and security forces in northwest Burundi, sources said. The incident, the most deadly since the end of the 1993-2006 civil war, came amid increasing reports in recent weeks of attacks by 'armed gangs'.

On Wednesday, 30 March 2011, the Refugee Space Project reports that Mr Swedi Fataki Mutambala was arrested in Gasorwe Refugee Camp, Muyinga Province. According to refugees talked to over the phone, Swedi - leader of the Association for the Defense of Refugees (ADR) in Burundi - had been sick and gone to the camp administrator so that he could go to Bujumbura hospital for a medical check-up. The police had arrived and Swedi had been arrested. Refugees said they did not know the reason for the arrest, but a few months ago refugees had been complaining about the violation of their rights.

Desperate and displaced, some Burundian women will do anything, including have unprotected sex for money, to escape the dreadful living conditions in the Bujumbura suburb of Sabe, where more than 480 families of internally displaced persons (IDPs) have lived for several years. Burundi has more than 100,000 IDPs as a result of several years of political turmoil; most of the families in Sabe are returnees from neighbouring countries.

Reporters Without Borders says it is 'deeply shocked' to learn that deputy prosecutor Marc Ndabakeshimana has asked a Bujumbura court to sentence detained journalist Jean-Claude Kavumbagu to life imprisonment on charges of treason and defamation. The court has 60 days to render its verdict. The editor of the online newspaper Net Press, Kavumbagu has been held since 17 July 2010 because of an article about a terrorist bombing in the Ugandan capital of Kampala with a toll of 76 dead, in which he questioned whether the Burundian armed forces would be able to deal with a similar threat in Burundi.

Hundreds of Burundians living with HIV/AIDS recently staged a demonstration in the capital, Bujumbura, to protest against a lack of treatment. Men, women and children lay on the ground for 10 minutes to 'show the government that if nothing is done rapidly - this week, this month - we will all die', said Jeanne Gapiya, a leading Burundian HIV activist. The protest was staged on 29 March by REMUA, Reseau de Reinforcement Mutuel des Acteurs de la Première Ligne, a network of six NGOs providing HIV treatment to more than 9,000 people.

Burundi has became the sixth country to sign a new draft agreement on the management of the River Nile, ending nearly 12 months of doubts about the future of the agreement and of the Nile Basin Initiative (NBI). The NBI is a regional partnership that seeks the best ways of developing the continent’s longest river. Burundi’s decision to sign the agreement now leaves DR Congo, Egypt and Sudan as the only countries yet to do so.

Unversed in Burundi's official languages of French and Kirundi, children of refugees returning after decades spent in Anglophone countries, such as neighbouring Tanzania, often find it difficult to continue their studies and some drop out. To ensure such students continue learning, a group of returnee teachers has set up an education centre in the commune of Mabanda in Makamba Province, near Tanzania. The teachers work without pay.

Burundi's decision to restore legal status to a prominent activist group banned in 2009 is a positive step and should prompt further government actions to engage with civil society, Human Rights Watch has said. On 28 January, Interior Minister Edouard Nduwimana reversed a November 2009 order that had banned the Forum for the Strengthening of Civil Society (Forum pour le Renforcement de la Société Civile, FORSC). FORSC is an umbrella organisation that coordinates initiatives by Burundian civil society groups and has often criticised human rights violations by the government.

After living abroad as refugees for years – in some cases decades – many of the half-million people who have returned to Burundi since 2002 are having to cope with a severe shortage of one of the tiny country’s most precious commodities: land. 'The issue of access and entitlement to arable land on which to undertake subsistence farming and of securing shelter [for the returnees] ... are among the most acute hurdles which continue to confront returnees,' Hugues van Brabandt, associate external affairs officer for the UN Refugee Agency, UNHCR, told IRIN.

Sex workers operating in East Africa are generally aware of the HIV risks of unprotected sex, but for many of them, the extra cash incentive clients often offer for sex without a condom is worth the risk. According to Basilisa Ndayisaba, coordinator of local NGO Society for Women against AIDS in Africa (SWAA-Burundi), which raises awareness among sex workers on condom use and HIV risk, despite their best efforts, many sex workers in Bujumbura remain apathetic about condom use.

Ten years after the signing of an accord designed to move Burundi from civil war to democratic stability, the country has yet to establish transitional justice mechanisms aimed at enhancing reconciliation and bringing to book those responsible for crimes committed during the country's turbulent years. Human rights activists and political observers say the lack of these mechanisms - a truth and reconciliation commission and some form of criminal tribunal - had perpetuated a culture of impunity, allowing human rights violations to proliferate, especially by state organs such as the police and judiciary.

Burundi is cracking down on civil society, media, and opposition parties in the wake of troubled local and national elections from May through September 2010, Human Rights Watch has said in a new report. The 69-page report, 'Closing Doors?: The Narrowing of Democratic Space in Burundi', documents abuses including torture, arbitrary arrests, banning of opposition activities, and harassment of civil society groups.