Shibura, Albert

A leading member of the Bururi group, of the Basapfu clan, he served as Chief of Staff in 1967, and as Minister of Interior and Justice after the government reshuffling of March 1971. Thanks to his strategic connections within and outside the army, he emerged as one of the most influential politicians during the years preceding the genocide. He played a dominant role in orchestrating the killings of Hutu in Bujumbura and other localities, acting in close collaboration with Artémon Simbananiye and André Yanda, the first secretary of the Jeunesses Révolutionnaires Rwagasore, the radical youth group which acted as the army’s auxiliary organization in rounding out Hutu suspects. In his memoir, Témoignages, published in Bujumbura in 1993, he lashes out at the United States Embassy and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for their responsibility in encouraging the Hutu insurgency, but without even a shred of evidence to sustain his argument. Much of his “testimony” is intended to demonstrate that the insurrection, engineered by outside forces -- including the US Embassy and the Belgian-based Christian Workers Movement -- carried the threat of a genocide of Tutsi, and that the repression, wrongly described as genocide, was the only solution to parry this threat.

For further reference:

Chrétien, Jean-Pierre & Dupaquier, Jean-Francois, 2007. Burundi 1972 : Au bord des genocides, Karthala.

Lemarchand, René, 1994, Burundi: Ethnic Conflict and Genocide, Cambridge: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Cambridge University Press.

Nsanze, Augustin, 2007, Le Burundi Contemporain: L’Etat-nation en question (1956-2002), Paris: L’Harmattan.

Shibura, Albert, 1993, Témoignages, Typescript: Bujumbura.