A group of 40 Burundian students started university classes this week in the capital, Bujumbura, after becoming the first returnees to be granted scholarships by the United Nations refugee agency. The new students at Université Lumière in Bujumbura were selected to receive scholarships by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which helps to administer the German-funded DAFI scholarship programme.

Life is getting tougher and tougher for Burundi's 12,000 urban refugees and asylum seekers. Amid rising prices and dwindling opportunities to make money, hundreds of refugees have left the capital, Bujumbura, over the past two years and moved to refugee camps where they can get assistance and free schooling for their children.

Extreme incidents of violence in post-Colonial Africa have frequently been explained through the discourses of tribalism and ethnic hatred. A variant of this narrative is the obsession with Africa’s ‘failed’ and ‘collapsed’ states that are said to be paralysed by kinship and ethnicity-based patronage politics. However, systemic violence has far more entrenched structural causes and the scholarly eye searches for these underlying conditions.

As representatives of national and international human rights organizations working in Burundi, we urge you to extend the mandate of the Independent Expert on the situation of human rights in Burundi. He has been and should continue to be an effective counselor to the Government of Burundi, a firm support to Burundian civil society organizations, and a passionate voice for victims of human rights abuses.

The release of detainees suspected to be members of the Palipehutu-Forces for National Liberation (FNL), Burundi's last rebel group, would remove a major impediment to the ceasefire between the group and the government, sources said. The FNL has repeatedly demanded the release of its detained members as a pre-condition for implementing a ceasefire with the government, according to local observers in the capital, Bujumbura.