By Aiyeku Timothy
Former President of Burundi, Pierre Buyoya has died of COVID-19 at the age of 71 in Paris, according to several close relatives on Friday.
“President Pierre Buyoya died last night in Paris. He had Covid-19,” a member of his family who requested anonymity.
The family source added that Buyoya “had been hospitalised Wednesday last week in Bamako where he was placed on a respirator.
“He was evacuated to Paris yesterday afternoon. His plane made a stopover and arrived in France in the evening. He died as the ambulance took him to hospital in Paris for treatment,” the source said.
Before his death, Buyoya served as a special envoy of the African Union to Mali and the Sahel from 2012 until November this year.
Buyoya resigned from his AU envoy job in late November after being sentenced to life imprisonment in Burundi over the 1993 assassination of his successor, an allegation he denounced as politically motivated.
The Tutsi President first came to power in the East African country in a coup in 1987 before stepping down in 1993 in the country’s first democratic elections in which a Hutu, Melchior Ndadaye, defeated him.
However, hardline ethnic Tutsi soldiers reportedly killed Ndadaye just four months into office, a development that plunged Burundi into years of civil war between the majority Hutus and minority Tutsis.
Buyoya emerged president again after a coup, ruling from 1996 to 2003.
He will not be forgotten for signing in 2000, the Arusha Accords, an agreement aimed at ending the civil war which left an estimated 300,000 people dead between 1993 and 2006. He stepped down in 2003 in line with the accords.
