Burundi peacekeepers on trial over Somalia mutiny

Peacekeepers face almost daily attacks from Islamist insurgents

Thirty-three Burundian soldiers accused of mutinying while serving in Somalia as peacekeepers have gone on trial.

They are charged with refusing to obey orders in January 2009 in a protest over their salaries.

Prosecutors said the soldiers had armed themselves without authorisation, accusing officers of stealing their money, AFP news agency reports.

Burundi and Uganda are the only countries to have deployed troops to Somalia for the African Union mission.

Working with the weak interim government, the peacekeepers only hold a few key areas of Mogadishu and face almost daily attacks from insurgents.

Three battalions

"All the 33 soldiers are being tried for revolting and incitement to revolt. They took arms and positioned themselves in all the strategic areas at Mogadishu university," prosecutor Lt-Col Jean-Claude Nzigamasabo is quoted by AFP as saying.

The BBC's Prime Ndikumagenge in Burundi's capital, Bujumbura, says the soldiers were demanding a total of $6,000 (£3,800) each - a figure that includes unpaid monthly salaries, daily food ration payments and a deployment fee.

Our reporter says the soldiers were discreetly arrested after the alleged mutiny and details of the incident are only coming out because of the trial.

Burundi's army first deployed to Somalia at the end of 2007 and it now has three battalions in the war-torn country numbering more than 2,500 of the 5,000-strong AU force.

Their commanding officer and deputy commander of the AU mission, Maj Gen Juvenal Niyonguruza, was killed in a suicide attack on peacekeepers in Mogadishu in September.

Somalia has been wracked by violence for much of the past 20 years and has not had a functioning central government since 1991.

The swearing-in a year ago of President Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, a moderate Islamist and former insurgent leader, has done little to calm the violence.

Extremist Islamist insurgents, some of whom have links to al-Qaeda, hold sway over much of southern and central Somalia.

They say they are fighting to create a Muslim state under their hard-line interpretation of Sharia law.