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US Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power. FILE | NATION

Burundi and other African nations, potentially including Rwanda, are part of a “very worrying trend” of leaders ignoring or circumventing term limits, the US envoy to the United Nations said on Tuesday.

Ms Samantha Power told reporters that the US will use its December presidency of the UN Security Council to address the increasingly bloody crisis in Burundi.

It was triggered by President Pierre Nkurunziza’s defiance of a two-term limit set in an accord ending a civil war that took an estimated 300,000 lives.

The 15-nation Security Council is likely to travel to Burundi this month to highlight the world’s concern “about the escalating violence and growing regional instability,” Ms Power said.

Council support

“There is unanimous council support” for making such a trip, but it is still in the planning stage, the US diplomat noted.

Given the East African Community’s designated mediation role and the African Union’s “very strong” communique on Burundi, “it’s going to be imperative to have some kind of African component to the trip,” Ms Power added.

She pointed to recent “parliamentary manoeuvrings” in Rwanda as indicating that President Paul Kagame may similarly intend to extend his term beyond its scheduled expiration.

Too tempted

Ms Power reiterated the US position that “we expect President Kagame to step down at the end of his term in 2017”.

He has “an opportunity to set an example for a region in which leaders seem too tempted to view themselves as indispensable to their own country’s trajectories,” the US envoy suggested. “Nobody is indispensable.”

Mr Jakaya Kikwete, whose two terms as Tanzania’s president ended last month, has already presented such an example by “giving up power peacefully,” Ms Power noted.

Lead to peace

She also addressed the continuing conflict in South Sudan.

Nearly two years of civil war has resulted in “tens of thousands of lives lost and unimaginable atrocities,” Ms Power said.

The scale of the destruction “has set this young nation back more than a generation,” she declared.

And South Sudan shows little sign of recovery, Ms Power suggested.

“While there is finally an agreement in place that can lead to peace, the parties have not met critical deadlines on implementation, fighting continues and the humanitarian situation looks set to worsen significantly in the coming months,” she said