By Patrick Nduwimana
Bujumbura - Burundi's outgoing Hutu ruling party FRODEBU has suspended its top official for six months after an election thrashing by a former rebel movement in the tiny central African nation.
A statement issued late on Sunday by 70 members of the party's governing body, including President Domitien Ndayizeye, blamed chairperson Jean Minani for its loss in recent parliamentary polls and other accusations linked to his running of the party.
The former rebel group Forces for the Defence of Democracy (FDD) - also from the ethnic Hutu majority - resoundingly won the July 4 legislative elections and is set to take the presidency in polls due later this week.
The elections were part of a United Nations peace plan designed to end a decade of ethnic bloodshed that killed 300 000 in Burundi.
"The internal regulations of the party give power to the governing council of the party to suspend the chairman in case he is accused of failing to lead the party well," new interim chairperson Leonce Ngendakumana said on Monday.
A special session of FRODEBU's general assembly is scheduled to elect a new chairperson in November. Ngendakumana said Minani was free to stand for the post.
The chairperson's position is the most powerful one in the party, superseding even that of the country's president, Ndayizeye, only a senior member in the governing council.
Minani rejected his suspension as illegal and unconstitutional and said in a statement he was suspending five members of the party, including Ndayizeye.
"According to the internal regulations of the party, only a general assembly has the right to sack or suspend the chairman," Minani's statement said.
He said he would remain in his post and was appointing party spokesperson Jean de Dieu Mutabazi as secretary general.
Minani had led FRODEBU since 1993 after the assassination of Melchior Ndadaye, the first democratically elected Hutu president. He was in neighbouring Rwanda during the 1993 military coup by Tutsi extremists.
He then lived in exile in Tanzania and returned home a few months after the signing of the Arusha peace agreement in 2000.
The FDD's Pierre Nkurunziza is almost certain to win presidential elections on August 19.