Burundi’s president said that gay people in his country should be stoned, amid a widening crackdown against L.G.B.T.Q. people in the East African nation that is adding to the anti-gay sentiments sweeping across the region and the wider African continent.
While President Evariste Ndayishimiye’s remarks do not have the force of law, they are an escalation of provocative statements directed at L.G.B.T.Q. people elsewhere by African government officials.
Mr. Ndayishimiye said that gay people should not be accepted in Burundi, a conservative nation where consensual same-sex intimacy among adults can already be penalized with up to two years in prison.
“I think that if we find these kinds of people in Burundi, it is better to take them to a stadium and stone them,” Mr. Ndayishimiye said on Friday during an event in the country’s eastern Cankuzo Province, where he answered questions from journalists and members of the public. “That’s what they deserve.”
In his remarks, the president also railed against Western countries that, he suggested, had conditioned aid on accepting gay rights.
“Let them keep it,” he said of their assistance.
On Sunday, a gay human rights activist in Burundi who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, expressed concern that the president’s remarks would set the stage for the extrajudicial killing of gay people and “worsens an already unsafe environment.”
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