There are no particular regional variations in this answer. It comes back everywhere as a major undercurrent, either as part of broader definitions or as a single criterion. Note that, running counter to crude gender expectations of women as nurturing and focused on relations, women do not employ the food definition or the social relations definition more frequently than men do.
Mobility A surprisingly large number of answers related peace to mobility. For example:
Peace is being free to move around and visit friends and family. (Twenty-four-year-old female, remote colline in Busiga)
When you can visit others there is peace. (Eighteen-year-old man, Ruhororo IDP camp)
A place where you can come and go as you wish, that is peace. (Twenty-year-old male student, Bwiza)
Even though Burundians are not very mobile – in many provinces, more than 80 percent of people have not visited anyone during the last year (MINIPLAN 2006: 32) – they do consider the possibility of doing so very important. I believe that the surprising importance of mobility in defining peace in Burundi relates to three factors. First, it refers back to times more innocent, before the war began. A few times in Ruhororo, for example, we heard the same image that peace means ‘you can go for a long walk and sleep where you arrive: you can knock on the door, you can sleep there and you will continue your voyage the next morning.’ This image is powerful in people’s minds. All older people I asked tell me that when they were young, this really was how things happened in Burundi until the 1980s.5 From this perspective, the mobility definition is about the restoration of the former social capital order, a sign of the desire for continuity amid dramatic change.
Second, during the war, insecurity and chaos forced people lead lives that were awfully akin to imprisonment. IDPs and refugees were literally stuck in their respective camps; many Hutu retain very bad memories of the awful camps de regroupement, where they were forcibly herded like cattle; and urban dwellers were ethnically cleansed into segregated neighborhoods. From this perspective, the mobility definition is about security and the state.
Finally, I surmise that mobility is generally a symbol of well-being: when people talk about the good life or about dreams for the future, they frequently use images of mobility as well. A better life is one in which one can move around, can go to places – whether the city or abroad – and can avail oneself of opportunities that are available there. Not surprisingly, then, this answer occurred most frequently among young people, especially those between twenty-one and thirty: they are establishing a new life and mobility to them is crucial.
Peace as good governance Few definitions of peace referred to the major political stakes the war was fought about – the composition of government, human rights, etc. When they were mentioned, it was usually in combination with other definitions of peace:
There is no peace now, for as long as there are political chicaneries in Bujumbura, these problems can spread throughout the country. The situation remains unstable. We have a saying: the light comes from the capital and shines over all the country. (Fifty-six-year-old ex-combatant farmer, Nyanza-Lac)
Peace for me is when the country is on the right path, meaning that there is respect for the human rights of all, freedom for all, punishment of criminals and all people who do wrong in respect of the law. (Thirty-four-year-old seller of charcoal, Musaga)
Clearly, Burundians do not spontaneously define peace in national political or governance terms. This is probably because they feel far removed from national politics, and our conversations focused on their own lives. Most of the minority who constitute the exception to this rule consist of people who are politically angry. These answers occur almost never in the two communes in Ngozi province we visited, nor in Kamenge – all strongholds of the CNDD/FDD. They are much more frequent, however, in Musaga (dominated by a strong Tutsi party) and Nyanza-Lac (a town where we found frequent opposition feelings toward the current government). For many of those who used a ‘peace as governance’ definition, this was an indirect way of critically commenting on the current government.
Conclusion We should not force all definitions of peace into a single category, as if there is one integrated definition, spoken by one composite Burundian. The people I spoke to used different definitions, in part because they had different opinions at the time I spoke with them – they were different individuals, after all, with different life stories and values; also, the flow of each conversation was different. Still, taken together, these different dimensions are revealing of what peace means to Burundian society.
Half of all people gave us multiple-criterion definitions. This is in line with a recent move in international discourse toward human security, which is precisely based on the notion that freedom from fear cannot be separated from freedom from want. More generally, there clearly seems to exist a widespread sense among Burundians that peace can be understood only in a broad, integrated, ‘positive peace’ manner.
It seems to me that the way Burundian society defines peace is well represented in the post-conflict agenda – thus contradicting the academically popular but simplistic notion that this is all a mere neocolonial agenda. The first three categories – accounting for 80 percent of all answers – are the exact categories that the international community privileges: security, development, and the restoration of social relations. This is good news: even though peace-building experts and ordinary Burundians use different terms, they seem to talk about the same things. Evidently, when it comes to actual practice, this congruence may start falling apart. In my conversations, for example, there was significant interest among people in opportunities for dialogues and interactions. They talked with pleasure about football matches, concerts, dialogues, radio programs, etc. At the same time, what preoccupies the international community is transitional justice – a truth commission and a judicial mechanism – which people rarely spontaneously talked about in our seven months. So, it is one thing to be on the same wavelength regarding the overall direction, and quite another to implement this in concrete actions.
The most surprising absence was the governance dimension. When Burundians think of peace, they very rarely explicitly mention governance. This seems to constitute a difference from the approach by the international community, which is rather obsessed with governance in post-conflict situations, whether it is the rapid and strong push toward full democracy, or the constant human rights scrutiny many post-conflict regimes are subjected to. Burundian society’s attitude seems to support Roland Paris’s notion of holding off on democracy while institutionalizing the state first: national politics or elections are not the key to Burundians’ sense of progress in life immediately at the end of the war, but safety and economic progress and social relations are.
This may be an incomplete understanding. Most of the key variables Burundians discussed in their vision of peace ‘objectively’ have major governance components. Security, for example, is obviously a core governance matter. The fact that the war ended is due to the Arusha negotiations and their implementation. And research also shows that the feeling of security Burundians have stems not only from the absence of overt war but also from the knowledge that their army and police forces are now bi-ethnic up to the highest levels (CENAP and NSI 2006). Finally, let’s face it, there will not be much development without rule of law and a fight against corruption – also governance matters. Hence, it seems we can conclude for now that governance is objectively important, but subjectively not high on Burundians’ immediate post-conflict agenda. But at the same time there are selected governance issues that have wide popular grounding – as this and the following chapters show, in Burundi security-sector reform is clearly one of them, as is the fight against corruption and the provision of basic services.
There are not many other researchers who have asked people in post-conflict countries what peace means to them. But for those who did, the answers are generally very similar. Donini and his colleagues (2005), for example, conclude a similar study i
n Afghanistan, Kosovo, and Sierra Leone as follows:
[L]ocal communities view security as safety from physical harm and abuse but also extending far beyond to encompass a sense of well-being including elements such as employment, access to basic services, political participation, and cultural identity. … Thus communities have a more holistic understanding of what constitutes security than the narrower concerns of the two other sets of actors [international development and security ones; Miyazawa 2005 obtained the same results in post-conflict Bougainvillea].
Donini and his colleagues add interesting information I did not explicitly collect: they asked the same question of people working for peace-support organizations (PSOs) and for aid agencies (AAs) and were thus able to compare these definitions of security with those of ordinary citizens. Their conclusion:
perceptions of security differ significantly among the three sets of actors. Within the context of their mission objectives, the military contingents that characterized PSOs understand security first and foremost in terms of ‘force protection,’ that is, the need for protection of their own personnel from attacks and threats of attack. PSO perceptions of the security needs of AAs and local communities are viewed through those lenses. While AAs are also concerned about insecurity as it impinges on their ability to carry out their assistance and protection activities, they are more likely to take risks in the interests of carrying out their tasks. They also tend to have a better understanding of how socio-economic issues impact on security generally have a better grasp than PSOs do of the concerns of local populations.
I believe that these results hold for Burundi as well. ‘Security’ for the UN is primarily, far and away, its own security.6 When I did this research, the security requirements of the UN and much of the international community could only be called ridiculous. They were far beyond anything resembling a realistic assessment of danger, and on a totally different planet from what Burundians themselves have to live through each day, including during the height of the war. UN employees were still traveling through the country only with armed escorts: cars with armed soldiers followed their own large, gleaming-white four-wheel-drive vehicles everywhere, and constant satellite communication with at all times was the norm. Of course, the security concerns – and associated benefits in terms of hazard pay – are not the only factors that create these social differences: the enormous social and economic differences have the same effect.7 Most UN people never leave the capital: instead one can find them behind the high walls, with control towers, barbed wire, and guards everywhere, which the locals call ‘Guantánamo.’ At night, they congregate together, in the same neighborhoods and bars, where the only locals are the absolute top elite of the country and a few NGO upstarts who are comfortable around the internationals. This all holds for most of the international community.
This is more than a waste of money. It squanders scarce social capital, contributing to the notion that there is a radical difference between the internationals and the locals. In post-conflict situations, then, the international community has the widest mandate, the strongest principles and ideas, and the most power (for governments are weak and profoundly aid-dependent). Yet, at the same time, these are also the countries where the people representing the international community are most ignorant of what is truly happening outside their offices, and the most dependent on small groups of intermediaries of sometimes unclear provenance. This situation persists long after the widespread insecurity has abated. This should give pause for thought to all would-be missionaries.
Security now
I also asked people how security was in their neighborhoods, their collines. The answers overwhelmingly indicated that current security is good – or at least, much better than in the recent past. Our conversations also show that this is a strong source of legitimacy for the current government and the president.
Each place had its own history of security. In Nyanza-Lac, the answer to the question was very often accompanied by a spontaneous discussion, with anecdotes, on how bad it used to be there, and a heartfelt expression of happiness that things were much better now. In urban neighborhoods, it was regularly accompanied by a qualifier, a hedging, owing to the sense that banditry is still a problem there.
In Bujumbura city, different social classes had their own particularities. In the poor slums of Musaga and Kamenge, a sizeable segment of the population complained about banditry. The tone of most conversations was that it had decreased but it was not over yet. Theft of bikes and of money; drunkenness and the aggression that frequently accompanies it; sexual violence or the risk thereof – these all came up rather frequently in these conversations, with obvious gender differences.
The better off and better educated our interviewees were, however, the more frequently they conveyed a sense of the precariousness of security based on a political analysis of the situation:
Security is good but precarious. Everything can explode at any time because of the current political tensions. (Thirty-three-year-old male bank manager, university graduate)
Security is still relative. The minds are not calmed down yet. Our place is still full with rebels and demobilized who could create disorder at any moment. (Forty-four-year-old male manager in the public sector, one year of university)
This may reflect a number of trends. First, these conversations all took place in late 2006, when the political climate was particularly tense, following the incarceration on trumped-up coup charges of opposition politicians and the regular intimidation of journalists. Second, more of the people interviewed in this category were Tutsi, and, while they were not necessarily vehemently opposed to the government, distance if not distrust was their default attitude. Third, as in the definition of peace, the people giving these answers were making national-level arguments: this is the level where their attention is directed, where they see their citizenship playing out. The implicit reference point of the majority of the poor we interviewed was local – the colline or the neighborhood. Fourth, this is clearly a more ‘intellectual’ reasoning, based on more complicated and long-term political causal relationships.
I did not ask explicit questions about the role of the police or the army in this overall sense of (in)security. A small number of people spontaneously attributed the improvement in security they discussed to the deployment of more police in the commune. On the negative side, among those who complained about persistent insecurity or ill governance, dissatisfaction with the police came up at times. This is in part related to an underlying unease about the ethnic question: many of the new policemen on the streets are former CNDD-FDD rebels, which creates unease in these predominantly Tutsi streets. The unease may be twofold – with the evident and blatant ethnic otherness of these people, and with the sense of risk and danger associated with all ex-combatants: they still carry guns, and who knows what goes on in their heads!
A personal anecdote will illustrate this. One night I was going out with a few young men from Musaga. We were walking the streets together, at about 9.30 p.m., after a beer in a local bar. Suddenly my young companion whispered to me, ‘Peter, watch out, there are CNDD rebels there, ahead of us.’ I, of course, in typical Muzungu (white person) fashion, saw nothing: it was dark, and there were people everywhere, and I wouldn’t have recognized one from another if my life depended on it. My friend pointed to the right, where, under the shadow of a tree, two policemen stood looking at us, easily 20 meters away still. I asked my friend, ‘How do you know they are rebels?’ and he answered, almost poetically, ‘Look at their eyes, Peter, look at their eyes!’ Unsurprisingly, the policemen stopped us, and a lengthy conversation followed, polite, but with a distinct element of menace in it. Everyone was making themselves as small as possible before these people with their guns, and their bloodshot eyes with the hepatitis yellow, their ragged clothes. They are so skinny and they behave as if they are delirious – hunger, drinks, a combination of the two? When we were finally allowed to go on, my companion asked me, ‘Did you see th
eir eyes? These are the eyes of crazy men. They have seen too much. They have caused too much suffering. They are hungry, Peter, they don’t have enough to eat. They have no morals.’
4 | ‘If I were in charge here’: Burundians on respect, corruption, and the state1
‘I would not accept to be a communal administrator with the current government, because the national resources are not invested for all but are in the pockets of a few people in power only. I cannot be a leader of the famished.’ (Forty-six-year-old taxi driver, Bujumbura)
In the previous chapter, we argued that while democratic governance is one of the central pillars of the international post-conflict/peace-building enterprise, Burundians rarely explicitly included governance in their definition of peace. But this is not the end of the story. Our conversations reveal that matters of governance and citizenship are important to ordinary Burundians in many ways.
The most directly relevant question we posed to approach this subject was one of our favorites: ‘If you suddenly became administrateur communal tomorrow, what is the first thing you would do?’ There was usually an amused smile on people’s lips when they heard the question, and they almost always had ideas, often very concrete ones. But insights about governance appeared in many other parts of the conversation as well. Corruption came up a great deal, especially when talking about aid and the state.
Citizenship
The hundreds of answers I received to the ‘communal administrator’ question crystallized in six categories. The first one, not surprisingly, was basic needs – ‘I would help the poor like me,’ or, more frequently, ‘I would create jobs for the people.’ The second category consisted of calls for infrastructure – roads and markets in the countryside, water and roads in the city. Both these will be discussed in the chapter on development: they reflect people’s desperate need for improvements in their life conditions. Conflict resolution and the fight against delinquency are discussed in the chapters on security and justice respectively. Here, I focus on answers 3 and 4.
Life After Violence Page 6