Life After Violence
Page 7
TABLE 4.1 Respect and the rule of law
Rural Urban Total
Basic needs 55 70 125
Infrastructure 39 33 72
Listen/respect 32 28 60
Rule of law 25 35 60
Conflict resolution 14 17 31
Delinquency 6 17 23
The ‘listen/respect’ category came back everywhere, often in a passionate manner. A few quotes will give an impression of what I put under this heading:
I would be closer to the local people and listen to them more. I would encourage freedom of expression, so that people would talk. I would make sure that the administration would have close relationships with people, so that they would not get lies. (Eighteen-year-old former child soldier, now taxi-vélo driver, Busiga)
I would listen to everyone, rich and poor. This is rarely done in Burundi (Nineteen-year-old woman, Busiga) The first thing I would do is to let the little people express themselves, listen to everyone and apply justice without bias. (Thirty-year-old female farmer, Ruhororo, Banda colline)
I’d assure an impartial social justice. I’d give the same consideration to everyone, the big and the small. (Twenty-four-year-old woman, ex-IDP, Musaga)
Young people are strongly represented among those who talk about this, both in rural and urban areas. This suggests that there is a slow generational shift going on in Burundi.
This type of answer is tied with, and closely related to, another type that I called ‘rule of law,’ which deals with equal justice for all, combating corruption and clientelism, and the like.
I would fight corruption, so that the rich and poor receive the same equal treatment. (She then gave examples of land appropriation and bribes in courts; thirty-year-old female farmer, Busiga)
I would help people in conflict without asking for anything first. I’d make sure emergency aid lists are made in an honest way and include all that need it. (Nineteen-year-old girl, Busiga)
I’d favor social justice with impartiality, and without trying to favor family members or friends. I would not take decisions all alone but consult my advisors. I’d fight corruption and would sanction those who engage in embezzlement. (Nineteen-year-old migrant man, works in a boutique, Musaga)
If I had the power, I’d do a lot for the small people and I’d fight corruption a lot. (Twenty-one-year-old FNL self-demobilized, no education at all, Kamenge)
The ‘rule of law’ category is the most equally shared type of answer across income groups in our interviews: from the poorest to the richest income group, a significant group of people care about it, and this tendency is especially pronounced in Bujumbura.
The 120 answers – fully one third – that I grouped under ‘listen/respect’ and ‘rule of law’ are clearly the starting points for a discussion of people’s opinions about governance in Burundi. The quotes above show Burundians talking about what people in the international community call non-discrimination, rule of law, and citizenship – even if the Burundians themselves don’t use those terms. And they do this across all divides – rural or urban, rich or poor, regardless of their trajectory during the war. This suggests that there is in Burundi a deep current of attachment to notions very similar to those of the good governance and human rights agendas.
These same images of citizenship and equality come back in other questions. One of the more frequent profiles people described to us when we asked them whom they admire is ‘someone who listens to others, even if you are unequal,’ or ‘people who do not oppress others.’ This came back in rural and urban areas.
I admire a person of justice, who can be trusted to keep secrets, who is impartial. Our chef de colline is such a person. (Twenty-one-year-old farmer, Busiga)
I admire every person who listens to the big and the small equally. There are administrators who, when a poor person launches a complaint, don’t listen at all. (Thirty-five-year-old female farmer, Ruhororo colline)
I admire someone who discriminates against no one, who acts for the good of others. In the IDP camp there was a chef like that. He intervened in a difficult situation to witness and save the life of a neighbor who was unjustly accused. (Nineteen-year-old female, Nyanza-Lac)
I admire the chef de quartier of Mirango. He is just and honest. If he has to make lists of people of a certain category, orphans for example, he doesn’t put anyone on the list who doesn’t belong to that category, even if people try to corrupt him. (Twenty-nine-year-old female, Kamenge)
Being listened to, being treated with respect and equity, the absence of corruption – these are matters that Burundians feel in daily life. People judge the reality of their interactions with the state with clear criteria, and they find this reality wanting. The reference point they used to make these judgments, I believe, is a combination of values associated with Western-style democracy as well as values deriving from the traditional institution of bashingantahe.
The institution of bashingantahe
One of the key institutions in pre-colonial Burundi was the bashingantahe. It consisted of men, designated by their community, and selected on the basis of their wisdom, impartiality, knowledge, and wealth (Trouwborst 1962: 148). Their role was to give advice in local conflicts and to propose judgments. The institution was non-ethnic: Hutu or Tutsi could, and did, become bashingantahe (singular: mushingantahe). It was not hereditary: each person had to earn the position through his behavior, his words, his slow learning. It is said that if even one member of the community disagreed with the investiture of a mushingantahe, it could not proceed.
This institution did not survive Burundi’s colonial period in its traditional form. Under the colonial administration and later the post-independence regimes, bashingantahe were increasingly nominated from above, obliged to apply formal law, and limited in their power. Eventually, by the 1980s, all state and party officials came to be called by this appellation, and the term came to mean little more than ‘sir.’ Even during my interviews I noticed that my translators at times presented me to people with this term, using it in its generic form of person of wealth and prestige.
At the same time, ‘real’ bashingantahe persist. They are often referred to by the designation ‘bashingantahe investi,’ i.e. those who went through the traditional investiture ceremony, as opposed to those who are just self-proclaimed or being accorded mere terms of politeness. It is not clear how many there are today or what their role and legitimacy are. In our conversations, a handful of people identified themselves as being ‘bashingantahe investi,’ and a larger number spoke about them, sometimes positively and sometimes negatively. The institution is certainly still alive, but it functions more haphazardly, and in competition with many other systems of resolving conflicts (which also don’t function well).
Their role during the war was ambiguous. In some places, such as Busiga and Nyanza-Lac, we were told that the bashingantahe gave advice that prevented ‘hot-headed young men’ from killing and looting, and that they thus maintained the peace; people were proud of that. In other communes, most notably Ruhororo, this was not the case: people told us that the bashingantahe themselves were killed, or simply not listened to.
The issue of bashingantahe corruption was often mentioned in conversations. Traditionally, after a decision, as the parties’ disagreement was settled, beer would be drunk by all those involved, including a special offering of beer to the mushingantahe. But now, we were repeatedly told, the bashingantahe ask for beer before agreeing to get involved, and will make decisions in favor of the one who managed to pay them in beer. Whether this is exactly what takes place is not clear; rather, this story describes a perversion of what beer is about – from a gift of appreciation to a condition, a bribe – and it reflects growing complaints about the functioning of the institution.
Many Burundians and the international community are interested in restoring the institution of bashingantahe (Dexter and Ntahombaye 2005). For many people, this institution provides a crucial indigenous basis on which to rebuild Burundi,
or to face the post-conflict challenges of transitional justice and land reallocation. The Arusha agreements, among other ‘cultural’ stipulations, talk about the ‘rehabilitation of the institution of Ubushingantahe’ (Protocol I, article 7, para. 27). In 2005, a National Council of Bashingantahe was created by constitutional fiat; trainings were given to bashingantahe in various places, and they were – and still are – included in all plans regarding transitional justice.
The current government, however, is distinctly less enthusiastic about bashingantahe (ibid.; Vandeginste 2006). As it seeks primarily to establish its full control over the territory, it is wary of a corps of people with major public roles who are entirely uncontrolled – a parallel network of local power, so to speak. One way to reduce the power of the bashingantahe has been the creation of deliberate confusion: the newly elected members of the ‘conseil de colline,’ the lowest level of public administration, are now given the title of ‘elected bashingantahe,’ with presumably the same prerogatives as the ‘invested’ ones. This has created significant local conflicts.
While the high politics of the institution of bashingantahe is ambiguous, our conversations clearly show that the values thatunderlie this institution are still deeply alive among Burundians. When asked ‘Whom do you admire?’ Burundians responded:
Someone who is objective and can solve conflicts peacefully, someone who can give good advice to others. (Twenty-five-year-old farmer and part-time employee of the civil register of the zone, nine years of education, Busiga)
A person who practices justice, tells the truth, and lives peacefully together with his neighbors, who takes care of the well-being of others. (Thirty-two-year-old demobilized ex-FAB, taxi-vélo driver, Ruhororo camp)
Someone who in a conflict advises the parties without bias. (Twenty-two-year-old female farmer, Ruhororo colline)
Someone who is just and honest, who manages conflicts that are entrusted to him by others well. (Twenty-three-year-old migrant taxi-vélo driver, Kamenge)
Or listen to this: late in the research, one of my assistants, Adrien, on his own initiative, decided to start asking a new question to the youth he found in Bujumbura: ‘What is a man?’ Most of the people he was talking to at that time were self-demobilized ex-combatants – angry young men with years of violence behind them, of low educational level, mostly unemployed. Hear the power of values in these voices – such beauty, after all the pain and anger:
I think my friends expect that I be a man of my word, a true mushingantahe, a man who takes care correctly of his family without forgetting his immediate and further away environment. (Eighteen-year-old)
For me, a man is someone who tries to listen and understand the others, someone who is just, who doesn’t discriminate and has no biases. (Twenty-eight-year-old)
To me, being a man is not simply having a woman, or having money. A man is about the parole: a word of honor, of truth, of wisdom. (Twenty-one-year-old)
To me, a man is a parole of honor, without lies, someone who speaks the truth and wisdom in his family and community, who is just, without biases and favoritism. (Twenty-three-year-old)
In short, throughout many of the conversations, and in response to many different questions, Burundians told us not so much about specific bashingantahe as about the values associated with the institution. These values are clearly still deeply alive in Burundi. People admire others who behave in this way; they would like to be treated that way by the authorities and anyone who has power over them; they dream of themselves living up to those standards.
The values embedded in the institution of bashingantahe, it seems, are Burundians’ equivalent to human rights (similar to An-Na’im 1992). This is an overstatement: these values are not identical to those underlying human rights – they are not universally applicable, for example, and they have some serious limitations regarding gender and procedure that would be hard to accept under human rights law (Donnelly 1989). But socially, they are the foundation for the key principles of human rights – non-discrimination, dignity, equality of treatment, fairness and reliability. One of the most important differences from the international human rights or good governance value systems is more subtle, though. Transparency never came up in this discussion, nor did separation of powers or justiciability or procedures of accountability or any other of the structural features human rights and democracy specialists usually talk about. For Burundians, the desired features of citizenship are in people’s hearts and minds and attitudes – not in structures of openness or counter-power. If a person has what it takes, one can have faith in that person doing the right thing, making wise decisions. Much of our Western and international ideology of democracy, human rights, and good governance is based on structures, on regulations, on the organization of counter-power and institutional checks and balances. While Burundians were often talking about the same aims, they did so in terms of people: they spontaneously desire better people’ rather than ‘better structures.’
Corruption
Corruption was the most-discussed public item in our conversations.2 The acknowledged facts about corruption do not contradict what the people told me. Reports published by OLUCOME, a local corruption watchdog, between 1998 and 2006 document more than 159 billion Burundian francs stolen by corrupt officials, and reality is likely to be far ahead of what is published (in 2006, one US dollar equaled about 1,000 Burundian francs). Transparency International ranks Burundi among the world’s most corrupt countries.
Burundian intellectuals often say that corruption is a phenomenon born of the war. This is wrong. I spent a lot of time in Burundi in the 1980s, and the recollections I have of that period are of systematic corruption and clientelism, embedded in the very seams of society – part of the constellation of causes of the war rather than a consequence of it. Why is this argument, then, so popular among many Burundian intellectuals? I can see three different reasons. First, back then, the media were all owned by the government: corruption by those in power was not publicly discussed. Second, the people who make this argument grew up in the old system, and are in many ways products of it. To them, things in Burundi started going wrong when the war began; before, Burundi was a nice place. All social ills are thus attributed to the war. Third, corruption did indeed become more visible, more brutal, during the war. There were fewer resources to distribute and the state was weaker. There was a dramatic switch to humanitarian assistance, which can easily be diverted by the many intermediaries who select their own families and friends as beneficiaries, hand out less and sell the rest, and so on. This holds for immediate post-war reconstruction programs as well.
In conversations with ordinary Burundians, most references to corruption occur in the context of international aid – mostly emergency aid, but also development aid. A few examples out of tens will suffice:
No organizations have helped me. There is humanitarian aid which often doesn’t reach our colline, but stays near the communal office. This is due to management, not because of distance from the colline. (Twenty-year-old married woman, Busiga)
When the lists of sinistrés [disaster victims] are made for humanitarian aid, either the wrong names are on it, or when the distribution comes, people are given too little. The rich stand by and buy the remaining sacks and sell it for a profit in their boutiques. This is done publicly, they don’t even hide it. (Fifty-five-year-old very poor female IDP, Ruhororo)
There were people here who came to support associations. But the way they chose the members was wrong. They took people depending on whether they were friends with the chef or not. Recruitment ignored the poor, the small people. […] We were told to build seven foot by five foot houses and then we would receive roofing, but once we did it, we only got enough roofing for two-thirds of the roof. The rest had been taken by the employees who distribute the roofing. […] Goats were distributed to friends of the cheif, but not to the repatriates. […] To be allowed to work on the building of a new school, we had to pay the foreman first. (Twenty-n
ine-year-old man, living off different small jobs, Nyanza-Lac)
The reason corruption comes up when ordinary people talk about international aid is not because aid agencies are uniquely corrupt – far from it – but because this is one of the few flows of money or goods that come close to the poor (or are designed to do so), and hence corruption and mismanagement here are very visible and painful.
Some of these accusations of corruption seemed excessive or almost ritualistic. Take, for example, this obviously better-off farmer who, after telling us he did not get emergency aid (targeted at the most vulnerable), immediately added that this was owing to corruption; or this demobilized soldier, who complained that he was refused emergency aid from other agencies (this is standard policy, as the assumption is that the agencies should focus on those people who have received nothing yet) and explained that this was due to corruption. Even in the quotations above, I am not so sure that the last one is factually entirely correct. What does this tell us? For one, the evident fact that we should investigate these matters more thoroughly: neither silence about corruption nor, necessarily, accusations about it are automatically true. But it muddies the water on more than empirical grounds. As Dan Smith (2007: 9), in his excellent study of corruption in Nigeria, suggests:
Arguably, the idea of corruption has become an organizing lens through which people in many contemporary societies explain and lay blame for a range of failings with regard to democracy, development, and other expectations of modernity. […] It is […] quite remarkable how widely the concept of corruption has been adopted and appropriated by people in developing countries as a way of talking about, understanding, and sometimes resisting aspects of inequality and injustice in their societies. As an organizing idea for understanding the world (and as a set of practices) corruption can be both a strategy of the powerful and a weapon of the weak.