These assumptions deserve closer examination. Whether the orthodox transitional justice model of prosecutions and truth commissions can be transplanted from the political transitions where it developed (South Africa; El Salvador) to the community-based violence settings (such as in Burundi) where it is now applied is unclear.
The core of the transitional justice paradigm is rooted in Western values promoting punishment of individuals who have engaged in criminal behavior, based on full information, formal procedures, and legal reasoning. More recently, truth commissions – although less strong in fulfilling the ideal of justice – have also come to hold a prized position (Kritz 1995; Minow 1999). Support by the international community for establishing truth commissions in transitional periods has become almost a reflex. There has been a widespread belief that deterrence through punishment and reconciliation through truth-telling are universally valid, transcending specific abuses, conflicts, or cultures.
Burundi is no exception to this trend. At the end of its twelve-year civil war, the government and the international community that constitutes its financial backbone are formally committed to both an ‘International Judicial Commission of Inquiry’ (later modified into a domestic ‘Special Chamber for War Crimes’) that will prosecute those who committed ‘genocide, war crimes and other crimes against humanity’ and a National Truth and Reconciliation Commission (NTRC) that will be ‘responsible for clarifying the entire history of Burundi, going as far back as possible in order to inform Burundians about their past. The purpose of this clarification exercise shall be to rewrite Burundi’s history so that all Burundians can interpret it in the same way’ (Protocol I, articles 6–8 of the Arusha agreement). The United Nations has sent a large number of missions to the country to advance this agenda; donors and international NGOs discuss it constantly. This is a major change compared to the past: no one has ever been convicted in Burundi for political murder (Reyntjens 1995: 7).1 Implementation of these initiatives, however, is very slow: the government of Burundi is clearly not much in haste to turn these ideas into reality.
This chapter presents the results of the research used so far in this book complemented by a qualitative study on perceptions of justice and reconciliation conducted by Ann Nee at the same time and in two of the same communes, Ruhororo and Nyanza-Lac.2 The focus of this study was on soliciting ordinary community members’ desires and beliefs regarding justice and reconciliation.
Prosecution and truth-telling
The most striking insight resulting from both studies is this: the majority of Burundians do not desire prosecutions or, to a lesser extent, truth-telling mechanisms. The larger, open-ended, non-justice-focused research shows clearly that, when people are not asked specific questions about such mechanisms, but are simply invited to talk about the past and the future, about the state and the community they live in, they almost never spontaneously express a desire for transitional justice. The smaller justice-focused survey demonstrates that, even where people are explicitly asked about the desirability of prosecutions and truth-telling mechanisms, the majority of respondents prefer that one or both of the mechanisms not be established. The sole exception was in the IDP camp in Ruhororo, one of the most polarized and divisive places in the country, where a majority of the inhabitants supported prosecutions.3 Let us now discuss the results in more detail.
First, both studies showed that the majority of people express sentiments in favor of ‘forgetting,’ akin to a general pardon, rather than prosecution. Respondents in the justice-focused study gave multiple reasons for this. Many argued that because such large numbers of people of all ethnic groups committed crimes, nearly ‘the entire population’ would be in jeopardy of prosecution.
We must pardon everyone because if not, it will be like we will have to punish all the population. We must pardon everyone because all ethnic groups did bad acts. (Thirty-eight-year-old female, Nyanza-Lac)
Because they are also Burundian, we don’t have anywhere else to put them, so we have to simply forgive them to have peace. Since all groups acted in the crisis, it is truly impossible to punish everyone. We risk punishing the entire population. (Forty-six-year-old male, returned IDP, Ruhororo)
People who committed crimes must be pardoned because killing them is not the best solution, for they also lost members of their families. So this would become very serious indeed if we tried to kill everyone who killed someone else. (Twenty-three-year-old female, Hutu, Ruhororo)
If I look in the two groups, there have been errors everywhere, it is better to forget. If we try to look for criminals, we will find almost everyone is a criminal. Even if a person did not actually kill someone, I am sure that one day in his heart, everyone wanted to kill someone. (Twenty-three-year-old female, Hutu, Ruhororo)
Other respondents argued that a pardon is better because it would enable the country to look toward constructing a future instead of dwelling on the past.
For those who committed crimes, we must educate them. We must show them that what they did is not good. Then they will change and become more like us and can help to rebuild the country. (Forty-four-year-old female farmer, Ruhororo IDP camp)
We have already forgiven the people who hurt us. It is necessary for all Burundians to forgive so we can reconstruct the country. If we don’t forgive and forget this will never happen. (Sixty-year-old female, Ruhororo)
If we continue to punish those who committed crimes in the past during the crisis, no one will feel at ease. For example, years could pass, and sometimes, even if you are innocent, people could accuse you of using lies. To alleviate things, it must be done, we must pardon them. No one is infallible. And even the person who did not actually kill someone, he thought about it. (Thirty-five-year-old civil servant, Hutu, Ruhororo)
An amnesty is the best solution for Burundi to try to begin a new life, a new page in the history of our country. (Thirty-eight-year-old woman, Nyanza-Lac)
Still others emphasized that prosecutions and truth-telling could not undo what had happened. They often repeated the same image: the dead won’t come back, so what would be the point?
You can have lost your belongings and your family, but what will you gain if you stay angry? You are not going to see again the people you lost. (Forty-eight-year-old male, returned IDP, Ruhororo)
Even if I had access to justice, there would be no benefit because you cannot have back the people who have been lost. (Thirty-nine-year-old female farmer, Nyanza-Lac)
As for telling the truth, if we had meetings together, it is not worthwhile to say all that happened because people will not get anything for the people that they lost. (Seventy-year-old traditional mushingantahe, returned 1993 refugee, Nyanza-Lac)
My family – my wife and my six children – was killed. I know who did it. I sometimes meet them in the street: they greet me and I greet them. I have forgiven them: they can never bring back my family, so it is the best thing to do. It is best to forget and to get on with life. (Forty-two-year-old ex-combatant, CNDD, now chef de colline, Nyanza-Lac)
Second, in our research, the situation in Ruhororo differed sharply from other places in its attitude toward prosecution and truth-telling. In Ruhororo – a town deeply divided along ethnic lines, with a long history of violence and continuing distrust – the majority Hutu position (when obliged to express an opinion: recall that people generally do not talk about this if not explicitly asked) supported truth-telling and opposed prosecutions, whereas the Tutsi position overwhelmingly supported prosecutions and opposed truth-telling.4 This clearly relates to how these groups politically interpret the civil war. Many Tutsi see themselves as the innocent victims of genocidal attacks. This is a fear they have grown up with for decades; the events of 1993, followed by their continued displacement (they were all still living in the IDP camp), are the daily proof of the reality of that a genocide. They tend to want punishment for the perpetrators, period. Truth-telling is unnecessary in the face of such proof, and could simply become a forum for th
eir aggressors to blame them for their own misfortunes or to bring their own grievances against the Tutsi, obscuring the weight of the crimes committed. Many Hutu, on the other hand, tend to see the last twelve years as a civil war for equal rights, a necessary fight against a system of social exclusion that had prevailed for decades and in which they were the victims. When asked about the desirability of various transitional mechanisms, therefore, they largely expressed a preference for a truth commission to clear up the past.
Another factor is the perception of the ethnic nature of the justice system itself. Hutu are suspicious of prosecutions because most of those imprisoned during the war were Hutu from the collines, and because the legal system in Burundi has historically been (and still primarily is) composed of Tutsi. Third, at the end of the civil war, Hutu have emerged the ‘victors,’ with a Hutu president and the integration of Hutu into the army, and prosecutions could upset these gains. In short, then, what justice means – and the approach to justice selected – is a highly politicized matter in a deeply divided community like Ruhororo, and, in all likelihood, among highly politicized people everywhere.
We do not believe this degree of politicization is common to all of Burundi. Most respondents everywhere, Hutu and Tutsi, declared that they preferred to forget. At the same time, we do believe that this politicization of justice does lurk just below the surface everywhere – in situations where antagonism mounts, or where people are presented squarely and directly with questions on the issue (as in our justice survey), they tend to revert to an ethnically based interpretation of justice.
Turning to the (Tutsi) IDPs in Ruhororo, the prime reason given for their support of prosecutions was the simple, forceful axiom that those who killed should also be killed. Without prosecutions, they further warned, the perpetrators would continue committing crimes, tensions between groups would continue to be aggravated, and popular vengeance could take over. In this group, opinions supporting prosecutions and punishment were often linked with strong, negative opinions against the recent liberation of the political prisoners.
For me, you must kill those who committed crimes because they also did not want that the others should live […] To improve justice, it is necessary that the government take seriously the question of people who committed crimes, because if these people are not punished, they will repeat the same acts, and the IDPs who had accused them will become laughing stocks before these criminals. (Thirty-seven-year-old female, IDP camp, Ruhororo)
If someone commits a crime, he needs to be put in a public place and killed, as an example. If we kill criminals, there is no negative consequence to this. Because if someone kills, he needs to be killed. […] There is the issue with the prisoners who were freed with the new [government]. If someone killed a person and is liberated and comes back to the village, you understand that they are not being punished for the crime. This makes people scared because it shows that you can repeat the same things. (Thirty-six-year-old male, IDP camp, Ruhororo)
Only two respondents in the IDP camp volunteered the idea that guilty parties on both sides should be treated equally in prosecutions. Both of these were bashingantahe, one traditional and one elected.
These people should be prosecuted by the justice system, which will determine their punishments. For me, if someone committed a crime, he must be killed, because he took a life. […] I think amnesty is not a good solution. It will aggravate the situation if you see someone who killed your relatives without punishment. You will always be angered. […] Criminals in both groups should be prosecuted in the same way. All groups of people committed crimes, and for the same crime, there should be the same punishment. (Fifty-four-year-old man, elected mushingantahe, Ruhororo IDP camp)
The rarity of this qualification from those who were in favor of prosecutions is surprising, in comparison to the prevalence of such comments from those who favored pardons. It suggests that the majority of those in the camp did not particularly consider that IDPs would also likely be implicated in any prosecution effort.
In Nyanza-Lac, where the patterns of violence have been different from those in Ruhororo, the responses in favor of prosecutions were far fewer; they also had a different quality. There were still individuals against amnesty because of the normative need to punish murder, in order to learn the truth of what happened, or to prevent a continuation of conflict. Respondents were much less in favor of the death penalty, however, and more in favor of using prosecutions to separate the innocent from the guilty, and as a future deterrent.
The punishment of these people should be fixed by the law. We must prosecute people to know who committed crimes and who did not. Amnesty has created problems because people killed others and committed crimes, and if they are not punished, it shows that this will continue. (Thirty-nine-year-old woman, Nyanza-Lac)
For criminals, I think they should get life in prison. For someone who dared to take the life of another person, they must not be allowed to live a normal life as if they did nothing. Even the life of a goat or a little animal has value; you cannot kill as you want. And even if you imprisoned criminals, but only those of one ethnic group, that would be another injustice. (Seventy-year-old female, returned 1972 refugee, Nyanza-Lac)
The most popular rationale given by individuals who supported truth-telling was that it would prevent a recurrence of the crisis. Paradoxically, a major reason invoked by people who preferred not to talk about the past was that doing so would lead to increased conflict.
Yes, people talk about the crisis. It is not a problem to talk about the past. What would be bad would be to begin again to commit these acts. Talking about it is a means of avoiding a return of violence. (Twenty-three-year-old male, Hutu, Ruhororo)
If we don’t find a way to talk and for the criminals to accept what they did, there will be rancor. This means that the ethnic conflicts will not really have ended. (Thirty-eight-year-old male, returned IDP, Tutsi, Ruhororo)
We talk about the facts of what happened, but we do not know what to do to prevent these things from repeating because there was another crisis in ’93. If possible, it would be good to have meetings with the populations about both crises. Then we could talk about this [prevention]. (Forty-five-year-old male, returned 1972 and 1993 refugee, Hutu, Nyanza-Lac)
If we wrote everything that happened, that would be bad, because these acts must not be remembered. I find that if we return to go over all the past, there will be people who would be angry because we will remind them again of the unhappiness they have lived. If you need reconciliation, that means to forget all that happened. (Forty-year-old woman, Nyanza-Lac)
We must not talk about the crisis because we understand that these times are over, and because of fear that it might start again. (Fifty-four-year-old male, elected mushingantahe, Tutsi, IDP camp, Ruhororo)
Those who talk about the past are those who still feel rancor. They talk about the past to show that they have not forgiven the others and that they still have this rancor. (Twenty-three-year-old female, Hutu, Ruhororo)
Part of this contradiction seems to arise through the difference between talking about the facts of the past and talking about their origins. Talking about the facts is about suffering and loss, destruction and displacement. It can be therapeutic. It can have the power to create bonds, as so much of the suffering is so similar. It can facilitate coexistence. On the other hand, talking i about the causes of the war – and a fortiori assigning blame, C naming and punishing individuals – is divisive, as people differ i profoundly in how they view these matters, and often have an interested stake in the outcome. The frequent position against talking about the past – and the assumption that doing so may cause fresh conflict – follows from the fact that many people realize that there are major divisions among them in how they see the past; as a result, these people fear that talking about the past would lead to accusations and blame.
People do talk of the crisis, but they do not want to touch on the origins because if they do, everyone wi
ll start throwing around blame. Each ethnic group will think the other started it, and it will mire people’s hearts in anger. I think that talking of the crisis should only be of the lives they lived while displaced, but not to evoke the subject of the origin [of the crisis]. (Thirty-eight-year-old female, Nyanza-Lac)
Yes, there are divergent opinions about the crisis between different ethnic groups. For example, there are disagreements about the origin of the crisis. Both groups were responsible for killing members of the other group, but people accuse only the other group of killing. (Twenty-three-year-old male, Hutu, Ruhororo)
Our conversations revealed many more reasons why the majority of Burundians prefer neither prosecution not truth-telling but forgetting, moving on – amnesty, if you wish. First, Burundi is a society where justice in a full, blind, equal-for-all version has not existed for decades. People have no belief that any judicial solution proposed to them will actually work as promised, and thus may opt against any solution that requires a correctly functioning justice system. One could therefore argue that their responses do not prove that Burundians do not prefer Western-style transitional justice: it may be that they would really desire the full transitional justice menu, if they believed they had a fair shot of actually getting it, but that they are cynical that it will ever come about.
As someone who is one of the common people, I do not know how to respond to the question of whether people should be prosecuted. When I try to comprehend that, until now, the case of the assassination of the president [Ndadaye] has remained unsolved, like it has been thrown away, how can I imagine, if the killer of a president is not prosecuted, that the case of a simple peasant who was killed will be prosecuted? (Seventy-year-old male, traditional mushingantahe, returned 1993 refugee, Nyanza-Lac)
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