Also illustrative of this desire to see their society as beyond ethnicity were responses to the question ‘Whom do you admire?’ A large number of answers consisted of people describing to us ordinary acts of justness and conflict resolution, or actions to defend others, all of which were special because they happened across ethnic lines. Stories like these comfort people, it seems, and demonstrate to all that a page has been turned, can be turned.
I admire a professor at his college communal. Someone wanted to unjustly send a student out of school: this professor defended the student with the administration, even though he was of a different ethnicity than the student. (Nineteen-year-old male student, IDP camp, Ruhororo)
I admire the one who has given me my job. He did it without knowing me or knowing my ethnic or familial background. (Twenty-four-year-old self-demob, security officer, Musaga)
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, even though he was from the other ethnic group. (Nineteen-year-old female farmer, Nyanza-Lac)
I admire my Hutu neighbors in my colline of birth. They remained solidaire when I lost my parents. (Thirty-seven-year-old man, Tutsi, private sector employee, Bujumbura)
I admire people who hid others [during the crisis], their neighbors and friends. They saved their lives. I also admire IDPs in the camp who, when they heard there would be an attack on the collines, went to warn you so you could flee. (Twenty-five-year-old woman, Hutu, Ruhororo)
These statements perfectly reveal the dual truth about Burundi: Burundians clearly admire this sort of behavior and identify with it, spontaneously so, but, equally clearly, this behavior is rare – i that is precisely why it is a source of admiration. These stories do refer to past divisiveness, but they focus primarily on surmounting ethnicity. This sentiment corresponds with study results showing a desire to avoid transitional justice mechanisms in order to avoid recalling directly the dangerous ethnic rhetoric of the past. In a constructing a society that is beyond ethnicity, Burundians may rightly see such a beginning as undesirable, unnecessary, and a i threat. But there is more.
One of the most striking observations emerging from our research in Burundi is the way people constantly maintain some form of relations across great chasms of violence, class, abuse, and absence. People have civil relations with the murderers of their families; husbands and wives, even after many years, can reconnect and share all again; refugees and IDPs return home, solving their own land conflicts in the process. And all of this happens against a background of stunning poverty. Burundi specialists decry the level of land conflicts, involving as many as 9 percent of all households in the province of Makamba, a center of return of refugees and IDPs: in many areas, as much as 80 percent of the current population consists of people who have just returned during the last few years. But this still means that an amazing 91 percent of the population is not party to any land conflict, and this in a country where every square foot of land is a matter of life and death.5 Let’s not forget: throughout the country, this means Hutu and Tutsi are living side by side again, for they were intermingled everywhere. How, then, do people manage to such an extent to reintegrate, after a decade of war, dislocation, and poverty?
This puzzle becomes all the more perplexing as Burundi does not have any public rituals, mechanisms, or procedures of community reintegration or reconciliation. Not one Burundian, whether intellectual or peasant, Hutu or Tutsi, urban or rural, described to us any ceremony or rite of reintegration or reconciliation, whether traditional, religious, or state-sponsored. While there are some local conflict resolution initiatives, more often people described the total lack of any recognized formal or coordinated efforts. Instead, the process leading to cohabitation takes place ad hoc at the individual level. In the areas where we worked, with the exception of the Ruhororo IDP camp, people seem to just return and arrange themselves with neighbors.
Burundians themselves talk about flexibility when they describe how this happens. What they mean by this is that they value the capacity to compromise, to go with the flow, to hide their true feelings, to move on. These are individual behaviors, anchored not in deep community-based mechanisms, but rather in the essential individual struggle for survival of all Burundians. At the same time, these attitudes and behaviors are socially valued: Burundians are proud of this, and uphold it as desirable.
There seems no doubt that this results from Burundians’ profound vulnerability: they need to maintain relations at all cost, for, apart from their bodies, the little bit of social capital they have is the only thing that may make the difference between total destitution and simple poverty, especially in a context of complete absence of rule of law. The capacity to maintain relations with people who crossed you, whom you distrust, is crucial, for one never knows – they may be necessary one day. Those who exploit you today may be at your mercy tomorrow and vice versa, but the only way to have a fighting chance is to stick with it. It is likely that this happens most from the perspective of women; it is they who depend upon and invest in these relations most.
This, then, is not the Putnamian social capital of generalized trust born out of collaboration and compromise, shared norms and expectations. Rather, it is based on such an extent of generalized, institutionalized, and internalized distrust (as well as insecurity and absence of rule of law) that one needs to build up the maximum amount possible, in order to survive. In a situation of insecurity and unpredictability, and in the absence of community-based mechanisms of reintegration and reconciliation, Burundians protect themselves by nurturing relations, by compromising, by maintaining a poker face under all conditions. None of them necessarily believes these relations are lasting or profound – indeed, they all know that they cannot trust each other’s word, that beer shared today does not exclude betrayal tomorrow. And so the system reinforces itself, particularly in circumstances of uncertainty. This is a practice both of great integration and division, of stability and radical change.
The question of culture in all of this is fascinating and difficult. Burundians have long been described – and describe themselves as masters of dissimulation, of not showing their true feelings. They are proud of it and will often jokingly tell you about the fact that you should never trust their words, that a no can always mean a yes and vice versa, that they can warmly hug the man they will kill a few hours later. They treat this as a cultural feature: this is how we Burundians have been since time immemorial, this is our culture. This theme is represented in a line of Burundian proverbs, such as ‘the one who doesn’t lie has no food for his children.’ This sort of behavior – the language, the body gestures, the strategic choices, the expectations – is reproduced through the generations, passed on from parents who demonstrate this behavior and probably also glorify or a least legitimize it to their children. As such, it becomes normal, invisible – just as our own Western constructs and expectations are largely invisible to ourselves. As a result, dissimulation and the constant maintenance of social capital at all costs are repertoires Burundians are very well qualified to use, and which serve them well. This strategy is necessarily mixed with culture; it is a culturally appropriate response to a set of issues Burundians face in their lives.
The potential for traditional transitional justice mechanisms to be divisive and to unravel the ties that form the basis of this social capital is evident. In accusing or testifying against neighbors, individuals would break with the socially preferred silence and risk ostracism, suspicion, and reprisal, as well as heightening ethnic animosity in their communities and elevating barriers to the cooperation on which their survival depends. As such, supporting these mechanisms would be an act against individuals’ immediate and long-term interests, in a context where most of the non-elite have nothing to spare.
Conclusion
Our conversations reveal two strong tendenc
ies that run counter to the basic tenets of transitional justice. First, most people seem to prefer to forget, to be silent, to draw a veil over the past, whether out of fear, shame, a sense of futility, a normative preference in favor of silence and flexibility, or – most likely – a combination of these factors. This preference has deep cultural and socio-economic roots that go far beyond the strict transitional justice debate and relate to how people have learned to cope with extreme uncertainty, poverty, and upheaval. Second, the paradigm of prosecution and equal treatment for the same acts, no matter who committed them, is not shared by many Burundians. Most people on both sides see themselves as victims and the other as aggressors; each sees its own acts as necessary for survival while the other group’s acts are patently unjust. When people talk about wanting justice, then, they more often than not intend it to be meted out for the crimes committed by the other side. When they speak of forgiveness, most foresee that it is the other side that ought to be apologizing first. For many people, in short, to the extent that they desire justice, they see it through a politicized lens. The more polarized the situation, the more people revert to this distorted approach to justice.
Both these factors together strongly suggest that only a minority of Burundians adhere to the notion of justice as consisting of impartial prosecutions, nor do many more believe in the need for the full truth, known to all, about all events. In simpler terms still, the norms presumed in the international transitional justice agenda have little purchase in Burundi.
This also runs counter to the dominant diagnostic about the problems in moving toward transitional justice in post-conflict countries: the implicit assumption by scholars and policy-makers is usually that ‘the people’ want justice (defined in the manner and form that the international community proposes), but that the power-holders block that deep groundswell in favor of justice by their short-sightedness, arrogance or fear. Our interviews in Burundi reveal that both the strong and the weak, the powerful and the powerless, prefer partial justice, or even silence and ‘no justice.’ Deep ambivalence toward transitional justice in Burundi exists not only at the level of the state, but also among the local population. Life goes on, and social and economic relations are re-established; beer is shared, as are benches in the church. This coexistence is a far cry from justice in any international meaning of the term but it is recognizable and, to some extent, desired, by people.
Our conversations also suggest that people do appreciate when safe environments are created for them to talk about the hardships they faced and the fears they still have, and to reach out to others in their communities. Dialogues and workshops along those lines, organized by communal administrators, parish priests, bashingantahe, and professional conflict resolution NGOs are widely liked – and there are far too few of them. These processes may lead to some measure of individual reconciliation and even forgiveness.
Finally, and as we saw in Chapter 5, Burundians want to be treated with equity and respect by the state, and they frequently talk about issues that Westerners would call ‘rule of law.’ There is in Burundi a social grounding to move toward justice as defined by the international community, then, but this process is a much slower and much more locally specific one than the transitional justice literature and practice seem willing to recognize.
8 | Conclusion1
In the following pages, I will present some final insights, building on the results from the conversations presented so far but also going beyond those, trying to tease out implications both more theoretical and more operationally relevant. I will start with some fresh insights about the causes of war in Burundi, and follow this with a discussion of the role of young men therein – one of the factors that motivated me to do this study. This, in turn, will lead to some ideas about gender and development in a post-conflict context. Broader discussions about citizenship and democracy at the end of violent conflict will end this chapter.
War
The arguments about the origin of civil war in Burundi that I will outline in the following pages differ from – and I believe nicely complement – existing explanations, which all focus on national-level elite competition for political power and its attendant advantages (e.g. Ndkimumana 2005; Lemarchand 1996; Prunier 1994; Reyntjens 1995). This dominant explanation is correct (and widely shared by Burundians as well) but additional elements are required to ground it – and to see the potential for change in Burundian society. These additional elements are, first, the dynamics of radicalization and deradicalization that Burundi has gone through; second, the role of local elites in spreading violence; third, the role of insecurity in creating the conditions for mass violence; and fourth, the real grievances of the majority of the population.
Radicalization For decades, Burundians have been caught in a totalizing process of redefinition, in which all people of the other ethnic groups increasingly came to be seen as (potential) enemies; preventive or pre-emptive self-defense became the only rational strategy (Uvin 1999). For Tutsi, this process started with the Rwandan ‘social revolution’ and continued with every violent action by Hutu soldiers or parties in either country. For Hutu, it began in 1972, with the mass murder of tens of thousands of Hutu intellectuals.
During those decades, on both sides, extremist political entrepreneurs became more credible, as they seemed to provide the best defense against the aggressive aims of the other side;2 the ethnic division, not crucial to people’s definition of self or to the political landscape at independence, became the fault line of socio-political life. The twelve-year civil war is the culmination of that: it truly was an ethnic war, and it divided towns, neighborhoods, and regions into ethnic warring camps. In many – but not all – towns and neighborhoods, broad-based ethnic cleansing took place; Hutu and Tutsi families fled in different directions; their sons tried to kill one another; newspapers discussed the deaths of only their own side. This was total ethnic war.
But this dynamic has begun to change. More and more Burundians have started redefining the enemy not as all people of the other ethnicity but as extremists on the other side, or even as politicians of all stripes. By 2006, this position represents the majority understanding of the cause of ethnic war in Burundi. This is a major – albeit reversible – social change, with potentially profound implications for conflict dynamics in Burundi.
What caused this change, and why was it different from what occurred in neighboring Rwanda? I can only offer some suggestions. Part of it may lie in Burundi’s deep political culture, which has always had stronger elements of consociationalism and compromise than Rwanda’s (Vandeginste 2006; Sullivan 2005) – whether in the early 1960s, in the early 1990s, or now, the Burundian political system has always tried to revert to a compromise-based and ethnically inclusive system of political governance. These systems have failed over and over, as centripetal forces took over, and the violence this has always unleashed has precisely contributed to the growing totalization of ethnicity and enmity described above. In comparison, Rwanda has always been a much more winner-take-all political culture. In both cases, it is possible to make parallels with the pre-colonial systems of governance (Lemarchand 1970).
Second, a profound and general cynicism and distrust toward the state have come to characterize Burundians: the state in Burundi is much weaker, more corrupt, more visibly exploitative, than in Rwanda, and no post-independence politicians have possessed the legitimacy or effectiveness that Kayibanda or Habyarimana had in Rwanda. My conversations show that this sense of alienation from politicians – including those of one’s own ethnicity – has become dominant (with the exception of the person of President Nkurunziza at the time of my work), thus making it easier to cast the blame on them, to detach oneself from their words and actions, which have so often favored violence.
Third, with very few exceptions, all Burundians have suffered dramatically from the war. The stalemate was mutually hurting, not only militarily but also economically and socially. Violence, it seems, does not guarantee securit
y in Burundi, does not protect people from depredation, does not make life better. Burundians gave war a chance, to quote Luttwak (1999), and saw that it does not pay. As security conditions improved significantly in much of the country from 2001 onwards, it became possible for people to be less caught up in the needs of individual and collective self-defense, to restore social relations, to reflect on the past. This is when my interviews took place.
Fourth, for a decade Burundi has seen a veritable explosion of conflict resolution activities: the country was in many ways the world’s top laboratory for this sort of work – well-listened-to radio programs, constant seminars and training at the elite level, dialogues among ordinary people. It is hard to quantify the impact of this work on peace writ large, but it seems quite possible that some of it did actually pay off, especially in conjunction with other factors described above. More research is needed on this, including the role played by local conflict resolution actors – churches, NGOs, informal leaders.
Local elites I worked in two communes in the province of Ngozi. Busiga had remained rather untouched by the violence of 1993, jû while Ruhororo was torn apart in repeated spasms of internal violence. What explains these differences between two communes that are no more than 10 kilometers apart? There is not some dense, impenetrable tropical forest that separates them, preventing direct contact: decent roads exist, with Ngozi, the _c provincial capital, in the middle between these two. Neither is the cause separate historical dynamics or class structures – this region is totally homogenous in almost every respect. Rather, the explanation resides with the idiosyncratic relationships between local power-holders.
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