The Facts on the Ground in Burundi
If you think that the carnage portrayed in the hit movie Hotel Rwanda is a thing of the past for Central Africa, think again. The Tutsi genocide did not begin and end with the slaughter of upwards of a million people in Rwanda in 1994. In 1993 in Burundi, Rwanda’s southern neighbor, some 300,000 Tutsis were hacked or burned to death by their Hutu neighbors. And the facts on the ground today, taken together, suggest that a full-scale genocide of the Tutsi population of Burundi is now in its preparatory stages:
• According to a recent report by Ismael Diallo, the director of the human-rights division of the UN Operation in Burundi, human rights violations continue in Burundi, with abuses by the intelligence services becoming noticeably worse. A local rights group, Ligue Burundaise des Droits de l'Homme, has decried extrajudicial killings and rape and the persecution they themselves have experienced for criticizing abuses by government agents. And the UN Security Council accused the Burundian government of dragging its feet regarding the establishment of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission “while challenges in the area of transitional justice and human rights violations appear to have increased.”
• Tutsis cannot meet as Tutsis without fear of being interrogated by government forces. Forced off their ancestral land to become internally displaced persons (IDPs) seeking safety in numbers, their farms have been confiscated and they are threatened daily by the automatic weapon-toting adolescent militiamen posted on the corners of their ghetto streets to warn them that the time has come to leave. Hutus in the marketplace mock Tutsis by saying that their current possessions are irrelevant since soon enough they won’t need anything at all. News services report the lynching of Tutsis who have been accused of sorcery or of inoculating their Hutu neighbors with disease organisms.
• All but the most opportunistic Tutsis recognize that they have no further role to play in their own country, and those relative few who have been able to flee have already fled into exile. Meanwhile, former génocidaires and their families, along with other Africans sympathetic to their ambitions, have flooded into Burundi.
• More than 3,000 war criminals, many of them condemned to death or to life imprisonment for genocide, have been released from prison under “provisional amnesty” by order of Burundi’s popular Pres. Nkurunziza, himself a war criminal under sentence of death. Now, Tutsis who could bear witness against them are being murdered with impunity.
• Hand grenades are tossed into places where Tutsis congregate socially and the government passes this off as random violence. Tutsis have been assassinated in broad daylight on city streets by police and soldiers in uniform, demonstrating that no one should care about the spilling of Tutsi blood. Death squads, largely trained in the Sudan and functioning in coordination with the police and assorted Hutu militias, have already begun their work.
• After arresting young Tutsi men living in the IDP camps, the government announced the closing of those camps, and asked the remaining women, children, and older men to return to their homes, which are now in the hands of their former Hutu neighbors. This follows the closing of the country’s largest IDP camp to make way for a second international airport in a country smaller than Maryland and about the size of Massachusetts.
• For a variety of reasons, not least among them the loss of so many Tutsi farmers and their fertilizer-producing cows, starvation is rampant in some parts of Burundi. But it is primarily the Tutsis who die; Hutu men join the militias in the bush and take what they want.
• Tutsis who legally commemorate or plan to commemorate the genocide against Burundian Tutsis in 1993, and who try to ensure that such genocide will not be repeated, are beaten and arrested, along with the attorneys who defend them and the journalists who report about them. In a further attempt to erase Tutsi memory, one of the principal mass graves of Tutsis murdered in 1993 has been bulldozed to make way for a soccer stadium. And in an attempt to erase history itself, members of the Burundian intelligence service, led by the infamous “Jean-Petit,” entered Room N° 100 in the Court of Appeals during the night of December 24, 2006, and removed all the hard disks containing the judiciary briefs of the 1993 genocide, effectively expunging the record of Nkurunziza’s actions and those of the people he unilaterally amnestied. These activities also help to ensure the credibility of respected historians like the revisionist Jean-Pierre Chrétien, who in 1994 confirmed the murder of 300,000 Tutsis in October 1993 but later applied that number to all Burundians, and particularly Hutus, who died between 1993 and 2004.
• On the night of April 9, 2007, Butaganzwa commune was the scene of a serious confrontation between the army and unknown men armed with automatic weapons. The FNL, the one Hutu militia remaining outside the government (which the FNL complains is overly generous to the Tutsi population), denied any knowledge of the attack, and an army spokesman asserted that these unknown men were simple gangsters, though nothing was stolen and no house seems to have been targeted. Violence is not simply a random, grass-roots phenomenon: Feruzi Mohamed, the former governor of Muyinga province, has been implicated in the disappearance and presumed death of more than thirty people, at least seven of whose corpses washed up on the banks of the Ruvubu River last July. All such events, including attacks by the Burundian army against the FNL, provide a thinly veiled pretext to kill any Tutsis in the vicinity.
• What the present governor of Muyinga has reported as occurring in his province is actually occurring throughout Burundi: dissidents from Burundi’s ruling party, the CNDD-FDD, are inciting the population to civil disobedience and actively recruiting combatants to join in preparing for a coming attack on their party’s power center. The new recruits, joined by a faction of the FNL that refuses to negotiate peace with the government, swell the ranks of the tens of thousands of militia members who constitute the personal army of the imprisoned former head of the party, Radjabu Hussein, created as a tool for the imposition of his anti-Tutsi, pro-Islamic, dictatorial ambitions. Within the government, Radjabu’s supporters call upon party members to reject Pres. Nkurunziza as irrelevant and to embrace Radjabu’s fight for complete Hutu power and a final solution to the Tutsi problem. Pascaline Kampayano, a member of the National Assembly and the highly visible president of the party’s women’s league, resigned from her government post at the end of May.
• Hate speech, such a powerful tool in arousing Hutu violence in Rwanda prior to the genocide there, is becoming increasingly common in Burundi. On the morning of June 2, 2006, a seasoned Hutu activist gathered thousands of Hutus in Ngozi’s Central Market and urged them not to leave without buying a machete, because the reprieve for the Tutsis was over and the time had come to give them a definitive lesson; by later that afternoon, not a single machete remained in the shops. A death sentence for Tutsis, broadcast on the radio this past mid-August, came directly from Pres. Nkurunziza, who declared that the Tutsi would be punished without mercy for their plans to overthrow the Hutu-dominated government. (The accusations of a coup proved so blatantly bogus that the government was eventually forced to back down, but not before torturing the Tutsi, and only the Tutsi, “conspirators” and preparing the justification for further action against all Tutsis.) Crowds cheered incendiary speeches by Nkurunziza and Radjabu Hussein, expressing the hope that Tutsi prisoners would be crushed so painfully that their families would hear their cries from prison and anticipate the same for themselves. And in early May of this year, a prominent Hutu website published a lengthy poem accusing the Tutsis of murderous aggression against their gentle Hutu neighbors and warning that those who have killed with weapons would themselves be killed by weapons.
The US Government, according to people in the State Department with whom I have spoken, has no plan to prevent genocide in Burundi and no contingency plan for dealing with genocide once it begins. Indeed, our government apparently has no will to do much of anything at all. This is despite the fact that at least some people at State have come to recognize, in light of the ethnically based rule of the majority and the increasing exercise of the politics of power, that whatever hopes they had for democracy in Burundi have been dashed. Perhaps, as a country, we prefer Pres. Clinton’s approach to the genocide in Rwanda: berating ourselves for inaction only when the accusations issuing from the empty mouths of a million corpses become too loud to ignore.
Why does our Government seem to turn a blind eye to the fate of Tutsis in Central Africa? Answers are many: reluctance to use the “g” word lest we have to act on our commitments to prevent genocide, deference to the European community (especially France, which actively aided the Hutu killers in Rwanda), lack of a compelling reason to get involved (though the growing influence of well-bankrolled and radical Islam in Burundi should be a very good reason, if a humanitarian reason will not suffice), and the complacent notion of moral equivalency, or, in the words of former French President Mitterrand, “in such countries, genocide is not too important.”
The American press is silent. The Burundian and European press and high-minded NGOs make it easier to ignore what is really happening by declining to identify who is doing what to whom.
The forces that trigger genocide feed on political chaos, hatred, blood-lust, impunity, and greed – all of which are being purposefully cultivated in Burundi today, as they were in Rwanda in 1994. Genocide is not inter-tribal conflict. It is not conflict at all – it is mass murder. It cannot be excused and it must not be denied.