Each morning in Bujumbura, you can read a long list of things you didn’t see, and screams you didn’t hear. Every day, local news agency Azania rounds up the night’s activities, and it is always grim reading. 17 July 2001: Three dead in a rebel attack at Gakenke. A rebel attack in Rumonge commune. A civilian beaten to death by soldiers. A rebel attack in Kayanza. The rebel leader Jean-Bosco Ndayikengurukiye rejects a new peace accord. In security-speak, in an enduring war, this is “nothing to report.”
Poor little Burundi. Eclipsed in disaster by its neighbours Congo and Rwanda, but equally troubled. One of the poorest and most densely populated countries on the planet, it has been at war for eight years, officially, and conflicted for nearly 50. It’s my first time in Africa, and I have started in one of its darkest hearts.
We are three, the British tourists in Burundi, all visiting friends who work for NGOs, all bewildered by the discrepancy between reality and expectation. “I thought I was coming to a war zone,” says Laurence, “And the first day they take me to play golf.” I think the same, drinking aperitifs at sunset overlooking Lake Tangyanika, or sailing on its deep waters, the outlines of Congo’s mountains in the distance. I think the same when, the first weekend, we go dancing at Havana club. A UN worker is guest-singing, and she belts out Gloria Gaynor’s “I will survive” with passion. “I bet there are some survivors out there!” she says afterwards, and the small crowd - Burundians and expats - shout back with feeling. They dance with a peculiar intensity, more than a usual Saturday night crowd, because of the 11pm curfew, or because constant war winds people so tight, they release at full-steam. The aerobics classes here are unusually punishing, too.
A drive through Burundi’s capital Bujumbura gives little taste of “the crisis”, as Burundians call their latest conflict. Dusty streets, flat African buildings, a bustling market, women carrying manioc. On Sundays, you will see Bujumbura’s middle-class puffing through the streets on the weekly organised walk. The churches are always full (Burundi is 80% Catholic and almost 100% Christian). There are basketball games and football matches, weddings, funerals, all the usual trappings of life, all reasons for Bujumbura to be nicknamed “the bubble.” It works hard at keeping the war away: The city roadblocks go up at 4.30pm, shutting out the rest of the country, and you can turn down the volume of the background war. But the noise is still there.
At the French ambassador’s Bastille Day party, held at his sumptuous hillside residence, it is all tinkling glasses and pungent Brie, and speeches of liberty and fraternity. Holding his champagne, an NGO worker says, “my cook’s wife and child are missing.” At Kavumu, on this same hill, as the party drifts on, soldiers are busy hunting rebels, and rebels are fighting soldiers, and civilians are making their way into town with bullet-holes in their back.
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In aid circles, Burundi is classed a Complex Emergency. But it’s actually about the simple things: Power, self-preservation, cynicism. It’s described as ethnic conflict, when anyone bothers to notice it at all, and the sing-song syllables of Hutu and Tutsi make it easy to categorise, compute, dismiss. Oh, it’s just like Rwanda. Tribal hatreds. Pesky Africans. Christophe Nkurunziza, a radio journalist at independent station Studio Ijambo, says the conflict here is ethnic, and his colleague snorts in derision. “It’s not ethnic, it’s political.” “It’s not political, it’s ethnic.” And so on. Actually, it’s an unholy alliance between the two. “It’s all about power and control of the state,” says Filip Reyntjens, a Belgian academic and expert on Burundi. “In a poor country, the state is the only way to accumulate money and power, so the stakes are high. Ethnicity is a tool.”
Burundi’s three peoples - Twa, Hutu and Tutsi - used to live together fairly harmoniously. The Twa are the shortest, least populous and usually ignored. The Hutu are the 85% majority, the Tutsi the minority. In the late 19th century, British explorer John Hanning Speke set out their differences, as he saw them: Hutus are short with flat noses, descended from negroid peoples from the south. They are backward and ignorant. Tutsis are tall and elegant, more Caucasian, descended from Ethiopians and, further back, from King David. They are the cultured ones.
In fact, Hutu and Tutsi speak the same language, Kirundi (though the elite speak French), worship the same God, and intermarry. The Tutsis herded cattle, Hutus farmed the land. Anthropologically-speaking, they don’t qualify as separate ethnic groups. But they do qualify as a caste system which Belgian colonisers, handed Burundi in 1922, used to divide and rule. The minority Tutsis got better education, better jobs, the run of the civil service and the army. Hutus got not much except disgruntlement. Nobody bothered about the Twa.
Even so, at independence in 1962, Burundians had a ready-made hero. Prince Louis Rwagasore had noble thoughts about unifying and getting along. But he was assassinated, like independence hero Patrice Lumumba in next-door Congo, and the skewed society has been reeling along ever since. Coup and massacre, massacre and coup, in a horribly predictable pattern. In 1965, a Hutu coup triggered the murder of the entire Hutu political elite. In 1972, after another coup, the Tutsi-dominated army hunted down every city Hutu with primary school education or above, while Tutsi and Hutu killed each other in the hills. 200,000 people were killed (or forty times the World Trade Center toll), 300,000 ran. It was, says Reyntjens, “a crucial point of reference.” This was the first time anyone used the word “genocide”: Each “ethnicity” decided the other wanted to exterminate them, and no-one has yet changed their minds. “Burundi and Rwanda are the only African countries with just two ethnicities,” says Reyntjens. “Everywhere else has dozens, hundreds. In a bipolar situation, it becomes much easier to mobilise your own ethnic group against the other. You know your enemy.”
More massacres in 1988 were followed by peace initiatives, until Melchior Ndadaye was elected president in 1993. The first democratically elected president, the first Hutu and the first civilian to hold power, he lasted two months, until Tutsi soldiers murdered him - some say with garden implements - and the latest war broke loose. Now, Hutu rebels fight the mostly Tutsi army, in an alphabet-soup of party acronyms: FDD and CNDD, (armed Hutu factions), FRODEBU (a Hutu political party), UPRONA, AVINTWARI, INKINZO, PIT (all Tutsi). Some, says someone, “only represent their garden and their cat.” Most have signed the Arusha peace accords, led by Nelson Mandela, which have set out a transitional government: Tutsi president Pierre Buyoya is to give way to a Hutu in 18 months. The civil service and the army are to be reformed. Armed rebels will be rehabilitated. But the two main fighting factions have not signed, and in the Arusha documents, the page entitled “ceasefire” is blank.
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Cassilda is preparing a banana beer party for her neighbours. She has returned from the refugee camps and wants to thank them for persuading her it’s safe to come home. Bitwi is angry, because he wanted to harvest Cassilda’s bananas and sell them. He tells her neighbours that the beer is poisoned. They are ready to believe him, until Rugo points out that Bitwi doesn’t even know Cassilda, so how does he know her beer is poisoned? Rumours are always unfounded. “Some schemer snaps his fingers and you jump!” It all ends happily.
This is an episode from the radio soap opera “Our neighbours are our family.” It’s the most popular programme in the country, listened to by 85% of the population. (In 1997, the army asked that it be broadcast in the evenings so its soldiers could listen.) The stars are two neighbouring families, one Hutu, one Tutsi, though it’s not clear which is which. Even writer Marie-Louise Sibazuri doesn’t know, and doesn’t care. She writes from exile in Belgium, where her husband fled after being shot in 1995, about the same time that an American NGO started Studio Ijambo, which produces the soap opera. “The city was completely divided,” says its British director, Francis Rolt. “There were street killings all the time. There were rumours and counter rumours feeding the conflict. There was a real need to provide reliable information.” “Our neighbours,” teaches people not to rely on stereotypes or rumours. Other programmes provide the information. Aloys Nyoyita produces the programme “What do we think?”. He goes into the streets with a microphone and asks people exactly that. The fact that they tell him is, in Burundi, groundbreaking journalism.
What are the results of eight years of war? The usual: Fatigue, bitterness, despair. Malnutrition, malaria, displacement, a mess. More death threats to NGOs from ex-employees than in most places. A country emptied of a third of its people, ringed with camps housing its hundreds of thousands of exiles. An economy, as a Burundian woman laughs, “where all the figures read zero”. But the most noticeable thing is quietness. Burundians keep themselves to themselves. They are so good at it, even reticent Rwandans call them impassive. “It is Byzantine,” says a quietly-spoken Catholic priest, about to escape back to Europe. “Everyone has blood on their hands, and everyone lies, all the time.” “We internalise most things,” says Christophe Nkurunziza. “You sit opposite someone, and you wonder who that person sympathises with, and you keep quiet.”
The most common phrase in Burundi is “don’t quote me.” A security briefing reads: “Burundi is a particularly complex and politically sensitive country to work in. Agencies who make statements to the media that imply criticisms of the government face expulsion, suspension or physical threat to the expat or national staff. Be careful at all times in your conversation with contacts, whether social or professional.”
Aloys refers to ethnic divisions as “tendencies.” He says, “I am Burundian, so I have to know how to orient myself. It’s harder for outsiders. Look at me, I am tall and thin. What do you think I am?” But I get it wrong. Yvette, a highly-educated, articulate Burundian NGO worker, says “Rose, please don’t ask people if they are Hutu or Tutsi. They will tell you the opposite, anyway.” She says her relatives were killed “by blunt weapons” in 1993, and that “everyone was touched by it. Who wants to talk about it?” Her father often rages that one third of Burundi is intermarried, and divisions are pointless - “how can you tell? how can you tell if you’re Hutu or Tutsi? How can you tell who is pure?”
Under the authoritarian regime of Colonel Jean-Baptiste Bagaza, between 1976-1987, using the words “Hutu” or “Tutsi” could get you thrown into jail. There was no ethnic violence, but no human rights either. Now, it’s unclear whether it’s better to use them or not, so I tiptoe around the sing-song syllables. Michael Courtney, the Vatican ambassador in Bujumbura, is annoyed by them. “I had a woman journalist here who wouldn’t stop using those terms. I don’t encourage myself to think in that categorising fashion.” The only other person who says this is the head of Burundi’s state news agency. “We don’t ask if someone is Hutu or Tutsi,” states Evode Ndayizigiye. “We take them on blindly, by test.” He thinks for a minute, then remembers, “my driver is Hutu!”. In fact, Burundi’s state media is almost entirely Tutsi, as is the army, the university, all the organs of power.
Few people will talk about the ethnicities that they are supposedly fighting over. Maggy Barankitse is therefore a rarity. “I don’t care if you’re a journalist,” she begins, grinning. “Telling these things makes me strong.” Maggy has no problem with the sing-song syllables. “I am Tutsi, and I am proud of it.” Perhaps this is because she was almost killed for it. She used to teach schoolchildren that there was no difference between Hutu and Tutsi. Such “openness” got her sacked. In 1993, she was having dinner with Hutu friends, when a Tutsi mob arrived and killed them. When she took refuge in the bishop’s house, more Tutsis arrived, including a relative of hers, greeted her with the word “Amahoro” (peace), and stripped her naked. She was forced to watch 72 Hutus being slashed to death, “so you get rid of your crazy notions.” They cut off someone’s head in front of her. When she survived, she decided to do battle by setting up orphanages, sheltering 5000 children - Hutu, Tutsi, Twa - in eight years. Her children often sing “We are Hutsitwa.” She took in a Tutsi girl who had been gang-raped by Hutus, and gave her a Hutu baby to look after as therapy. It worked.
Maggy is in town to attend a UNHCR meeting on refugee repatriation. Though Burundi has spat out refugees for decades, this is the first such meeting. (Once, it was cancelled because it fell on World Refugees Day, which UNHCR takes as a holiday.) “I am not here to do reports,” Maggy says. “I am here to say I am sick of the hatred.” She will go into top-level meetings and tell ministers to stop lying. When rebels come to kill her, as they often do, she will invite them in for food, and ask them to write a testament of why they want to kill her. They always leave, embarrassed. She will stand guard in front of her orphanage, all night. She will go to attacks as soon as they happen, to help, “because what’s the point of going afterwards?” She is, as the Vatican’s man said, a very unusual woman.
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I hitch a lift one day with a fierce nun to the city suburb of Kinama. In February, rebels walked here from their camps in Kibira forest, and installed themselves in the Jesuit mission and health-clinic. The place is now wrecked. They even took the pipe fittings. The nun shows me machine-gun dots in the iron roof, the bomb blasts on exterior walls. She gets nervous when I get out a camera. “Only take pictures inside. It’s best not to show ourselves too much. You have to notice who is around you.” When the army came to take Kinama back, it’s said they went so beserk that the Human Rights Minister had to change the battalion. There were so many corpses that curfew-breakers were press-ganged into clearing them away. Now, Kinama is full again, a warm African scene - women shopping, carrying, working. But every third house is destroyed, and suddenly along come a dozen jogging soldiers, singing ferocious military songs and carrying Kalashnikovs.
This macho display is deceptive. 35% of Burundi’s budget goes on the war effort (compared to 6% in most African countries), but “after 4.30pm,” says a Jesuit aid worker, “this country belongs the rebels. Most of it belongs to them all the time, anyway.” Most observers say the war is unwinnable. But there are too few signs as to how the fighting is proceeding to draw any conclusions. The curfew is one: 8pm in February, when the rebels invaded Kinama; 11pm now, in relative calm. One woman who works in a certain factory counts how many socks the army orders. Soldiers will wear second-hand uniforms, but their underwear is always new. More socks, more trouble.
Cibitoke, Burundi’s northernmost province, has been out of bounds for a week. It lies between Congo and Rwanda, so rebels pass through on their way from one nasty war to another. Congo’s young president Joseph Kabila recently decided to kick out some of the “negative forces” - Burundian rebels and Rwandan “genocidaires” - who had settled in his country, and they have been walking through Burundi. On the way north, I watch the roadside for who it may contain. The month before, a Children’s Aid Direct driver had been shot: The rebel was lying in the grass, and didn’t see the vehicle’s logo. Bored soldiers appear every 500 metres, squatting, staring. I see a column of armed men in the distance. Yvette smiles at my expression. “I used to be nervous too.” She says rebels wear flip-flops, but soldiers wear boots. Both wear uniforms, and neither are known for their restraint.
Yvette is here to open a Vulnerable Children’s Centre, which will teach orphans to stitch, to bake, to farm, to survive. The centre’s manager saw a column of 300 rebels the week before, but “they passed through very kindly.” He says things were bad in 1998, but they’ve been OK since then.
14 year-old Dieudonné - “God’s gift” in translation - became a vulnerable child in 1998. The fighting was bad, so he waited one night until the hippos had left for land, then crossed the Rusizi river in a home-made raft to the Congo, leaving his parents behind. Later, he heard they had both died. “They were poisoned,” he says, too seriously for his age. “They went to a welcome centre, and they were given bad food.” Yvette says that country people say “poisoning” when it’s actually malnutrition. Like countless others, Dieudonné’s parents were prevented by fighting from getting to their fields, and died of poverty and bad food. Malnutrition is one of Burundi’s plagues. A wail goes up to remind me of the other: Malaria currently kills 300 Burundians a day, and in the clinic next-door, it’s just claimed one of them.
That night, we go bar-hopping around Cibitoke. In the banana beer hut, there is a soldier. He is drunk with a gun, an alarming combination, and he is unhappy. I say to my companion that it must suck, being a soldier in a proper war, and he says “no, they get fed and they can rape.”
Who is the enemy in Burundi? Last November, Italian monk Antonio Bargiggia was shot in the head by uniformed, booted men. The army said they were deserters, and executed them swiftly. But behind closed doors, Antonio’s friend introduces me to the murky world of Burundian speculation. He says Antonio was probably killed by disgruntled army factions; they kill whites and the president looks bad internationally. The same forces, he says, were behind the targeting of the Sabena plane, shot - but not downed - as it came in to land in December. They may have organised the murder of 20 people, including British VSO worker Charlotte Wilson, travelling last December on the “Titanic” bus from Rwanda to Burundi. Or was it because the Titanic drivers hadn’t paid enough tax to the rebels? His shoulders sag. “I don’t know what’s going on here. Burundians don’t know either. We’re always in the realm of the perhaps.” “I can’t decide if I’ll be deported or shot,” he says finally, but is certain it will be one or the other.
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I go one day to Tora, a small town in the middle of Bururi. These are high and sharp hills, beautiful and majestic. The tea plantations are green and fresh. But it is deceptive. Though Burundi is incredibly fertile, here the agriculture is difficult and the life is harsh.
We turn off onto a bumpier road, and an agronomist says, “rebel territory!” and laughs. They often stop him and ask for lifts, he says. Sometimes you get rebels and army in the same family - you can see them at weddings, or funerals. The battle lines are so blurred. In this “ethnic conflict”, almost the entire political and rebel elite comes from one southern province, Bururi. In this “ethnic conflict,” some of the President’s personal guard is Hutu, because they are from Bururi. It’s like politics - the divisions are always horizontal, not vertical. The elites pretend to fight, but actually they’re busy shoring up the line between power and the next class below. The class below is busy hanging on to their jobs. “Some of the strongest resistance comes from the lower middle-class civil servants,” says Filip Reyntjens. “They really have a lot to lose.”
Nelson Mandela knew this, as soon as he took over the peace process. Once, he made a famous speech to a table of Burundian negotiators. “The daily slaughter of men, women and children is an indictment of every one of you. The lack of urgency is an indictment of every one of you.” He slammed the government for setting up “regroupment camps” - he called them concentration camps - where they herded thousands of Hutus, away from polluting contacts with rebels. The camps were disbanded. On a bare hill in Kirenzi, in the very troubled province of Bujumbura Rural, you can see the remains: A low shelter made from sticks and grass, unfit for a rabbit. This is what 18,000 regrouped people had to live under in the rainy season, when they were forbidden from returning to their fields, and given no water or food, nothing but armed guards.
Close by are an NGO-operated clinic and feeding centre. Many of the women here carry plastic bags with a picture of Rambo. One girl, Mariette, has the face of a sad Madonna. She’s 13 years old, and she knows her rights, tugging at the team leader Marcel’s sleeve again and again. He translates. “She says her heart hurts. She says we sent her to the health centre, and they gave her stuff and nothing works. She says it’s not good enough.” One by one, the women fill the Rambo bags, or balance full bowls on their head, and set off walking. They need to be home before dark, when the rebels start their business. But Mariette is unshakeable.
I can predict her future, if I try. The optimistic version: She will get some education, get married, die young. Or she’ll be raped with bamboo sticks by soldiers, or killed by rebels. She’ll get AIDS or malaria or hunger. But Mariette’s stubborn determination to get her heart fixed is what Burundi needs most of all. “We are all so tired,” said Maggy Barankitse, the Vatican ambassador’s shining example of positive thinking. “Politicians, businessmen, everyone.”
In the Buja bubble, rumours fly that the peace accords might work this time. There are gracious houses being built by the lakeside, by businessmen who anticipate a flood of UN peacekeepers. One bar-owner has ordered a ready-made Irish pub kit from the States. But some people have an interest, as driver Severin says, in “talking, talking, talking and getting nowhere.” Burundian Human Rights League Iteka calculates that negotiating delegates can earn five months’ income by one week’s attendance at Arusha.
And rumours fly in other directions. The city will be invaded, properly. The city will fall. Since December, the few Hutu students at the university have been standing guard over each other - one night-long shift, every fourth day - in anticipation of trouble.
But the rumours are hard to grasp, like the war itself. Two weeks here, and I have consistently slept through gunfire, including a night when tracer fire lit up Buja’s hills for hours. I have seen the war’s before and after, in the school graduation party of a girl who wants to be an engineer, but first must do military service in a serious military situation. In the news, a week after I leave, that 300 Tutsi soldiers have taken over the radio station in the year’s second failed coup. “You talk to one person, and you feel upbeat,” said Filip Reyntjens. “And then you talk to someone else and you feel desperate.” Even though the transition process officially began on November 1st, he is economical with his optimism. He has met Ukrainian technicians in Bujumbura, refitting four new MI24 helicopters and several armoured vehicles. “These are long-term investments.” The army is preparing for more war, while it’s also preparing for peace.
After two grenades were thrown into a city market in September, army spokesman Colonel Augustin Nzabampema told the press, “the current insecurity reported in the country is “not worse than at other times”". Slashed limbs, blood, fallen groceries. War as usual, nothing to report.