Ruhororo is located in the same province, maybe 10 miles away from Busiga. It has known much more division and violence. Hundreds of Tutsi died there in pogroms immediately after the 1993 coup d’état, and thousands fled to displacement camps. Ruhororo has the dubious distinction of having had, for most of the war period, the largest camp of internally displaced people in all of Burundi, more than twenty thousand people. Ruhororo was also on the path the CNDD/FDD rebels took from their rear bases in Tanzania to their headquarters in the forest of Kibira. Over the years, there were numerous violent confrontations involving rebels, IDP populations, and the army.
We worked in Ruhororo mainly because of its large displacement camp. We spent weeks among the thousands of Tutsi, many of whom have been living for thirteen years in this camp. We also conducted research in a remote colline of Ruhororo, Banda, which Tutsi had fled. This allowed for comparison with both the people living in the camp and the people living in Busiga. Pretty much all the people we interviewed in the camp were Tutsi, and almost all those in the colline Hutu.
Ruhororo is poorer than Busiga. The proportion of vulnerable households at 32 percent is almost double that of Busiga (18 percent).4 About four months a year, people declare they have only one meal or less (both unbalanced and insufficient) a day to eat. Their summer months are as good as Busiga’s, but they suffer more the rest of the year. This statistic is unfortunately visible in the large number of pot-bellied children we saw, the skin-and-bones adults we talked to. As the commune has no markets on its own territory, its budget is the country’s lowest.
Politically, these two communes are bastions of the ruling CNDD/FDD: both mayors are from that party, as is the governor of the province. President Nkurunziza comes from this area. The two communal administrators – a woman in Busiga – were very helpful and gave us carte blanche during our research; we had good conversations with them on a number of occasions. Note that the Tutsi in the IDP camp overwhelmingly voted for UPRONA, the main Tutsi party: they sent three UPRONA representatives to Ruhororo’s conseil communal.
Our third rural commune, Nyanza-Lac, is on the other side of he country, in the bottom southern corner, tucked against Lake Tanganyika and Tanzania. It contains a good-sized urban center (we did not work there) and a very large rural hinterland. This is also by far the biggest of all communes we worked in, its surface and population easily double those of the others.
We chose Nyanza-Lac because it is the foremost refugee return commune in Burundi. In one of the collines, as many as three-quarters of the population consisted of this category, and many of them had spent about a decade abroad – and sometimes, if they were refugees from 1972, more than three decades. In Nyanza-Lac, we primarily interviewed repatriated refugees, but we also spoke to a number of returned IDPs. The region has known many IDP camps as well, but, unlike in Ruhororo, these camps were bi-ethnic and they had entirely emptied out in the last two years.
Nyanza-Lac is a place of contradictions and extremes. Historically, this is one of the richest communes in the country. This whole region has ample income-generating opportunities: palm oil, rice, fishing, manioc, trade over the lake and the road. Food intake is significantly higher in this region: whereas in the north almost one half of the population has a daily caloric intake of 1,400kcal, in the south less than one fifth of the population lives in a household with such a low caloric intake (World Bank 2006: 43).
Notwithstanding its wealth, schooling was neglected in Nyanza-Lac. The commune did not have a single secondary school until 1994. There are two reasons for that. One is clearly a policy of the state not to build schools in many of the country’s peripheral areas. The other is the fact that people in Nyanza-Lac were doing economically well and did not feel a major need for education.
The commune’s population has been growing fast since the 1970s. A few decades ago, only the coastal strip was inhabited; the rural hinterland was much emptier, covered with dense forest and grazing lands. All this changed after 1972. The violence started in this part of the country and the repression was ferocious: many were killed, many fled, and the commune emptied out. In the subsequent decades, major in-migration took place, both spontaneous and organized by the state: truckloads of people were brought in from other parts of Burundi. These were often people from the poorest and most densely settled regions up north (Gitega, Kayanza) but also from neighboring communes.
Some bought their land, some received it. The communal administrator told us that of the current population of Nyanza-Lac, less than 10 percent has roots there from before 1972.
Politically, this town is Hutu dominated, but closer to opposition parties such as FRODEBU and CNDD-Nyangoma. The mayor belongs to the FRODEBU; he is a repatriated refugee from Tanzania, an extremely friendly and dynamic man, whom we interviewed at length one evening, together with his Tutsi ex-FAB police chief. In this commune, we interviewed many people who were followers of the CNDD-Nyangoma, whose leader is from neighboring Bururi.
Bujumbura city, finally, was chosen – well, because it is Bujumbura: the only major city in the country, source of dreams and fears for all Burundians, and a totally different place from the countryside, whether economically, socially, or politically. We worked mainly in Kamenge and Musaga, two poor neighborhoods at the periphery of the city, almost totally Hutu and Tutsi respectively.
Kamenge was the heartland of the urban violence throughout the civil war. Once multi-ethnic, like the rest of the city, it was the theater of mass violence and became entirely Hutu. Thousands of people were killed in 1994 by the infamous gangs and the army here (Reyntjens 1995: 18). An enormous number of FNL and CNDD/FDD rebels were recruited here (this is reflected in the interviews, for we have many ex-combatants from here). The neighborhood has almost no public services: a few water points, some congested roads, old open sewers. It is located near some major roads, though, providing opportunities for many small traders as well as artisans and informer sector laborers (Observatoire Urbain 2006: 22). This is the poorest urban commune we worked in, with the lowest rate of education (less than 2 percent has tertiary education). Some sectors of the commune are slightly better off: civil servants build houses there, although they typically prefer not to live there. In other sectors, farmers from Bujumbura rurale have sought refuge from the continued war with the FNL. The town mayor is FRODEBU, a party that had positioned itself during the elections as more radically pro-Hutu than the CNDD/FDD. He too was extremely friendly and open, very busy dealing with a non-stop stream of people needing help.
Musaga is the Tutsi equivalent of Kamenge, but economically more mixed. As with other places where Tutsi congregated during the war, Musaga is located around a big military camp; the city prison is on its territory as well. It contains a neighborhood that is high middle class; indeed, even some UN foreigners live there. But the rest of Musaga is pretty much as poor as Kamenge. There are only ten public water points for tens of thousands of people, one health center, three primary and two secondary schools, and few other decent infrastructures (Nduwumwami 2006). Politically, the commune is firmly in the Tutsi opposition camp. It is governed by a mayor from PARENA, the party of former president Bagaza, generally seen as very pro-Tutsi.
Bwiza is adjacent to the city center, and has better water and sanitation, more electricity, better roads. Economically it is a step up, with many petits fonctionnaires living there, although it is still a far cry from the top neighborhoods where the ‘chefs’ and the bazungu (‘whites’) live. Ethnically it has always been mixed, and remained so during the war (although it was not easy for Hutu to live there). It also has a sizeable population of Congolese and other Africans. It remained quite calm during the war: middle-class families of both ethnicities fled there, if they could afford it, to seek refuge from the violence in the rest of the city. It is also a commune with a great many bars.
Finally, I decided to get a better idea of the visions and analyses of some better-educated and wealthier people in the capital. Thus I sent my translators out for a w
eek of interviewing their friends and neighbors and former classmates. This yielded twenty-five or so interviews with people who belonged to economic class 4 – the highest class in my interviews. These people lived in many different neighborhoods. They were typically university-level-educated, older – mid-thirties to fifties – and full-time salaried in the private sector, the international aid community, or the higher levels of the state.
PART TWO
The view from below
3 | Peace and war as read in Burundi1
Toward the end of all our interviews, we asked people ‘what does peace (amahoro) mean to you?’ This line of questioning was designed to allow us to take a position in some more theoretical debates. First, I wanted to get an empirical sense of the ‘positive peace’ versus ‘negative peace’ debate. This discussion started in the late 1960s, against the backdrop of the cold war (the Vietnam War was waging then) and growing awareness of Third World poverty. Traditional peace research was under attack by a new generation of radical scholars. One of their prime complaints was that researchers focused solely on negative peace, i.e. the absence of war, uncritically elevating this to an absolute ideal. But, critics argued, peace is not simply when people or nations don’t fight each other, but when there is cooperation, trust, and respect between them. They were also concerned with social justice: in situations of high exploitation and inequality, is the absence of overt war truly the best possible outcome? Do people really think that there is peace in their lives when they are discriminated against? The term positive peace, then, opened the doors to include concerns with justice and social relations. This debate never made much headway in regular security circles,2 although the current usage of the term ‘human security’ draws on this intellectual legacy.
Second, I thought it would be of interest to compare people’s answers to these questions with the international post-conflict agenda. This agenda contains four main parts, which one finds back, both ideologically and organizationally, in all post-conflict situations. In order of importance, they are security (security sector reform, SSR, demobilization, disarmament and reintegration, DDR), governance (the creation of a democratic polity), development (economic growth), and justice/reconciliation (Hamre and Sullivan 2002). These four domains also dominate Burundi’s current policy framework, whether in the government’s PRSP (Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper) or the UN’s Development Assistance Framework (PBC 2006: 5–7).
There is an intuitive logic to this set-up, but it has also been criticized by scholars. Some argue that it is an external agenda, an export of Western neoliberal thinking in both the economic and political realm, but not something people locally desire or are ready for (Gordon 1997; Paris 2002). Others say it is ridiculously unrealistic (Paris 2004; Ottaway 2002; Burnel 2006) and a much-reduced agenda is thus required (Uvin 2007a). This chapter gives an idea of how ordinary Burundians weigh in on these debates.
What does peace mean to Burundians? The overall data
First it must be said that more than half of all Burundians with whom I spoke about this issue employed multi-criteria definitions of peace: they told me that peace was a combination of different goods, which they could not or did not want to separate. Table 3.1 simply presents all definitions by location.
Safety The most frequent definition of peace is clearly one of traditional ‘negative peace,’ coming in at double the frequency of the next answer. This is clearly the most common meaning of the term amahoro, which from a linguistic perspective refers to the opposite of violence: it is about tranquility, calm; as in other languages, it is also used as a greeting – ‘peace be with you.’
Most people, when using this definition, talked about the absence of gunshots, of fear. About half of them employed the very same image: ‘to sleep at night without fear.’ This came back over and over, in rural and urban areas. This answer was over-represented among young men below twenty-two years of age – possibly because they feel at the greatest risk of being killed or enlisted.
A few people offered very strong ‘negative peace’ definitions, making clear that they intended to limit peace to only that notion, and explicitly excluding any other aspects:
TABLE 3.1 Definitions of peace
Peace is about eating and sleeping, being able to enjoy the fruits of your work. When there is peace, you can work with a calm spirit. Even if the situation isn’t good today, you can have hope for tomorrow as long as you can invest in an activity. (Twenty-eight-year-old male farmer and mason, Nyanza-Lac)
Peace is not hearing gun shots anymore. It is not fleeing one’s house. Even if I have to sleep on an empty stomach, I know I will wake up in security. (Twenty-three-year-old unemployed woman, sexual abuse victim, Musaga)
Negative peace answers often included references to theft and criminality.3 This was principally the case in Busiga, the commune least touched by the war, but which must have had until recently a checkered security record in terms of thefts and banditry. It was also the case in the capital, and especially in the poorest neighborhoods. In other words, in the ‘peace equals security’ definition, more is included than the absence of war: people also value the absence of crime very much, and they consider there is no peace without it. It is a definition of safety, not ‘no war’ as such (see too CENAP and NSI 2006).
This close link between peace and criminality reflects the fact that many people have suffered more during the war years from criminality than from direct politically motivated warfare as such. Indeed, the issue that surfaces constantly when people discuss the war years is pillage: it was hard in our conversations to find any family, any person, who was not deeply marked by the theft of their animals, their money, their roofs, their bike, their clothes. For many, this happened repeatedly, including when the peace agreements had been signed already and when the demobilization was already well advanced. In other words, the prime face war took for people was criminality and banditry, and much of this was not necessarily the same as ‘THE WAR’ in capital letters – the big conflict between clearly defined politico-ethnic parties. If criminality continues or even worsens after the official end of the war, there is not only no peace dividend, but also no peace, period.
One final remark. My sense from the conversations is not so much that criminality and banditry rise after war ends (as is usually argued, e.g. Call 2007; Mac Ginty 2006; but doubted by Peters et al. 2003: 28), but rather that they abate too little, or maybe not at all. Criminality and banditry were omnipresent during the war, but they were hidden under cover of the war. When soldiers or rebels pillaged civilians, it may have been to intimidate enemy populations, to nourish themselves, or simply because the opportunity was too juicy to pass up. It is hard for people to know the difference, and the pain is the same. When war ends, this cover is removed, laying bare the criminality underneath it. At the end of the formal war, the same people, with the same guns, the same needs, and the same lack of jobs, are still around – hence the importance of successful demobilization, disarmament and reintegration (DDR) programs.4
Basic needs The second-most frequent definition of peace involved basic needs and poverty. Many people told us that there exists no peace without a minimum of material well-being. As a thirty-five-year-old woman in Ruhororo told us: ‘How can you have peace if your stomach is empty?’ Indeed, the image that dominates this category is overwhelmingly the empty stomach: no peace can exist on an empty stomach. It is not only women telling us that. Here is a quote from a twenty-nine-year-old male migrant peanut seller in Musaga: ‘Peace is foremost having bread. If my children and those of my neighbors don’t cry of hunger at night I have peace in my heart.’
Different assumptions seem to underlie this statement. First, people are clearly telling us that, for them, peace means nothing without improvements in the quality of life. This confirms scholarship: as Tony Addison (2003: 1) states so well: ‘The end of war saves lives – including those of the poor who are often its main victims – but it may not deliver much if any improvement i
n livelihoods.’ This is confirmed by the fact that this definition seems to occur most frequently in places where there has been major suffering from the war and where there is significant social discontent that nothing has changed since the end of the war (Ruhororo; Kamenge). Second, a minority of people seem to adhere to a version of the core belief held by development professionals everywhere, namely that civil wars occur because of poverty. As a young man we met herding cows in a remote colline of Busiga told us:
There are different levels to peace. One is individual – that you are not sick and hungry. Another is mutual understanding, that there is no discrimination. My own life is at peace, but that is not the case for all of us: the individual dimension is often lacking. People are often hungry and sick, they have heavy debts and family conflicts, and that can disrupt peace.
Or this twenty-five-year-old male migrant to Musaga, with no education: ‘Peace is when nobody is a victim of injustice. It is also when the entire neighborhood has enough to eat. If your neighbor doesn’t have what is needed you too become vulnerable.’ Or this twenty-nine-year-old mechanic in a better-off urban neighborhood: ‘People must have work and quit poverty: if they don’t, they start thinking badly of each other, because they feel bad themselves.’ For this minority, there is a causal link between poverty and peace.
Social peace The third-most frequent answer defined peace as ‘good social relations.’ This definition, too, is more holistic than simply about the absence of war. It privileges social relations, cohabitation, social harmony.
If we live in the same place and understand each other there will be peace. (Twenty-one-year-old woman, Busiga)
Peace is when people live together and share, they don’t kill each other but help each other. There is almost peace now, so there is hope. (Thirty-year-old male student from the interior, living in ‘Chechnya,’ a very poor neighborhood in Musaga)
Life After Violence Page 5
