On a practical level, what this all means for aid agencies is that they can, and ought to, build on ongoing gender changes in society. Burundi presents a fertile terrain for a ‘positive deviance’ approach to social change, building on already ongoing dynamics. CARE-Burundi’s work, using appreciative inquiry methods to uncover stories of significant personal and gender change (as determined by the women themselves, and not by outsiders) and then taking these women and their husbands to talk to other women about their experiences, is very interesting in this respect (CARE-Burundi 2007). Change exists, and it is carried from within. It does not need to be imported.
Peace
Our conversations clearly revealed how people defined peace in terms of law and order and an absence of criminality and banditry. The security dimension is the peace dividend people appreciate, across ethnic divisions and places. For most people, it is pretty much impossible – and irrelevant – to separate banditry committed by rebels or soldiers from banditry committed by ordinary criminals, or politically motivated plunder from economically motivated plunder. In both cases, the result is the same: you live in fear, and you risk losing your meager assets. This confirms the growing consensus that there is no development without (a sense of) security.
Another important conclusion is that there are significant differences in the extent to which Burundians have suffered from the war. Some places, such as Ruhororo and Kamenge, have been among the very worst hit by the war for many years and are full of people who carry deep personal traumas. Their suffering seems to be continuing after the war: there is more psychological trauma here, more anger, more economic hopelessness, less money to rebuild.
Agencies working in post-conflict countries need to target certain categories of people, if only because they have insufficient resources.7 Rather than this targeting being done by accident, they can focus on certain categories. One possibility is to prioritize a particular group whose grievances and capabilities are such that it could constitute a menace to peace – the idea underlying DDR. One such group is the ‘self-demobilized,’ young people who spent years as child soldiers and who quit their troops (whether FAB, CNDD, or FNL) at some point – because they were wounded, sick of fighting, or afraid for their lives because of internal purges (Uvin 2007b). There are probably a few thousand such young men in the city (especially in Kamenge and Bujumbura rural). Their sense of having needlessly suffered, of being neglected by everyone, defines their lives, and their anger and frustration are palpable. They are prime recruitment terrain for any spoiler who wants to threaten the peace. Providing these people with a sense of future, a stake in the system, is a peace-building activity that falls eminently with the domain of development. Another possibility is to assist a group that has been disproportionately hurt by the war: starting with them may demonstrate that times have changed. One such group consists of young Tutsi men in the displacement camp in Ruhororo, mostly devoid of hope of any profitable economic activity, waiting all day for an opportunity that never comes, living surrounded by trauma and a sense of victimization. These are just examples, but they illustrate what a conflict-sensitive development strategy could fund. This is especially important for mechanisms such as the newly created Peace Building Fund, which was set up to do exactly that – but does not currently do so (Action Aid et al. 2007). These are tough choices that need to be made, and they ought to be made based on good information and clear criteria. This is hard in any political system, including a fragile and young one like Burundi’s.
What is politically interesting about the two places that continue to suffer most from the effects of the war is that they are very dissimilar in terms of location and ethnicity. Ruhororo is totally rural, Kamenge urban; Ruhororo’s IDP camp is inhabited by Tutsi only, whereas Kamenge is totally Hutu. This has broader political implications, both for donors and post-conflict governments – they can choose targeting strategies that send clear political messages and undermine extremist interpretations of post-conflict trends – and for the structural evolution of the political landscape: not all winners are of one ethnicity, nor are all losers. Coalitions are possible, and, indeed, did emerge in Burundi. This is a factor of hope for its further political evolution.
Development
Farming is a prison to most Burundians.8 In the countryside, especially in the north and center, people desperately want to reduce their dependence on the land. The three big ways for young people to escape poverty are education, migration, and hard work. To Burundians, secondary education is crucial: the primary if not the sole image ordinary people have when thinking about an escape from poverty is that of the fonctionnaire – not a matter of public service but of individual gain. More generally, urban migration is the crucial way by which young people try to make a decent living for themselves and their families; it is a way to prepare the conditions for marriage as well.
In this respect the policy neglect of the city is alarmingly out of focus. There are understandable reasons for this neglect. First there is the traditional donor perception that poverty is rural only. This is blatantly wrong: the relations between the rural and the urban in Burundi are so dense that it is impossible to separate them, and many more rural people live off urban income than is acknowledged. Second, the current government clearly sees its power base as being in the countryside. This is good news, reversing decades of neglect and exploitation of the countryside under the previous regimes. But it is also dangerous and mistaken if taken to extremes. There is deep poverty in the city, as well as great potential. From a conflict prevention perspective, it is in the city that the conditions for violence are by far the most ripe: the dense concentration of ex-combatants, the deep frustration felt by many as a result of their relative impoverishment when compared to the visible wealth of the new elite, the presence of political entrepreneurs with deep pockets – all these factors facilitate further violence.
Burundians think of survival and progress in profoundly individualistic and capitalist terms. It has become common to argue that ‘culture matters,’ and this is often taken to mean that people in developing countries lack the cultural values that favor individual advancement and innovation. Talking to ordinary people, one is struck by the constant repetition of the themes of hard work, perseverance, good planning and foresight, and, increasingly, innovation and dynamism. It is impossible to over-estimate the value of perseverance in poor people’s lives. Under all circumstances, dramatic setbacks occur for the poor; war makes this worse still. The capacity to fall and stand up again, to never give up, no matter how badly one is hurt, becomes essential for progress in life. Religion is crucial too, especially, it seems, in the city. It provides a value framework that allows people to persevere against all odds; a sense of dignity and community that are often absent in much of daily life; and a way to avoid the temptations – drinking, womanizing – that for the poor in Burundi can lead to total destitution.
This should, once and for all, lay to rest the ‘dependency syndrome’ argument in development circles. How many hundreds of times have I heard that argument, expressed by high-earning intellectuals, local and foreign: ‘helping the poor is dangerous for they will become (or are already) dependent on aid’? Aid dependence, it seems, acts as an explanation for every negative social phenomenon. The rural road not maintained; the anti-erosion measure not adopted; the expression of hunger in a conversation – all due to aid dependence. Nonsense, and condescending nonsense at that.
Governance
All of Burundi’s modern institutions (the ones the international community recognizes and interacts with) would cease to exist in their current form if it were not for foreign money. More than half the state’s budget comes from aid, and, basically, so does the entire NGO sector’s financial lifeline. Even the churches, the other major players in Burundi’s social and economic landscape, could not survive without constant donations from abroad. Much of what exists in terms of modern enterprise – construction, restaurants, transport, banking – exist
s because of the physical presence of the international community. Aid represents 39 percent of GDP – almost twice the value of exports of goods and services. The ‘modern’ institutions of Burundi, then, are truly artificial: none of them can be sustained by internal resources and effort – nor have they domestically emerged or been negotiated among internal social forces. And yet, these are the only institutions with which the international community interacts. To make matters worse: the form these ‘modern’ institutions take hardly captures what truly takes place within them. This neo-patrimonialism – the capture of formally modern state institutions by neo-traditional, civil-society-based, patron-driven dynamics – has become the dominant lens through which the African state is conceived now (Erdmann and Engel 2007), and Burundi seems no exception.
But change is happening. The dynamics of the last decades – including the violence – constitute the constantly evolving appropriation by Burundians of the ‘modern’ state they were suddenly bequeathed by the departing colonizer. In the early years, not surprisingly, the best connected and best armed took over the state machinery and used it to their advantage, while the large majority of Burundians neither knew what to expect nor complained. From their perspective, continuity prevailed in terms of the individuals who occupied the positions of authority and the sort of clientelist relations they maintained with these people. The new state was effectively reappropriated by the old political system (Laely 1997; Ziegler 1971).
But this did not last. First, from 1966 onwards, the highest levers of power were captured by a clan of low-caste Tutsi who previously would never have been able to amass such power and prestige. While the way the state interacted with the inhabitants of the territory changed little, this change in top personnel did slowly impact on state–society relations: the legitimacy of the system fell precipitately, and increasing amounts of naked oppression were required for the powers that be to maintain control. The state constantly lost legitimacy and effectiveness; it eventually fell apart in rapid economic decline and, finally, civil war.
Out of the ashes of the old, new dynamics are now starting to emerge. Ordinary people are angry about corruption and violence, about being misled, neglected, exploited, used and abused. They have come to profoundly distrust politicians and the state. The old system has lost its legitimacy. People demand respect, to be listened to, to be treated fairly and equitably – prototypes of human rights and citizenship, in other words (An-Na’im 1992). And the way the Arusha negotiations ended, with multi-party equilibrium, makes it harder to return to the parti unique of yore.
Add to this the fact that Burundians genuinely desire to move beyond ethnocentricity, and that, as we have documented throughout this book, distinctly different ideologies exist. Burundians have different opinions about the war, about the ethnic question, about marginal youth, social mobility, gender even. What all of this suggests, then, is that even in an ethnically devastated society like Burundi, there exists a social basis for issue-based, non-ethnic politics. I believe there is a social grounding for an entirely different political practice in Burundi.
The mental image that Burundians use when talking about a new relation with the state and with each other is that of the deeply anchored and still socially valued institution of bashingantahe – the wise men whose impartiality, knowledge, and sense of justice are so widely accepted that they are chosen to advise in local conflicts. The institution is severely weakened now, but it remains the reference point for most Burundians. Many of the examples they gave us – of people they admired, of behaviors they desired, of standards they set for themselves and for others – described the attributes of a mushingantahe. This leads me to conclude that Burundians, when thinking about respect and equity and non-discrimination and justice, do not seek better institutions but better people. They demand the same end result sought by human rights activists – non-discrimination and dignity – but they do so not in terms of human rights, but rather of social relations.9
This poses a deep challenge to the development community. It always talks about participation and local ownership, but what if people have a completely different epistemological framework on matters of governance and justice – one that approaches these matters through the lens of social relations and personal attributes rather than structures and institutions? Surely this lens is hard to reconcile with the development business’s usual obsession with institutional capacity-building and political neutrality.10
International aid does not recognize this nature of the political dynamics discussed here. It sticks to a formulaic, formal vision of democracy, both at the national and the local level. This vision is far removed from the understandings and concerns of most people. As a result, it cuts short on process, internal learning, and ownership; it is ultimately too easily subverted by the powerful, as has been proven by past experience.
Notes
1 A brief political history
1 The Rwandan Patriotic Front, a rebel movement born out of the Tutsi diaspora, which invaded Rwanda from Uganda in October 1990.
2 Arusha Peace and Reconciliation Agreement, Preamble, Protocol I.
3 But not CNDD/FDD, the biggest rebel movement by far. Nyerere had decided, in order to manage the negotiations, that split-offs from parties to the Arusha talks would not get a seat at the table, and as a result it was never represented.
4 These are early 2006 figures; the budget was subsequently revised in July 2006.
2 Methodology and location
1 I put him down as a repatriated refugee. I ended up creating a second category for everyone, and in that one I had him as internally displaced. At the end of the day, though, few answers to questions differed significantly between these categories. This may be because the key variables in Burundians’ life are rather similar, and/or because the categorization, indeed, was too arbitrary and reductionist.
2 An indicator that can only be used in conjunction with others, for it applies both to the most well-off families, where someone has salaried employment, and the very poorest – the landless who survive only by working for others.
3 Uvin (2007b) teases out the results of these interviews only – something that is not repeated in this book.
4 The provincial average is 22 percent: CARE spreadsheet ‘population totale ciblée par PACTDEV’, which mentions as its own source WFP’s ‘Etude sur la Vulnérabilité des ménages 2004.’
3 Peace and war
1 Crucial comments were received from Adrien Tuyaga, Kimberly Howe, Craig Cohen, Benoit Birutegusa, Pie Ngendakumana, Joseph Bigirumwami, Kristiana Powell, and Noel Twagiramungu. I also got useful feedback from Susanna Campbell, Cheryll Hendricks, Antonio Donini, and Frédéric Clayé.
2 Galtung’s work on ‘structural violence’ was part of that same debate (Galtung 1996; Lawler 1995). I took this up in my own work on development and conflict (Uvin 1998, 2003).
3 For example: in another question – what would you do first if you became communal administrator? – the fight against delinquency was a frequent answer (see Table 4.1).
4 The results of my conversations with sixty-three ex-combatants, including seventeen ‘self-demobilized,’ can be found in Uvin 2007b.
5 It seems likely that, as Kristiana Powell observed, such notions of communal harmony can be used as tools for reconciliation.
6 See also Pouligny (2006: ch. 3) for an excellent discussion of this mindset.
7 Pouligny (2006) is very perceptive about the effects of this obsession with security and the class-biased nature of social interactions on UN mandates.
4 Respect, corruption, and the state
1 This chapter has benefited from important feedback from Kim Howe back when it really was a pain in the neck to read it. Great comments were also received from Cheyanne Church, Benoit Birutegusa, and Adrien Tuyaga.
2 Le Billon (2005: 73, 82) observes the exact same fact in surveys in the Balkans, Nicaragua and Sierra Leone.
3 The traditional form clientship took in Burun
di (ubuhake) was a patron’s gift of cattle to client, who, in return, had to perform labor for the patron and owed allegiance.
4 Largely the model described by Mamdani (1996).
5 This is where we diverge from Chabal and Daloz, whose brush is too broad: the institutions they describe are much less legitimate than they are willing to recognize.
6 Note that what was mainly peaceful about these elections was the day they were held. There was significant intimidation before the elections, as the parties fought the CNDD/FDD (which possessed parallel administrations throughout most of the country) for local control. Afterwards, the usual mechanisms of cooptation and intimidation allowed further solidifying of power. Hence, democratic elections are sandwiched between non-democratic processes, but the international community needs only the day itself to allow itself to congratulate itself on its beautiful success.
7 OK, this is slightly overstated. Donors also support the media – indeed, Burundi’s radios would not survive without foreign assistance. They also support a number of courageous or simply nice NGOs. This is largely positive: great people have been helped, and they have had real impacts. But even that remains a top-down approach, which neglects the deeper potential for change in Burundian society.
Life After Violence Page 20
