Life After Violence

by Uvin, Peter,Social Science Research Council (U. S. ),International African Institute. ,Royal African Society.

  5 Hard work and prostitution

  1 My thanks for comments by Kassie McIlvaine, Benoit Birutegusa, Liz McClintock.

  2 Note that we also have a large number of people considering this a negative social trend, of course. There is no change without resistance.

  3 In Musaga, eighteen out of nineteen who gave us positive answers were migrants, and so was the sole person who stated that his life was better than his parents’ in Kamenge. Among the rich group, migrants were the dominant category too.

  4 Note, however, that many of the better-educated refugee youth have not returned to Burundi yet, preferring to continue their studies, or get jobs, abroad. This affects these results.

  5 Among our interviewees, the average child lost four years of schooling in rural areas.

  6 Observatoire Urbain (2006: 98) documents that only 3–4 percent of the people from the neighborhoods we worked in has ever had contact with an NGO.

  7 Twenty-three percent of all people living in Bujumbura households have no family tie with the head of the household (Observatoire Urban 2006: 30).

  6 Changing gender expectations

  1 We thank Benoit Birutegusa, Adrien Tuyaga, and Kassie Mcllvaine for their fine comments.

  2 This is not new: Trouwborst (1962: 139) already describes how ‘permanent extra-matrimonial unions […] often transform into legal marriages after transfer of a dowry.’ But he goes on to add: ‘Extra-matrimonial pregnancy of a young woman is strongly feared. In the old days, the guilty party could be killed and his father risked confiscation of his possessions. The only way to escape was to pay a high ransom.’ This is not the case anymore, as such pregnancies are very common now.

  3 For example, researchers have concluded that young men who failed to achieve acceptable constructions of masculinity were more likely to engage in conflicts in Liberia and Sierra Leone, participate in ethnic violence in Nigeria, and are more likely to be involved in violent gangs in South African townships, or were easy targets for recruitment by the genocidal Rwandan government. See also Barker and Ricardo (2006: 173); Sommers (2006a: 145, 153).

  7 Justice, silence, and social capital

  1 Burundi specialists argue that the culture of impunity that grew after each successive wave of violence led to increased tendencies both to use brutal violence in future repressions and to resort to vigilantism by those unable to obtain justice or protection by other means (Dexter and Ntahombaye 2005: 35).

  2 The study was carried out in conjunction with Miparec, a Burundian NGO established to promote conflict resolution and reconciliation in local communities. The study consisted of two-hour-long semi-structured interviews with thirty-five respondents in Ruhororo and eighteen respondents in Nyanza-Lac, primarily initiated based on random encounters within the selected communities.

  3 See the discussion of differences in the IDP camp within the section on entente, below.

  4 This mirroring dichotomy is in itself interesting, because prosecutions and speaking about the past were not offered as a binomial choice in our justice survey. Instead, respondents were asked what they thought of both, independently. While the literature says that ‘truth’ and ‘justice’ do not have to be preclusive of each other, our respondents in Ruhororo seem to have decided that they would be.

  5 Admittedly, many of the toughest cases – refugees of 1972 – have not yet returned. Also, if the Land Commission, just created to solve these conflicts, fails to do a decent job, more conflicts could erupt.

  8 Conclusion

  1 I thank Kim Howe, Justin Ginnetti, and Marc Sommers for their comments.

  2 See Chrétien (1990) for a good definition of extremism in Burundi.

  3 The current image is always one of child soldiers being forced to fight, but that is not what I found in Burundi, nor is it generally correct (Brett and Specht 2004).

  4 This may also help explain the low level of trauma I found (Uvin 2007b): research shows that youths who have had an active engagement in political struggle and/or ideological commitment are more resilient later (McEvoy-Levy 2001).

  5 To their credit, it is: the PRSP, the PBC program, and general donor support have targeted the police and the army to an extent that would have been impossible even a decade ago. Comprehensive SSR, however, has proved very difficult so far.

  6 Burundians do not live in villages but in isolated homesteads spread out throughout the entire countryside. Traditionally, neighbors live tens or hundreds of meters away from each other, and there is no central square, no baobab tree where the old meet daily to smoke and drink. People meet, of course, at markets and church services, but there is a lot more isolation here than elsewhere in Africa. Note that when I describe Burundi as flat, I am not talking about class or income: there are great inequalities in Burundian society.

  7 The current categories of targeting are too vast to be of any use. Take a major community-based reconstruction project the World Bank just launched, for example: it defines the ‘most vulnerable’ groups the project will target as ‘ex-combatants, displaced persons, youth, vulnerable children (orphans, ex-combatants, street children, children heads of household), households affected by HIV/AIDS, women, elderly, disabled, Batwa population’ (2006: 22) As much as three-quarters of Burundi’s population falls into this category! If one wants to use aid as part of a peace-building strategy at the end of war, it will be necessary to do a much more fine-tuned analysis in order to fund those activities whose rapid implementation can have a crucial impact on peace consolidation.

  8 I described this a decade ago for Rwanda: Uvin (1998).

  9 We observed a similar redefinition of a Western concept in terms of social relations in the chapter on justice too.

  10 I thank Justin Ginnetti for this insight.

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