THE African continent has been the scene of many tragedies through the years. But few equal what happened in Rwanda and Burundi in terms of Africans killing fellow Africans. Rwanda and Burundi easily qualify as the killing fields of Africa, two countries of magnificent beauty, with green hills and valleys, soaked in blood.
Even Nigeria's tragedy during the civil war from 1967 to 1970 pales into insignificance by comparison in terms of the number of victims and the magnitude of the violence unleashed.
This is not to ignore the suffering of the Igbos and other Eastern Nigerians in that war. It was a horrendous tragedy. But Northern Nigerians did not slaughter hundreds of thousands of Igbos and other Easterners in Northern Nigeria as the Hutu and the Tutsi did to each other in Rwanda and Burundi from the early sixties to the mid-nineties alone.
Most of the victims during that tragic period in Nigerian – and African – history died from starvation, a weapon the federal military government deliberately used effectively to starve the Igbos and other Eastern Nigerians into submission. As Chief Anthony Enahoro, the commissioner of information in the Nigerian government under General Yakubu Gowon, bluntly stated at a press conference in July 1968: “Starvation is a legitimate instrument of war, and we have every intention of using it against the rebels.”
Chief Obafemi Awolowo, vice chairman of the Federal Executive Council, hence Nigeria's vice president under Gowon who was the head of the federal military government, articulated the same position.
In Rwanda and Burundi, most of the victims were simply slaughtered – hacked, clubbed, stoned, slashed, speared or shot to death. And the carnage continues today.
Although this chapter is about Burundi, it is also about Rwanda because the two countries have so much in common that they literally constitute one country, had it not been for the demarcation line that separates them. At the very least, they are identical twins. The artificial boundary has not changed that. Yet, both are so divided within that each is, tragically, two nations in one, hence four in both: Hutu versus Tutsi.
Formerly known as Ruanda-Urundi, the two countries were a part of what is Tanzania today when all three formed one country called German East Africa (Deutsch-Ostafrika).
The area that came to be known as Tanganyika, what is now Tanzania mainland, is the country that was first named Deutsch Ostafrika (German East Africa). Burundi, then known as Urundi, became part of German East Africa in 1898, and Rwanda, then called Ruanda, in 1899.
After Germany was defeated in World War I, both Ruanda and Urundi were mandated to Belgium by the League of Nations as one territory of Ruanda-Urundi. The territory was administered jointly with Belgian Congo. The administrative centre was Leopoldville, the capital of Belgian Congo which was renamed Kinshasa by President Mobutu in 1966.
Tanganyika, which was the largest part of the East African German colony, became a British mandated territory after Woodrow Wilson, the American president, turned down a request by British Prime Minister Lloyd George to administer it under the League of Nations trusteeship mandate. Otherwise Tanganyika, what is mainland Tanzania today, would have become an American colony or possession, the only one on the continent. Liberia is considered by some people to be a virtual American colony; some even consider it to be America's 51st state. But that is an entirely different subject beyond the scope of this work.
Had the three territories – of Tanganyika, Ruanda and Urundi – remained together and emerged from colonial rule as a single political entity, the history of the Great Lakes region would probably have been different.
It is possible the massacres of the Hutu and the Tutsi which have taken place in both Rwanda and Burundi through the years, including the 1994 genocide, would not have taken place. It is also possible many Hutus and Tutsis would have moved to other parts of the large country – the former German East Africa – instead of remaining crowded in the heavily populated territories of Ruanda and Urundi fighting for scarce resources especially land.
It is also possible there would have been an equitable distribution of power in the larger political entity in which the Hutu and the Tutsi would not have been locked in conflict as they are now in Rwanda and Burundi.
The Hutu constitute the vast majority of Burundi's population, a formidable 85 per cent, and the Tutsi, 14 per cent. The Twa, who are the Pygmies, make up the remaining 1 per cent.
But it is the Tutsi who have always dominated the country and the government. It is this inequity of power, probably more than anything else, which has caused so much bloodshed between the Hutu and the Tutsi through the years.
Other factors, especially shortage of land and poverty, have exacerbated the conflict.
Burundi is one of the poorest countries in the world. It is also the most densely populated country in Africa after Rwanda.
In such a small, desperately poor and overpopulated country, shortage of land may be the country's biggest problem. Had there been enough land, there would have been less conflict which has been an integral part of the country's history since the Tutsi conquered and virtually enslaved the Hutu about 400 years ago and established the kingdoms of Ruanda and Urundi under aristocratic rule.
Even after the end of colonial rule when it was expected that both the Hutu and the Tusti would equally participate in the government of their country, the asymmetrical relationship between the two ethnic groups continued. The Tutsi remained in a dominant position.
On 1 July 1962, the Tutsi-dominated kingdom of Urundi won independence as a monarchy. It was renamed Burundi under the leadership of Mwami (King) Mwambutsa IV.
But independence from Belgium did not usher in a new era of peace and stability for the country. The mid-sixties were marred by violence between the dominant Tutsis and the subjugated Hutus, and by struggle for power among the Tutsi themselves.
The assassination of Louis Rwagasore, a Tutsi and prominent nationalist, on 13 October 1961 by a Belgian just a few months before independence, exacerbated tensions ans intensified competition within the Tutsi elite in their quest for power, with different factions conniving against each other. The factionalism contributed to their defeat in the 1964 parliamentary elections which the Hutu won.
However, even without such intra-ethnic conflict among the Tutsi, the Hutu would probably have won the election, anyway, given their numerical preponderance if the elections were democratic, as they indeed were during the parliamentary contest.
Although the Hutu won the 1964 parliamentary elections, Burundi's head of state, Mwami (King) Mwambutsa IV, refused to appoint a Hutu prime minister to lead the cabinet. And that was at a time when the country was in a very tense political situation because of the intense hostility between the two ethnic groups.
Not long before the 1964 elections, fighting between the Hutu and the Tutsi erupted in December 1963 in which at least 5,000 people were killed following an invasion of Rwanda by Burundi-based Rwandan Tutsis with the help of their Burundian kinsmen in an attempt to overthrow the Hutu-dominated government of Rwanda.
Embittered by their exclusion from power as a result of King Mwambutsa's refusal to appoint a Hutu prime minister after an election they won, the Hutu tried to seize power from the Tutsi.
On 18 October 1965, Hutu insurgents in the Burundi army and gendarmerie in collusion with the Hutu elite and politicians attempted to assassinate Mwami Mwambutsa IV and the Tutsi prime minister he had appointed.
The coup was led by Gervais Nyangoma and succeeded deposing King Mwambutsa. Soon after the king was ousted, Hutus in the police force started killing Tutsis. The police force during that time was led by Antoine Serkwavu, a Hutu.
But the revolt did not last long and was violently suppressed by the Tutsi-dominated army and security forces.
The leader of the counter-coup was Michel Micombero, a Tutsi, who returned to Burundi during the same year after getting military training in Belgium. He had been quickly promoted after his return and was secretary of defence when King Mwambutsa was overthrown.
He mobilised forces in the army whose officers were mostly Tutsi and neutralised the Hutu who ousted the king. The king was reinstated.
Then a wave of violence was unleashed by the army and its Tutsi supporters against Hutus throughout the country.
At least 30 to 40 Hutu soldiers and gendarmes were summarily executed, sending a strong signal to the Hutu that any attempt to oust the Tutsi from power would be dealt with ruthlessly.
The executions were followed by a wave of violence that erupted in the hills above the capital, Bujumbura, formerly known as Usumbura, in which Hutu civilians joined fleeing gendarmes in burning Tutsi homes and other property in retaliation.
The International Commission of Jurists reported that all the elected Hutu members of both houses of parliament, and all the main Hutu leaders, 86 of them altogether, had been shot dead. Many other Hutus were also killed1 by the Tutsi in an attempt to eliminate any Hutu threat to their hegemonic control of the country in which they were vastly outnumbered. For example, in the central province of Muramvya alone, more than 1,000 Hutu elites were killed by the Tutsi in 1965. And the violence and killings continued.
On 8 July 1966, Mwami Mwambutsa IV was deposed by his son who became Mwami (King) Ntare V in October the same year. The new king was 21 years old. He overthrew his father with the help of Michel Micombero who became the real ruler of the country, with Mwami Ntare being only a figure head.
Mwami Ntare did not last long in “power” even as a mere figure head. He was overthrown less than two months later on 28 November 1966 by Micombero who proclaimed Burundi a republic and became the country's first president. He was 26. He also became brigadier general after promoting himself.
Remarkably, Micombero assumed power after a bloodless coup in a country known for bloodshed. Mwami Ntare had appointed Captain Micombero prime minister on 11 July 1966 because of the role he played in the July 8th coup in which King Mwambutsa IV was overthrown when he was supposedly in voluntary exile in Geneva, Switzerland.
A graduate of the Royal Military School in Brussels, Belgium, Micombero was the army chief of staff when he overthrew Mwami Mwambutsa.
But he later fell out with Mwami Ntare V and accused the new king of failing to discharge his responsibilities. He also accused the youthful, aristocratic ruler of allowing himself to be unduly influenced by his father, the deposed king.
After overthrowing Mwami Ntare V, Micombero formed the National Committee of the Revolution (CNR) entirely composed of army officers. Almost all of them were Tutsi. And the only political party allowed to operate in the country was also Tutsi: the Party of Unity and National Progress (UPRONA). The Hutu party, the Democratic Front of Burundi (FRODEBU), was banned. Captain Micombero was also promoted to colonel and given a seven-year term as president.
The most serious problem Micombero faced when he became president was the presence of tens of thousands of Tutsi refugees, and their king, Mwami Kigeri V, from Rwanda. They fled their homeland between 1959 and 1961 after a bloody conflict – starting with the Hutu mass uprising of November 1959 – in which the Hutu emerged victorious.
Many of the Rwandan Tutsis who had fled to Burundi were also armed. The presence of these Tutsis and their king, in a safe haven in Burundi, was viewed with apprehension by Hutu-dominated neighbouring Rwanda where they were determined to return and restore the Tutsi aristocracy.
Although before independence the Tutsi-dominated kingdoms of Ruanda and Urundi were administered jointly as Ruanda-Urundi by Belgium, they chose to separate after the Belgian colonial rulers relinquished control of their colonial territory.
Rwanda became a republic at independence, and Burundi remained a monarchy until 1966 when the Tutsi aristocracy was replaced by a republican form of government under Micombero.
When Burundi became a republic, her relations with Rwanda also improved. Both countries were now under the same political system. Both were republics. The monarchy in both countries was gone.
Micombero also tried to ease ethnic tensions in Burundi, but only half-heartedly. He imposed harsh rule on the country and silenced his critics within two years of seizing power. Most of those critics were Hutus who had been excluded from power. Therefore, instead of improving relations between the two ethnic groups, he alienated most Hutus. According to Africa Contemporary Record 1968 – 1969:
“Political expression in any way critical of the government had remained severely curbed in Burundi.
Six former ministers and parliamentarians were each sentenced to ten years imprisonment on December 26, 1968, for writing and distributing an open letter critical of the president.
Three others arrested in the case in May (1968) were imprisoned from three to seven years, and three were acquitted.
Among those sentenced to ten years' imprisonment was the former president of the Legislative Assemby, Mr. Thadde Siryuyumisi.”2
In 1969, President Micombero survived a coup attempt by some politicians and disgruntled elements in the army. Following the abortive coup, he consolidated his position by concentrating more power in his hands. And as head of the only legal political party in the country, the Unity and National Progress Party (UPRONA) which was Tutsi, he tolerated no opposition even from fellow Tutsis.
In 1970, Burundi adopted a new constitution. But it did little to liberalise his rule.
One of Africa's bloodiest conflicts erupted in April 1972 when Ntare V returned to Burundi from exile. President Micombero assured him in writing that nothing would happen to him if he returned home.
The deposed king returned to Burundi with dreadful results. An attempt by his supporters to reinstate him failed, and the rebellion was brutally suppressed by government troops. Ntare was “judged and immediately executed.”3
Mwami Ntare's return coincided with the invasion of Burundi by Hutu exiles mostly based in Rwanda. The invasion was triggered by the brutal purge of Hutus from the military and the government, and by the vicious repression of Hutu peasants across the country by Tutsi soldiers.
There was no direct evidence, circumstantial or otherwise, showing that the Hutu living in Burundi joined the invasion. But given the intense hostility between the two ethnic groups, some probably did, and many undoubtedly supported the idea of dislodging the Tutsi from power by force. However, the invasion failed.
About 10,000 Tutsis were killed in the fighting. But it was the Hutu who suffered the most. The Tutsi-dominated government and army launched a brutal campaign of retaliation and terror against them which amounted to genocide. “The victorious Tutsis proceeded to massacre some 100,000 persons in six weeks, with possibly more slain by summer.”4
More than 100,000 Hutus fled to Tanzania and Zaire (now Congo) in what had become an established pattern of forced migration in this highly unstable Great Lakes region which has undergone momentous upheavals through the years, with the two countries (Tanzania and Congo) acting as shock absorbers.
However, the refugees, from both Rwanda and Burundi, have never been fully welcome in Congo – in 1981, Zaire under Mobutu stripped the Banyamulenge Tutsis of their citizenship – because of ethnic hostilities and conflicts over land in the eastern part of the country. But they have found better reception in Tanzania. As Professor Harvey Glickman stated in “Tanzania: From Disillusionment to Guarded Optimism”:
“Tanzania (has a track record of)...generous treatment of refugees and mediation of disputes that cause refugee flows....
After Zaire, Tanzania hosts the second-largest number of refugees in Africa. More than 700,000 – including a half million from Rwanda and about 200,000 from Burundi – are in camps in the northern and western parts of the country.
Burundians now comprise two generations of refugees. Thousands of Burundians crossed into Tanzania in 1963, fleeing the violence accompanying Burundi's first (abortive) coup. These earliest refugees were resettled and some achieved citizenship.
In 1980 tens of thousands of Rwandan refugees were offered citizenship.
A second wave of refugees from Rwanda entered in 1983, after expulsion from Uganda. Just under 100,000 Burundians have fled the latest surge of violence since 1993 (and sought refuge in Tanzania).”5
The ethnic violence will probably continue for years, as it has during the past several decades.
After the abortive April 1972 Hutu invasion of Burundi, the Hutu revolted again in May 1973 against the Tutsi. Another massacre of genocidal proportions followed. Tens of thousands of Hutus and thousands of Tutsis were killed. More refugees, mostly Hutu, fled to Tanzania and Zaire.
In 1976, the Minority Rights Group (MRG), a British organisation, accused Micombero's government of having systematically killed all Hutus who had more than secondary school education.6
On 1 November 1976, Lieutenant-Colonel Jean-Baptiste Bagaza overthrew Micombero in a military coup and became president. He was a distant cousin of Micombero. Both were members of the same clan.
A Tutsi himself and Belgian-educated political scientist, Bagaza promised to end civil strife, but with little prospect of success in such a deeply divided country.
In 1979, he was elected to lead the country's ruling party, UPRONA, in a rigged contest and which was almost exclusively Tutsi. The Hutu majority remained virtually disenfranchised.
In 1980, Bagaza established a “civilian government,” making the Central Committee of Burundi's sole political party (UPRONA) the main legislative body to approve his decrees, and dissolved his military junta – the Supreme Revolutionary Council – composed of 30 army officers.
Meanwhile, as ethnic violence continued, former Burundian president, Michel Micombero, died of a heart attack in exile in Somalia on 16 July 1983. He was 43. According to Africa Report:
“Burundi's former president, Michel Micombero, died of a heart attack on July 16 in Mogadishu, Somalia.
He came to power in 1966 after deposing King Ntare, and he ruled until his ouster in 1976 by Lieutenant-Colonel Jean Baptiste Bagaza, who sent Micombero into exile in Somalia.
Micombero began his career in the military, and then served as minister of defense, secretary of state, and prime minister before installing himself as president.
Once in office, Micombero attempted to reconcile the rift between the Hutu majority and the politically dominant Tutsi minority. He began by freeing Hutu political prisoners, but his rule quickly turned repressive. Following a 1972 attempted coup, his forces turned on the Hutu, killing 100,000 people.
In Somalia, President Mohammed Siad Barre declared a three-day period of mourning for Micombero.”7
The Hutu-Tutsi conflict also involved the Roman Catholic church which incurred the wrath of the Tutsi-dominated government.
The Catholic clergy was suspected of sympathising with the Hutu majority, a charge which led to the expulsion of many foreign priests and other missionaries in 1985.
The vast majority of the people – Hutu and Tutsi – in both Rwanda and Burundi are Catholic, and the church has great influence in their lives, although it has not been able to resolve the ethnic conflict between the two groups. Ironically, Rwanda and Burundi are the two most Christian countries in Africa.
In May 1987, Major Pierre Buyoya overthrew Bagaza, his cousin. Buyoya was also Micombero's nephew.
The new military ruler introduced reforms intended to reduce ethnic tensions but whose implementation depended on the willingness of the Tutsi to do so.
Buyoya, who went on to rule Burundi for 13 years at different times (1987 – 1993 and 1996 – 2003), became the longest-ruling president in the country's history.
After he overthrew Bagaza, he formed a cabinet to reflect ethnic composition of the country. The majority of the cabinet members he appointed were Hutu. He also chose a Hutu prime minister and encouraged the Hutu to join the Tutsi-dominated army.
But these measures did little to weaken let alone end the Tutsi's hegemonic control of the country. Real power remained in the hands of the military junta which was dominated by Tutsis. The Hutu majority continued to suffer discrimination. They had only limited educational and economic opportunities and remained virtually disenfranchised in a country where they vastly outnumbered the Tutsi 6 to 1.
Burundi again descended into chaos in August 1988 when large-scale fighting between the Hutu and the Tutsi erupted, following an abortive coup attempt by the Hutu whose condition had hardly improved in spite of the reform measures introduced by Buyoya to liberalise the political process and achieve ethnic reconciliation:
“The Tutsi-run military government under Pierre Buyoya massacred an estimated 20,000 Hutus. U.N. Officials at refugee camps near the border with Rwanda told of soldiers chasing, machine-gunning, and bayoneting fleeing Hutus.”8
Tens of thousands of Hutus fled to Tanzania. But most of them returned to Burundi by mid-1989. However, that was only temporarily, as a new wave of violence engulfed Burundi and the entire Great Lakes region during the 1990s.
On 2 June 1993, Melchior Ndadaye, a Hutu candidate of the Burundi Democratic Front (FRODEBU), won the presidency in the first democratic elections since independence in 1962. He defeated the incumbent military ruler, Pierre Buyoya, who was the candidate of the predominantly Tutsi party, UPRONA.
Ndadaye survived a coup attempt on July 3rd and was sworn in as president on July 10th.
Buyoya had allowed the elections to take place in fulfillment of his pledge to introduce democracy and allow the Hutu to participate fully in the political process. He also believed he was going to win the election because of his liberalisation programme – democratic reforms which had never been introduced before – which may have won him considerable support, so he believed, among the Hutu.
His commitment to egalitarianism, although lukewarm, earned him enemies among his fellow Tutsis, especially hardliners including his cousin Jean-Baptiste Bagaza whom he overthrew in 1987. They saw him as a traitor.
Ndadaye tried to improve relations between the Hutu and the Tutsi and appointed a female Tutsi, Sylvie Kinigi, as prime minister. He also appointed many Tutsis as members of his cabinet. And entire third of the cabinet members were Tutsi. He also granted amnesty to Jean-Baptiste Bagaza who was living in exile and freed political prisoners.
The president also tried to redress the ethnic imbalance across the spectrum and improve living conditions of the Hutu majority who had been deprived of opportunities by the dominant Tutsis through the years. He also introduced reforms in the army and the police to reduce control by the Tutsi. Many Hutus also got government posts originally held by the Tutsi after the landslide victory in the June 1993 election by the predominantly Hutu party, FRODEBU, further infuriating Tutsis.
The freedom of speech Ndadaye allowed also made things worse. Newspapers and the radio provided extensive coverage of the reforms introduced by Ndadaye but in a way that inflamed passions, especially among the Tutsi, who now felt they had been marginalised by the Hutu rulers, although the government was not dominated by Hutus. It was fairly representative of all the people of Burundi and took into account concerns of the Tutsi in a country that was now under a Hutu president, a predominantly Hutu cabinet and parliament for the first time in the nation's history because of truly democratic elections Tutsis have always feared so much since they are vastly outnumbered by Hutus.
The changes Buyoya introduced and tried to implement angered many Tutsis who felt that their privileged position was being threatened by the new policies.
He did not last long in office. He was assassinated within four months, bayoneted to death by Tutsi soldiers on 21 October 1993 in a coup attempt engineered by Tutsi hardliners who wanted to restore Tutsi leadership of the country.
President Ndadaye's assassination infuriated the Hutu. But it also emboldened the Tutsi who saw their loss of power only as temporary.
The result was genocide in which more than 100,000 people, mostly Hutu, were massacred within one year after the assassination, and more than 500,000 fled to Tanzania, Rwanda, and Zaire.
Ndadaye's assassination was a turning point in the nation's history. It marked the beginning of the bloodiest and longest civil war in the history of Burundi. It lasted from 1993 until 2005. More than 300,000 people, mostly Hutu, died in the conflict. Some estimates put the death toll at 500,000.
The war formally ended when Pierre Nkurunziza, a Hutu and former rebel leader who fought the Tutsi, was sworn in as president in August 2005.
A few months after the civil war started in 1993, Cyprien Ntaryamira, another Hutu who had served as the minister of agriculture in the government of Ndadaye, was chosen by the parliament in January 1994 to be the president of Burundi. He was appointed to serve the remainder of Ndadaye's term which was almost the entire term since Ndadaye had been in office for only three months before he was assassinated.
Ntaryamira's appointment as president infuriated the Tutsi. And like his predecessor and fellow Hutu Melchior Ndadaye, he did not last long in office.
He died on 6 April 1994 together with the president of Rwanda, Juvénal Habyarimana, also a Hutu, after their plane was hit by a rocket over Kigali, Rwanda's capital, when they returned from Tanzania where they had participated in peace talks aimed at resolving the ethnic conflict between the Hutu and the Tutsi in both countries:
“The rockets were fired form the immediate vicinity of the Kigali airport, an area controlled by the Rwandan army.”9
The shooting down of the plane was the beginning of a downward spiral for Rwanda. It was an incident which precipitated an orgy of killings in the Rwandan capital, Kigali, targeting Tutsis and Hutu moderates.
The killings spread rapidly, engulfing the whole country in what came to be one of the most horrific events in the history of mankind towards the end of the twentieth-century history.
The peace talks between the Hutu and the Tutsi which were held in the town of Arusha in northern Tanzania led to an agreement on the establishment of a coalition government in Rwanda. But it was bitterly opposed by Hutu extremists who did not want to share power with the Tutsi. And they are the ones who were suspected of having fired the rocket which hit the plane carrying the two Hutu presidents.
The Hutu blamed the Tutsi for shooting down the plane and, in retaliation for “killing” the two Hutu presidents, started massacring Tutsis.
The downing of the plane may have triggered the massacres, eventually leading to genocide, but the reasons for the genocide can not be explained in such simplistic terms.
And there would have been another major casualty on that plane, with wider implications for the entire region, had fate not intervened.
President Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire who also attended the peace talks in Tanzania was supposed to have caught the same plane on his way back to Zaire but changed his mind at the last minute and delayed his departure, thus saving his life.
Although Hutu extremists were the prime suspects in the shooting of the plane, Tutsi hardliners were also suspected of having brought the plane down. Like their Hutu counterparts, they also had vehemently denounced the power-sharing agreement as a threat to their security and the very survival of their ethnic group.
It was never firmly established who fired the rocket which brought the plane down. Was it Hutu extremists? Or was it Tutsi hardliners?
What is clear is that circumstantial evidence indicated that it was probably Hutu soldiers who fired the rocket because its trajectory showed it was fired from an area controlled by the Hutu-dominated Rwandan army.
There were Hutu soldiers who were opposed to the concessions made by President Habyarimana at the peace talks in Tanzania and wanted him removed from office, by any means, in order to block implementation of the power-sharing agreement.
But others speculated that the people who killed President Habyarimana and his Burundian counterpart, Cyprien Ntaryamira, belonged to a different opposition group impatient with the delays in forming a coalition government of Hutus and Tutsis and blamed Habyarimana for that.
Whatever the case, the assassination of the two Hutu leaders provided Hutu extremists with an “excuse” to start killing Tutsis – whom they blamed for the murders – and Hutu moderates who wanted to share power with the Tutsi.
Within an hour of the announcement of the deaths of the two leaders, the killings began, raising suspicion that the massacres had been preplanned.
The tragic incident, shooting down of the plane, not only sparked massive carnage in Rwanda but led to an escalation of violence in Burundi where the Hutu were still enraged over the assassination of the country's first Hutu president, Ndadaye, who was brutally murdered by the Tutsi only a few months before. The assassination of another Hutu president of Burundi, Cyprien Ntaryamira – to the Hutu, by who else? – only stoked the flames.
Before the civil war broke out in Rwanda in April 1994 following the assassination of President Habyarimana, Burundi was in a much worse situation than Rwanda before October 1993 when its first Hutu president, Ndadaye, was assassinated. The country was plunged into chaos following the assassination, and everything was being done by the Tutsi-dominated government to placate and contain the Hutu, employing a combination of diplomacy and brutal suppression.
In September 1994, a power-sharing agreement was reached between the Tutsi-dominated party, the Union for National Progress (UPRONA) which constituted the official opposition, and the predominantly Hutu Democratic Front of Burundi (FRODEBU) which formed the democratically elected government left behind by the two assassinated Hutu presidents, Ndadaye and Ntaryamira.
But the coalition agreement was undermined by Tutsi extremists who denounced the moderate Tutsi prime minister, Anatole Kanyenkiko, as a sellout and finally forced him to leave the predominantly Hutu government.
The situation was further complicated by the fact that former FRODEBU interior minister, Leonard Nyangoma – frustrated by the inability of the Hutu-majority government to govern effectively because of constant undermining by the traditionally powerful Tutsi military and elite – had gone into exile and formed an opposition group.
His group was known as the National Council for the Defence of Democracy (CNDD). It had an armed wing, the Democratic Defence Front (FDD), which started waging guerrilla warfare in northern Burundi from its operational bases in South Kivu Province in eastern Zaire.
The fighting between Nyangoma's Hutu guerrillas and Burundi's Tutsi-dominated army escalated towards the end of 1995 and in early 1996, with the death toll among civilians, mostly Hutu, climbing rapidly. Most of them were killed by Tutsi soldiers in indiscriminate acts of “retaliation.”
With the 1994 Rwandan massacre of almost one million Tutsis still fresh in their memories and indelibly etched in their collective psyche, the Tutsi in Burundi feared they would be victims of the same kind of holocaust at the hands of their “historical enemies,” the Hutu.
Caught between escalating guerrilla warfare by the FDD Hutu rebels and brutal repression by the Tutsi-dominated army, President Sylvestre Ntibantunganya – another Hutu and FRODEBU's constitutionally eligible successor to his assassinated predecessor, Ntaryamira – was reduced to being no more than a ceremonial head of state, without functional utility, at the mercy of the Tutsi.
It was in the midst of all this that former President Pierre Buyoya, a Tutsi moderate, was returned to power following a Tutsi-led military coup on 25 July 1996 which ousted Ntibantunganya.
But Buyoya himself, although a Tutsi and a soldier and therefore a member of both the dominant ethnic group and the country's most powerful institution (the army), found himself in an untenable position. A moderate who allowed Burundi's first democratic elections to take place in June-July 1993 in which he lost to a Hutu (Ndadaye), he had many enemies among fellow Tutsis who saw him as a traitor for allowing such transfer of power to the Hutu majority. And when he was returned to power in the 1996 military coup, he could not stop the atrocities being committed by the Tutsi army against innocent Hutu civilians.
Hutu support for the rebels also kept on increasing, fuelled by the atrocities being perpetrated against them by Tutsi soldiers. And when Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda imposed economic sanctions on Burundi to punish Buyoya and his Tutsi colleagues for overthrowing the constitutionally chosen Hutu president, Ntibantunganya, who headed a democratically elected although powerless government of the FRODEBU party, the Hutu guerrillas of the Democratic Defence Front (DDF) capitalised on the economic embargo and intensified their military campaign against the Tutsi regime and Tutsi civilians.
The capital itself, Bujumbura, came under attack, raising fears of an imminent holocaust against the Tutsi reminiscent of the 1994 genocide in neighbouring Rwanda.
The economic sanctions imposed on Burundi were producing dividends, however limited, because of the impact they had on the army. But the embargo did not affect the FDD guerrillas who were operating out of eastern Zaire just across the border from Burundi. Even destruction of their bases in South Kivu Province by the Banyamulenge (with the help of Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi) towards the end of 1996 was not enough to neutralise them. Instead, they stepped up their offensive against Burundi's Tutsi regime.
Between July and October 1996, the guerrillas believed that their increased offensive was about to extract concessions from the military junta in Bujumbura whose intransigence led to escalation of the conflict. President Buyoya even started to talk about negotiating with the rebels; a very dangerous move which was strongly opposed by Tutsi hardliners including his cousin Jean-Baptiste Bagaza whom he overthrew in 1987. It could very easily have cost him his life. Yet the economic sanctions seemed to be working, pushing the Tutsi regime towards the conference table. However, towards the end of October, things took an unexpected turn.
After the Hutu rebels were routed from Uvira in South Kivu Province, Zaire, by the Banyamulenge Tutsis on 26 October 1996, their leader Leonard Nyangoma fled to Tanzania where he met with Julius Nyerere, the former Tanzanian president and the force behind the diplomatic initiative to impose an economic embargo on Burundi who had been pushing for a negotiated settlement of the conflict.
But when Buyoya was asked to go to Nyerere's home in the village of Butiama in northern Tanzania for a meeting, he reneged on his promise, saying he had changed his mind and would not participate in any negotiations aimed at resolving the conflict. Tutsi hardliners gave him very little room to manoeuvre even if he had wanted to negotiate with the Hutu.
A few weeks after he refused to meet with Nyerere, he arrested former President Bagaza, his cousin, together with several other Tutsi extremist leaders; a move which gave him more freedom to operate and make his own decisions. However, with the peace process derailed, Nyangoma and his guerrillas stepped up their offensive against Buyoya's government and the Tutsi-dominated army.
The army failed to contain let alone neutralise the guerrillas and started rounding up Hutu civilians in northern Burundi and put them in concentration camps to “isolate” the insurgents; a policy which could partly be attributed to the failure of economic sanctions which had never, from the beginning, been intended to force Buyoya out of power but restore constitutional rule.
Economic Embargo
On 30 September 1996, African regional leaders agreed at a meeting in Arusha, Tanzania, to impose full economic sanctions on Burundi in response to the July 25 Tutsi-led military coup and appealed to the international community for support in enforcing the embargo.
They also demanded immediate talks between all parties within and outside Burundi. But they took no action on a report presented by military planners for armed intervention in the strife-torn country.
The secretary-general of the Organisation of of African Unity (OAU), Dr. Salim Ahmed Salim of Tanzania, confirmed the decision to impose economic sanctions on Burundi after the leaders held a summit meeting to discuss the military coup.
After more than five hours of talks, the leaders said in a statement: “The summit has decided to impose economic sanctions on Burundi and appeals to the international community to support these measures.”10 And as President Benjamin Mkapa of Tanzania put it: “This is a total economic blockade on Burundi. It was a unanimous decision. There was not a single dissenting voice.”11
The leaders of Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Zaire, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Zambia, Cameroon, and OAU representatives led by the organisation's secretary-general, Salim Ahmed Salim, attended the summit. And the measures they agreed upon to punish Burundi's military regime were later formally ratified by the OAU and by the United Nations. Tanzania's President Mkapa who hosted the summit said a technical committee would spell out details when sanctions would start and how long they would last.
Burundi is one of the African countries which is highly vulnerable to such punitive sanctions. A small, desperately poor and landlocked nation, its economy was, even before the sanctions were imposed, already hard-hit by civil war and by the suspension of international aid because of its poor human rights record and the atrocities committed by the Tutsi army against the Hutu, especially since the brutal assassination of President Melchior Ndadaye. Because of its landlocked position, its neighbours could exercise enormous leverage on its government and help bring about fundamental change in the country by simply choking it off. It also relies almost entirely on Tanzania and Rwanda to export its coffee and tea, its main exports, and to import all its fuel and other goods.
But it is highly unlikely that Rwanda, a Tutsi-dominated state, would enforce full economic sanctions against fellow Tutsis in Burundi. And there is humanitarian concern involved in the implementation of punitive measures which hardly affect the economic wellbeing of those in power including their relatives and friends. For example, in 1996 alone, Burundi was in such a bad economic situation because of the civil war that the UN World Food Programme sent it 43,000 tons of food worth $28.5 million (USD) to alleviate the plight.
But sanctions can also be used to weaken and isolate an oppressive regime; encourage its opponents to escalate their campaign against it; turn its supporters against it because of the economic hardship and suffering caused by the sanctions; and force it to make meaningful concessions to its opponents and reach a negotiated settlement. It is in this context that the economic embargo imposed on Burundi must be viewed as an effective bargaining tool in conflict resolution in that embattled country.
The coup which prompted Burundi's neighbours to impose an economic embargo was a direct result of the Tutsi dissatisfaction with the coalition government under Hutu President Ntibantunganya; a dissatisfaction deeply rooted in the animosity and distrust between the two ethnic groups. This was clearly demonstrated by the fact that even power-sharing between them had failed to reduce – let alone end – the ethnic violence plaguing the country.
Many parts of Burundi were so wracked by violence that they were totally out of government control and had become virtually inaccessible. Only the most reckless would even think of going into those areas.
Then the power-sharing agreement, negotiated after the abortive Tutsi-led coup of October 1993 in which Hutu President Melchior Ndadaye was assassinated, collapsed because the Tutsi demanded more power.
On 24 July 1996, the Tutsi political party, UPRONA, withdrew from the coalition with FRODEBU, the Hutu party. The end of the coalition marked the end of the government.
The Tutsi prime minister, Antoine Nduwayo, was rendered powerless by fellow Tutsis; so was the Hutu president, Sylvestre Ntibantunganya, who fled to the American embassy in Bujumbura where he was given sanctuary.
The situation degenerated into chaos as marauding bands of club-wielding young Tutsis took over large sections of the capital Bujumbura with the tacit support of the Tutsi-dominated army which did nothing to stop them.
Then on the following day, 25 July, the army announced that it had seized power and that Major Perre Buyoya, the former military ruler, would be the leader of the new military regime.
The ouster of the coalition government did not come as a surprise. There had been rumours circulating in the capital and elsewhere that Tutsi hardliners in the army were about to execute a coup. The city was gripped with fear, and many people speculated that another genocide was imminent. According to a report from Bujumbura by The Economist, 27 July 1996:
“Seasoned visitors to Burundi's capital – which, cleansed of Hutus, now belongs to the 14 per cent Burundians who are Tutsi – said they had never seen the city so fearful. Not, however, of a coup, let alone a fall of government. Burundians' overriding fear has been that extremists, on either side of the ethnic divide, could send the violence that has killed more than 150,000 people in the past three years spiralling into genocide.
Such fears seemed confirmed last weekend when 350 displaced Tutsis, mostly women and children, living in a settlement at Bugendena in central Burundi, were horribly slaughtered.
Reports by survivors suggest that their attack was masterminded by the rebel Hutu army led by Leonard Nyangoma from just across the border in Zaire, possibly in collusion with elements from the old Rwandan army, also in exile.
On July 23rd, when President Ntibantunganya tried to visit the scene of the massacre, he was stoned by Tutsi protesters and forced to beat a retreat – all the way to the American embassy.”12
In fact, he was almost lynched and miraculously escaped from the mob.
The Hutu rebel attacks were met with a swift response from the Tutsi army which used them to justify its indiscriminate campaign of terror against Hutu civilians who were targeted mainly because of their ethnicity.
The army also targeted Rwandan Hutu refugees who settled in northern Burundi after they fled their country for fear of reprisals by the victorious predominantly Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) for the 1994 genocide. And the fact that the refugee camps had some of the perpetrators of the genocide hiding among innocent civilian refugees made the campaign by Tutsi soldiers more credible when they targeted those camps.
However, the presence of Hutu extremists in the camps was also used by the Tutsi government to justify its mass expulsion of Rwandan Hutus from northern Burundi even when there was no need to do so:
“The forcible repatriation of several thousand Rwandan refugees from northern Burundi...began on July 19 (1996) just before the massacre (of 350 displaced Tutsis in a settlement at Bugendena in central Burundi towards the end of July).
Of the estimated 85,000 Rwandans (mostly Hutu) in Burundi, more than 13,000 have so far been crammed into lorries and dumped across the border.”13
Many of them arrived in Rwanda only to find their homes, farms and property had been taken by Tutsi exiles who were among the one million Tutsis who returned to Rwanda after the genocidal Hutu regime collapsed in July 1994.
But in spite of what happened next door in Rwanda in 1994, a holocaust unprecedented in modern times in terms of magnitude and intensity in telescoped time (one million people slaughtered in 100 days at a rate five times faster than Hitler killed the Jews), the international community did nothing to avert a probable catastrophe in Burundi where low-intensity warfare was claiming countless lives, with a potential for another genocide may be even on a scale equal to or bigger than Rwanda's.
On 22 July 1996, the UN secretary-general, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, asked the Security Council to support a military intervention in Burundi under UN auspices. But his appeal fell on deaf ears.
In Africa itself, a regional East African intervention force – of Tanzanians, Ugandans, and Ethiopians – was being mobilised to cope with the situation. However, nothing went beyond the preparatory stage.
The crisis intervention force could not intervene without Burundi's approval. The Tutsi army itself, the most powerful institution in the country, was in no mood for that. And that was before the coup. Tutsi leaders became even more intransigent after that. Because of its enormous power, the army could veto any decision by the civilian government headed by the Hutu president, Ntibantunganya, and his Tutsi prime minister, Antoine Nduwayo.
The deteriorating security situation in the country had, in June 1996, prompted the civilian government to request military intervention from its East African neighbours before everything spun out of control. But the Tutsi vetoed it, with threats:
“Last month (in June 1996), Mr. Nduwayo was persuaded to join Mr. Ntibantunganya in 'inviting' such a force into Burundi to provide 'security assistance.'
'Traitor,' shouted his fellow-Tutsis. Under this attack, Mr. Nduwayo vacillated, eventually deciding that he resolutely opposed outside intervention, which, he said, would not only fail to prevent massacres but would make the situation worse.”14
In opposing intervention, Nduwayo had partially rehabilitated himself with his fellow Tutsis many of whom agreed with him when he said the presence of foreign troops would only make things worse.
One main reason for this opposition is that throughout the history of the Hutu-Tutsi ethnic conflict in both Rwanda and Burundi, the Tutsi have repeatedly complained that neighbouring countries – Tanzania, Congo, Kenya, and Uganda (before Yoweri Museveni, of Tutsi ancestry himself, according to some reports, became Ugandan president) – favour the Hutu; a charge without foundation which former Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere dismissed as “nonsense,” adding, “we have heard it before,” when he was the chief mediator in Burundi's conflict and the main force behind the economic embargo imposed on the Tutsi regime in Bujumbura.
One of the most prominent and outspoken Tutsi leaders who blamed Nyerere for favouring the Hutu was Charles Mukasi. There were also reports that Tutsi hardliners planned to assassinate Nyerere. A planned visit to Bujumbura by Nyerere during the mediation of the conflict was also cancelled for security reasons cited by the Tanzanian intelligence service.
The underlying argument by the Tutsi – who are Nilotic in origin but who are now also Bantu after centuries of intermarriage with the Hutu majority – is that the people of neighbouring countries take sides with the Hutu because the vast majority of them are Bantu (which is a linguistic designation, not a racial category, since there is no Bantu race) like the Hutu; totally ignoring the asymmetrical relationship between the two ethnic groups in both countries, with the Tutsi minority as the dominant group denying the Hutu majority equal rights and opportunity.
It is an observation that has been made even by foreign missionaries who, because of their sympathy towards the oppressed Hutu majority, were expelled from Burundi in 1985 by the Tutsi military regime led by Jean-Baptiste Bagaza. Many of them had worked there for years.
It was in an attempt to rectify this situation – of Hutu oppression by the Tutsi – that Burundi's neighbours imposed economic sanctions on the Tutsi-dominated state which deliberately functioned as an ethnocracy, for the Tutsi, more than anything else.
Some of the people who were vehemently opposed to the East African intervention force included many Tutsi hardliners in Burundi's army, several of whom were involved in the1993 abortive coup in which President Ndadaye was assassinated. They had an unfinished agenda which would be difficult to pursue in the presence of foreign troops.
Hutu rebels were also opposed to intervention. While their Tutsi enemies vetoed foreign intervention in order to maintain the status quo and preserve Tutsi supremacy, the Hutu wanted the East African force kept out of Burundi so that they could pursue, without hindrance, their goal to end Tutsi hegemonic control of the country.
The crisis intervention force was supposed to protect government leaders including cabinet members and senior civil servants as well as vital institutions and installations such as banks, the post office, the airport and power plants. But security for the leaders and different establishments in the country would not have stopped the ethnic violence between the Tutsi army and the Hutu rebels. And it would not have saved the lives of innocent civilians, both Hutu and Tutsi, who were being slaughtered at will by the combatants, targeting them purely on ethnic basis.
The regional security force never, of course, intervened in Burundi. It was never invited by President Sylvestre Ntibantunganya and Prime Minister Antoine Nduwayo who had Tutsi hardliners breathing down their necks. And after their government was overthrown, that option was completely ruled out. It was now time to see whether or not economic sanctions would work, since it was obvious that the new Tutsi military regime had no intention of inviting the East African intervention force, let alone giving up power.
The sanctions began to have an impact soon after they were imposed. Within only a few days, many Burundians especially in the capital became fully aware of the stranglehold neighbouring countries, mainly Tanzania, had on their fragile economy.
Rwandan Tutsi rulers, out of solidarity with fellow Tutsis in Burundi, may have wanted to avoid enforcing the sanctions. But their ability to do so was severely limited because their country is landlocked and is itself dependent on Kenya for an outlet to the sea. Burundi, on the other hand, is heavily dependent on Tanzania for that. According to The Wall Street Journal, 5 August 1996:
“Gas stations shut down in Burundi's capital after Tanzania closed its border to impose an embargo to force out the new military-installed government. Meanwhile, a U.N. Report says Burundi's army massacred thousands of Hutus in April and May.”15
The massacres had been going on – on a large scale – since October 1993 when President Ndadaye was bayoneted to death by Tutsi soldiers, plunging the country into chaos. And although the economic embargo did not stop the carnage, it caused a lot of hardship for the army. Fuel shortage restricted the army's mobility, and lack of goods and equipment in general, including spare parts, caused other logistical problems for the military because of the economic sanctions being enforced by Tanzania.
Of all the East African countries, Tanzania was in the best position to enforce the embargo even without the help of other countries because more than 70 per cent of Burundi's imports and exports got through her territory.
The Tanzanian government tightened the noose around Burundi to try to force the Tutsi military junta to relinquish power by blocking oil and tanker trucks and lorries and other vehicles at the border. As a senior Tanzanian official said on 5 August 1996: “The border is closed. Nothing is going in and nothing is going out.”16
But, in spite of the sanctions, the Tutsi were determined to hang on to power at any cost because of what they believe, rightly or wrongly, to be a threat to their very existence and survival as a people.
Vastly outnumbered by the Hutu, they fear they will perish unless they are the sole rulers of both Rwanda and Burundi; an uncompromising stand – despite professions to the contrary by the Tutsi – which has made power sharing impossible. Any concessions they have made to the Hutu have been minimal and have not loosened their grip on power, thus perpetuating the ethnic conflict.
Therefore any meaningful change has to be pursued through a combination of punitive measures and diplomacy with the help of the neighbouring countries and the rest of the international community as happened in the case of apartheid South Africa. And that is not a far-fetched analogy.
Tutsi domination and oppression of the Hutu is another form of apartheid; it is black apartheid. But security concerns of the Tutsi as a vulnerable minority if they were to lose power or play a subordinate role in both Rwanda and Burundi where they are vastly outnumbered by the Hutu must also be taken into account.
Tanzania was the first country to enforce the embargo against Burundi, not only to oust the Tutsi military regime but also to help the Hutu actively participate in the political process in a meaningful way. Although the African leaders who imposed the sanctions did not explicitly state that their intention was to remove the Tutsi minority regime from power and replace it with a democratic government, that is exactly what they intended to do when they approved the embargo.
Even Rwanda, a Tutsi state, supported the sanctions, although only symbolically by signing the embargo agreement. In what amounted to no more than a symbolic gesture, Rwanda's foreign affairs minister announced on 5 August 1996 that his country would soon join the sanctions effort. Yet no one took him seriously.
Ethnic solidarity among the Tutsi is paramount and transcends regional interests. The powerful Tutsi minority in Rwanda sympathise with their kinsmen in Burundi and will not do anything to make them suffer regardless of what other regional leaders say.
The immediate effect of the sanctions was petroleum shortage. But the embargo had an impact in other areas as well. Commodities traders said the embargo had doubled the price of salt and other items and pushed up the price of other goods, some of which were no longer available on the market.
Around the same time, South Africa's Deputy President Thabo Mbeki arrived in Tanzania for talks with President Benjamin Mkapa on the Burundi crisis. South African President Nelson Mandela, who had been under increasing pressure to become directly involved in action against Burundi, said his country would act as a part of regional and continental efforts to bring about fundamental change in the landlocked East African country.
On 4 August 1996, Burundi's military ruler Major Pierre Buyoya denied again that he had executed a coup. He went on to say that his action was “an operation to save a people in distress. After all, it is better to face sanctions than to be killed. Countries which have not yet understood the change, particularly Tanzania, will understand.”17
Buyoya's sentiments on the economic embargo were echoed by the United Nations. On 7 August, the UN made a passionate appeal to Tanzania and Kenya for permission to send food aid to more than 700,000 war refugees in Burundi.
The two countries imposed a tight air, road and water embargo on the landlocked nation which had a major impact because of their access to the sea. Both are bordered by the Indian Ocean. And a sustained embargo – especially by these two countries – could, at the very least, have brought down the Tutsi military junta and paved the way for a return to constitutional order.
As the embargo continued, blockading the coffee- and tea-producing nation to try to force the military regime to restore civilian rule, Major Buyoya said in an interview published on August 7th that he was willing to negotiate with the Hutu if they laid down their weapons. He told the French daily Le Figaro: “There will be a national debate. We'll find a solution.”
He also pledged to put an end to “abuses and mistakes” after UN observers reported that thousands of Hutu civilians had been killed in recent months: “In a civil war, abuses and mistakes are possible,” he said. “We will do all we can to put an end to this. We will use discipline to fight against it.”18
Buyoya also pledged “all guarantees” for the security of former President Ntibantunganya whom he overthrew and who took refuge in the American embassy in Bujumbura. He said about the ousted president: “I have also suggested he participate in the institutions working for the transition.”19
UN officials said unless Tanzania and Kenya allowed humanitarian aid to pass to Burundi, the plight of those in need would dramatically deteriorate. In a letter to President Benjamin Mkapa of Tanzania and President Daniel arap Moi of Kenya, the United Nations promised to “put into place a framework that will ensure food reaches only those it is intended for.”20
Uganda joined the blockade on August 7th, and the state-owned Air Burundi had only one foreign destination, Kigali, the capital of neighbouring Rwanda, another Tutsi-dominated state, which said it would not enforce the sanctions.
Rwanda's vice president and defence minister, General Paul Kagame, the country's most powerful man and de facto ruler, told BBC in an interview: “We are going to work with them and help them find a solution.”21.
He was critical of the seven-nation African summit which imposed the economic embargo, saying a mechanism should have been put in place so that the imposition of the sanctions was not done on a country-by-country basis.
But the main and probably only reason why Kagame refused to enforce the embargo was his government's sympathy for fellow Tutsis in Burundi; the kind of ethnic solidarity and ethnocentrism that has helped ignite and fuel tribal warfare in this highly combustible region through the years.
Had he cared about justice, he would have frankly acknowledged Tutsi oppression of the Hutu as the main problem in both Rwanda and Burundi, at the very least as one of the major problems, just as was the case in Rwanda where the Hutu ruled from 1962 to 1994 and discriminated against the Tutsi under a brutal Hutu ethnocracy which also instigated the 1994 holocaust in which almost one million Tutsis perished.
As Buyoya vacillated, without fully committing himself to negotiations with the Hutu for ethnic and pragmatic considerations (Tutsi hardliners could kill him if he made major or too many concessions to the Hutu, and his people, the Tutsi, would be out of power if he re-introduced democracy as he did in 1993), the East African leaders calibrated a graduated response to his initiatives – or lack thereof – to induce him to make fundamental changes short of calling for his ouster.
Not asking him to step down was itself a diplomatic tactic. It was intended to encourage him to cooperate and work with Tutsi moderates to keep Tutsi hardliners at bay; most of the hardliners would like to overthrow him and derail the peace process. However, regional leaders were emphatic in their demand. According to The Economist, 3 August 1996:
“They all called for an immediate return to constitutional order in Burundi, with the restoration of parliament and the unbanning of (political) parties.
They stopped short of demanding the reinstatement of ex-President Sylvestre Ntibantunganya...And they also postponed their call for foreign intervention, giving Mr. Buyoya until mid-August to implement the reforms.”22
Although the regional leaders postponed their call for a crisis intervention force to intervene in Burundi, they still appealed to the international community to support them in enforcing the economic embargo. Buyoya reciprocated by appointing a Hutu prime minister, not only as a gesture of goodwill to the East African leaders who imposed the sanctions, but also as an effort to ease ethnic tensions and initiate meaningful dialogue with the Hutu.
It is a fact of life in relations among nations that countries have temporary friends but permanent interests. That explains why Rwanda and Uganda, both friends of Burundi, joined the call to isolate the Tutsi regime in Bujumbura, although Rwanda's protest was only symbolic.
But it is clear why the other neighbouring countries imposed the economic embargo on Burundi, besides their desire to see a restoration of constitutional order in that embattled nation.
The holocaust in Rwanda which sent waves of refugees pouring across their borders was still fresh in their minds. They could contemplate a scenario similar to that, unfolding in Burundi, if they did not arrest the situation. Otherwise they would have to prepare for the worst: be inundated with an influx of refugees, should Burundi collapse and descend into anarchy.
Therefore it was also purely a matter of national interest why Tanzania and other countries wanted to restore civilian rule in Burundi before millions of refugees started flooding them.
But prospects for a negotiated settlement of the ethnic conflict remained bleak, even as the embargo was being applied to achieve this goal.
The gulf between the two sides had widened even further when the Tutsi army cleansed Bujumbura virtually of all Hutus in 1995. The capital was now inhabited almost exclusively by the Tutsi; hardly a sign of good intentions towards the Hutu majority who have always been excluded from power and denied equal opportunity in all areas.
Even the appointment of Pascal Firmin Ndimira, a Hutu – who had been agriculture minister in 1994, and vice-chancellor of Bujumbura University – as prime minister, did nothing to bring the two sides any closer. “Mr. Buyoya has said he will talk to Leonard Nyangoma's Hutu rebels who operate from Zaire, controlling large tracts of land in northern Burundi, but only if they first lay down their arms. For his part, Mr. Nyangoma has vowed to go on mobilising the Hutu people until Mr. Buyoya and his Tutsi entourage capitulate.”23
The Hutu majority had few illusions about Buyoya, despite his professions of good intentions. He was strongly suspected of having instigated the 1993 coup attempt which led to President Melchior Ndadaye's death and that of up to 100,000 other Burundians, mostly Hutu. The suspicion had credibility because it was backed up by UN investigators in Burundi.
And former President Jean-Baptiste Bagaza, who was overthrown by Buyoya in 1987, added fuel to the UN report when he implicated his rival (who was also his cousin) in the October 1993 abortive coup which took place only about four months after Buyoya lost the election to Ndadaye.
But many Tutsis, probably the majority, remained unperturbed by Buyoya's alleged complicity in Ndadaye's assassination, thus adding credibility to the charge that he was indeed involved in the murder in order to neutralise Hutu attempts to gain political power and perpetuate Tutsi hegemonic control of the country. And the Tutsi remained defiant even in the face of a sustained economic embargo. By mid-August 1996, most foreigners left Burundi as the sanctions continued to inflict pain on this landlocked, impoverished nation.24
Yet the choices have always been clear in this perennial conflict. The ethnic violence will continue for as long as the Hutu majority are excluded from power; and for as long as the Tutsi minority continue to fear that they will be exterminated.
Economic sanctions could not solve this dilemma and even failed to dislodge the Tutsi from power. But that is mainly because they were not fully enforced on sustained basis even if they had to go on for years to achieve the goal: to choke off the Tutsi-dominated state and enable the Hutu majority achieve equality with the Tutsi minority in a country that equally belongs to them. Therefore, in one way, Tutsi solidarity prevailed.25
And there is no doubt that ethnic nationalism will continue to play a central role in the volatile politics of the region for many years and can be contained only when the Tutsi-dominated states of Rwanda and Burundi truly become pluralistic societies with extensive devolution of power probably in a confederation of ethnostates.
The ethnic problems in these two countries require radical and innovative solutions, including separation, which may or may not be applicable or necessary in other African contexts.
Rationale for Intervention
African countries have been pathetically inept at settling their own conflicts through the years since independence in the sixties. They have, instead, relied on foreign intervention to save them – from themselves.
But the involvement of the East and Central African states in Burundi's crisis gave some hope that Africans have the capacity and the determination to solve their own problems without begging foreigners to do that for them, thus making a mockery of their independence.
The intervention by Burundi's neighbours, although limited, was endorsed by the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) – whose solid reputation in conflict resolution rests on its unenviable status as a prestigious debating club and, as Nyerere put it, “a trade union of tyrants” – in a move which was a dramatic departure from its avowed policy of non-intervention in the internal affairs of member states.
Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia, Zaire, and Zambia, minus Rwanda, severed commercial, air and road links to Burundi; not only to exert pressure on its fragile economy in order to force the Tutsi military regime to capitulate, but also to send a warning to potential coup makers and aspiring military dictators that coups will no longer be tolerated in the region and elsewhere on the continent; and that Africans don't need external intervention to settle their disputes.
Usually, Buyoya's seizure of power in July 1996 would have been virtually ignored or simply accepted by other African states as just another change of government and a ritual of African politics – which was none of their business as long as it took place outside their borders.
Since the founding of the OAU in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in May 1963, member states have upheld the principle of non-intervention with religious devotion, and colonial boundaries inherited at independence as sacrosanct. Thus, when Nigeria was plunged into a civil war (1967 – 1970) which could have led to the annihilation of an entire people – the Igbos of Eastern Nigeria who seceded from the federation and declared independence as the Republic of Biafra, had they not surrendered – most African countries, hence, officially, the OAU, refused to exert enough pressure and diplomatic influence on the Nigerian federal military government to induce it to stop the war it was waging against its own people and seek a negotiated settlement. This approach was flatly rejected at the OAU summit of the African heads of state in Algiers, Algeria, in September 1968. According to Africa Research Bulletin:
“At a plenary meeting, Tanzania, Zambia, Gabon and the Ivory Coast (the only African countries which recognised Biafra as an independent state) urged that the OAU should demand an immediate ceasefire in the Nigeria war followed by renewed negotiations between the two sides. This view was opposed by many speakers who supported the majority view that the war was an internal Nigerian affair and that Nigerian territorial integrity must be maintained at all costs.”26
If the massacre of the Igbo in Northern Nigeria and the potential for their extermination during the civil war was Nigeria's internal affair and was a price worth paying to save the Nigerian federation, then the persecution of black people in South Africa under apartheid was equally South Africa's internal affair. Yet other African countries went up in arms, as they vigorously protested and supported the freedom fighters against the apartheid regime.
President Julius Nyerere once addressed this subject with regard to non-intervention in the internal affairs of other countries. He said when an entire people are targeted for discrimination and even extermination, it ceases to be a an internal affair and becomes a matter of concern for all mankind.
That was clearly the case with the Igbos in Nigeria where tens of thousands were massacred and up to 2 million of them perished in the war; it was also the case with South Africa where the apartheid regime espoused the doctrine of white supremacy, oppressing blacks and other non-whites.
And that is clearly the case with Rwanda and Burundi where both the Hutu and the Tutsi have been victims of genocide, only in varying degrees, through the years, killing each other. The crisis calls for intervention whether the rulers, Hutu or Tutsi, like it or not.
But that is not the logic of African leaders. They contend otherwise.
The massacre of about 500,000 – some estimates say 800,000 – people in Uganda under Idi Amin (at least 150 people were killed every day); President Masie Nguema's 11-year reign of terror during which one-third of the population of Equatorial Guinea – about 100,000 people – fled into exile and an estimated 40,000 were tortured and killed; and the 1994 Rwandan genocide were all matters of internal affairs in which other African countries had no business interfering, as indeed was the case. None interfered in those countries, except Uganda when Tanzania got rid of Amin.
In all those cases, other African countries said nothing, and did nothing, to protest or try to stop the pogroms.
By the same criterion, the brutal suppression of the Hutu by the Tutsi army and security forces in Burundi – and in Rwanda by the predominantly Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) since it seized power in 1994 – is an internal affair to be handled by the Tutsi themselves.
Yet in a complete reversal, the OAU said, “No,” in the case of Burundi and supported the initiative by its neighbours to impose economic sanctions on the Tutsi regime to try to force it out of office.
Besides its desire to solve its own problems, Africa is also aware that the rest of the world does not care much about the continent, if at all, except when the interests of the world powers are at stake.
But there are also several reasons for that – why the rest of the world doesn't care about Africa. There is compassion deficit. There is also fatigue, with other people, non-Africans, asking: When are African wars and other major problems – corruption, tyranny, tribalism, poor governance, economic mismanagement, lack of transparency, outright theft by leaders who raid national coffers with impunity, to name only a few – when are all these problems going to end?
There are also considerations of national interest: What do the big powers and other countries have to gain or lose by intervening in or by staying out of African conflicts?
Then there is racism: The victims of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo “look just like us and like our children,” unlike those in Rwanda and Burundi. “We even give ice cream to the children in Kosovo. They're happy and even play soccer outside because they are well taken care of, by us,” yet “we have no money, we can't afford food for starving African refugees, not even cheap maize flour to make porridge which is a whole meal for them – and which is all they need. They aren't used to anything good like our people in Kosovo.”
So Africans have to learn to be on their own – we have to learn to depend on ourselves.
After the debacles of Somalia, Liberia, and Angola, and an almost total lack of interest in the plight of Sierra Leone despite ardent pleas to the international community for help, Africans know that the United Nations will not rush to rescue them.
Sometimes there are legitimate reasons for that.
UN peace keepers were killed and run out of Somalia; they were “exhausted” in Liberia; expelled from Angola; refused to intervene in Rwanda where they could have saved the Tutsi and prevented the genocide; stayed out of Sierra Leone until late in 1999 and, even then, they were mostly Nigerians who were already there constituting the bulk of the West African peacekeeping force and simply changed hats from ECOMOG to UN; and also did not intervene in Burundi and other hot spots across the continent.
After months of delay and lukewarm efforts to find a diplomatic solution to the conflict in Burundi, the UN refused to intervene as the country degenerated into chaos. The Security Council ruled out military intervention but offered no alternative or other options to resolve the conflict; yet another reminder to Africans that you are on your own.
Such UN indifference and OAU's unwillingness or incapacity to act allowed Julius Nyerere, the former president of Tanzania, to take the initiative in trying to resolve the conflict in Burundi; a role which enabled him to exert great influence during the crisis.
For months before the July 1996 coup, he led mediation efforts which brought the two sides together but without resolving the conflict because of the intransigence of both parties, especially the Tutsi who were determined to perpetuate themselves in power. In response to that, he promised “peace enforcement” if the rival parties refused to negotiate and make meaningful concessions. It is this 'peace enforcement” which led to the imposition of economic sanctions on Burundi.
As the sanctions began to bite, Burundi's response was swift, invoking moral arguments as well, to try to undermine the legitimacy and credibility of the embargo as a tool of conflict resolution. But that did not dissuade Tanzania, Burundi's neighbour and direct access to the sea – and probably the most strategically located country in the alliance of embargo supporters, with Kenya being next because of her access to the Indian Ocean like Tanzania but not Burundi's immediate neighbour – from enforcing the economic sanctions.
The other countries also enforced the sanctions in varying degrees, with Uganda doing so only half-heartedly because of her friendship with Burundi, while Rwanda did nothing – besides her symbolic gesture of endorsing the embargo. Without Tanzania's participation, the economic sanctions would have had very little impact on Burundi.
By 10 August 1996, more than 2,000 metric tons of UN food destined for refugee camps in Burundi were being held up in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in compliance with the embargo.
The Tanzanian Sunday News (the sister paper of the Daily News), 11 August 1996, quoted officials in Kigoma, the Tanzanian port on Lake Tanganyika through which most of the Burundi-bound traffic passes, as saying three ships loaded with food had been stopped from sailing to Burundi's capital Bujumbura.27
The impact of the sanctions was officially acknowledged by the Burundian government.
Burundi's new foreign affairs minister, Luc Rukingama, said on August 10th in Brussels, Belgium, that the embargo was having a disastrous impact on his country's economy and hurting the most vulnerable people:
“Now it's a matter of explaining, of informing and showing that this embargo is politically without foundation, completely unproductive, morally unacceptable and a catastrophe economically. (Sanctions) work against the children, women, old people and all the men of the country.”28
Rukingama became minister of foreign affairs in a transitional government formed on 2 August 1996, about one week after President Sylvestre Ntibantunganya was overthrown.
The Tutsi military rulers claimed they seized power to prevent genocide in Burundi. Yet it was their attempt to seize power in October 1993 which triggered the genocide of more than 200,000 (some say 500,000) people, mostly Hutu, within three years after the newly elected President Melchior Ndadaye was bayoneted to death by Tutsi soldiers; an assassination that enraged his kinsmen, the Hutu, who started killing Tutsis, thus provoking an extremely brutal retaliatory response from the Tutsi army which went on the rampage, massacring hundreds of thousands of Hutu civilians including children. No-one was spared. Every Hutu was prime target.
Therefore, there was no reason to believe why a complete takeover by the Tutsi army would stop the very genocide it had started and which it actually had no intention of stopping, as was clearly demonstrated by the extremely brutal repression and continued indiscriminate mass killings of Hutu civilians by Tutsi soldiers even after Buyoya seized power in July 1996.
Since the coup, both sides continued to accuse each other of committing atrocities. And the victims were not getting enough attention, if any, with sanctions compounding the problem.
The international medical charity, Doctors Without Borders, said in August 1996 that the economic embargo was blocking medicine from reaching the victims, and supplies in Burundi were drying up.29 But in spite of all that, the regional leaders tightened the sanctions.
On August 16th, regional foreign ministers meeting in Kampala, Uganda, banned travel to their countries by the members of Burundi's military regime. Zambia also joined the blockade.
However, the ministers decided to allow medical supplies and food for Rwandan Hutu refugees in Burundi to pass across the border. They also set up a committee, based in Kenya, to coordinate the embargo.30
In a coordinated strategy – augmented by the impact of the embargo – to undermine the legitimacy of the Tutsi military regime, Burundi's ousted Hutu president, Sylvestre Ntibantunganya, insisted that he still was the legal head of state, in spite of the fact that he was overthrown and was now a refugee in the American embassy where he was admitted on July 23rd, two days before the coup.
In a statement from him issued by his predominantly Hutu Front for the Democratisation of Burundi (FRODEBU) on August 19th, Ntibantunganya said that Burundi's only legal institutions were his presidency, the National Assembly, and his government.31
The statement was released in Nairobi, Kenya, where his party had offices, waging a campaign against the Tutsi military junta. It was a direct response to what Buyoya did after he seized power: he claimed the presidency, formed a government, suspended the National Assembly, and banned all political parties. As Ntibantuganya stated: “The Parliament elected on June 3, 1993, remains the sole legitimate legislative institution.”32
He thanked neighbouring states for their coordinated effort to punish the Tutsi military regime and force Buyoya to relinquish power.
Their involvement in Burundi's crisis set a precedent in the regional context. No such coordinated effort had been made before to deal with a regional crisis. That is why Idi Amin's reign of terror went unanswered and lasted for more than 8 years (25 January 1971 – 10 April 1979 when the capital Kampala fell), as most of the neighbours looked the other way. And that is why nothing was done by the East African countries to stop the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.
But in spite of such retrogressive isolationism, their 1996 intervention in Burundi had been preceded by another intervention in the region, although on unilateral basis. And that was by Tanzania when Idi Amin annexed 710 square miles of her territory in November 1978, triggering a six-month full-scale war which led to his downfall. He fled on 11 April 1979 in a helicopter and went into exile in Libya.
Economic sanctions against Burundi could have achieved the same objective – ouster of a reprehensible regime – had the two countries in the embargo effort, Tanzania and Kenya, used their strategic location as coastal states to compel the rest to enforce the punitive measures.
Kenya could – and should – have denied both Uganda and Rwanda access to the sea, totally blocking their exports and imports, unless they isolated Burundi entirely. And both Kenya and Tanzania should have blocked Burundi's imports and exports until the Tutsi regime relinquished control and allowed the Hutu majority to share power with the Tutsi minority on the basis of a mutually acceptable formula. Tanzania by herself could have enforced a total blockade of Burundi's exports and imports passing through her territory.
That is probably the only way the Tutsi regime in Burundi could have been forced to capitulate, short of military intervention – an unrealistic scenario in the absence of a regional crisis intervention force.
The survival of the Tutsi military regime in Burundi was one more sad chapter in the history of the country and of this highly volatile region. The military rulers only succeeded in perpetuating what is probably the most violent ethnic conflict – Hutu versus Tutsi – on the entire continent.
Its resolution requires bold initiatives and compromises unprecedented in the history of post-colonial Africa....