Tutsi control of the army seemed imminent, and to them this represented an even more dire threat. What
followed, of course, was the assassination of President Ndadaye (and of the president and vice president
of the National Assembly), the beginning of Deo’s long flight, and Burundi’s civil war.
According to rough estimates, about fifty thousand Burundians died in the violence of 1993, Hutus and
Tutsis in roughly equal numbers, most of them civilians. After a period of maneuvering, Tutsi politicians
reclaimed power, and the war went on, growing wider. For the most part it was waged between the Tutsi
army and various Hutu militias, with most of the population caught in the crossfire. Burundians, it seems
important to say, are no more or less inclined to violence than other human beings. Only 3 percent of the
country’s young men joined armed movements during the war.
A virtual library of treatises on the Rwandan genocide has been published, and a relative handful on
Burundi. As I read, I felt drawn especially to the work of Peter Uvin, a scholar with long experience in
both countries. In several articles and in separate books about each country, he attempts a synthesis not
just of the events that led up to catastrophic violence, but also of the political, social, and economic
forces at work. While careful to say that no single factor can explain each country’s violence, he tries to
depict the essential settings of the slaughters—that is, the lives of the peasant majorities.
For this, Uvin borrows the term “structural violence.” Violence, that is, of the quotidian kind, the
physical and psychological violence of poverty, the type of violence that had surrounded Deo all through
his childhood and adolescence. Hunger and disease and untimely death. Exclusion from the means to a
better life, especially exclusion from secondary school and college. And examples of what the peasant
majority was being excluded from—portly men in suits, foreign development workers and their
privileged Burundian and Rwandan counterparts riding through dirt towns in suvs. I thought of Deo’s
descriptions of easy arrogance among fellow high school and university students. There was the violence
of widespread unemployment, the plight of many young men who were prime recruits for armies and
militias. There was rampant and blatant corruption, and complete impunity for those who practiced it—
and impunity also for the soldiers who killed and the officers who gave them their orders.
In his book about Burundi, Uvin describes what he calls “the micro-politics” of the country’s long war,
not just the competition for power among national elites, but the facts of life in urban neighborhoods and
on rural hills. The justified grievances of the Hutu majority. The increasing segregation of the two
ethnicities, and the ever-growing fear between them, which made violence, especially preemptive
violence, a rational strategy for self-defense. The ability and willingness of local elites to organize and
foment violence. Uvin writes: “In societies where the rule of law is close to nonexistent and security
forces are neither effective nor trusted, small groups of people willing to use violence can create enough
chaos and fear to force everyone into making violent choices.”
The Rwandan genocide was a carefully planned case of scapegoating, launched by a government of the
majority against a powerless minority. Burundi’s mass violence was an ethnic civil war between a
minority government and rebels drawn from the majority, a war between two equally powerful armed
factions. In Rwanda, ordinary people killed mainly out of prejudice. In Burundi, it was mainly out of
fear. These were different catastrophes, Uvin insists, not to be conflated. But they had essential
ingredients in common: “Social exclusion and the ethnicization of politics … are the two central
elements to violent conflict in Burundi and Rwanda that, like electrons, spin around a core of massive
poverty and institutional weakness.”
Rwanda’s genocide began in April 1994, and ended about four months later, in July, after the Rwandan
Patriotic Front had conquered most of the country. Estimates of the dead vary, from around 500,000 to a
million; most split the difference and put the number at around 800,000. Some two million Hutus fled
the country. Many of the killers went with them, carrying their weapons. By 2006, most of the refugees
had returned, forced back by the government of Tanzania and by civil war in what was then called Zaire.
Since the end of the genocide, leaders of the RPF had ruled Rwanda. The RPF‘s former commanding
general, Paul Kagame, was now Rwanda’s president. Criticism, indeed condemnation, of Kagame’s
government was widespread, but far from universal. By the time I set out with Deo, Rwanda was said to
have achieved a stable peace—or, as the critics might have said, an absence of war.
Burundi’s tragedy was less notorious but much more prolonged. It continued through the 1990s and into
the new millennium. Rather early on, a host of African and Western countries initiated peace
negotiations. After four years, an agreement was signed, but the fighting went on. Actually, it may have
increased, because the principal Hutu rebel groups weren’t included in the talks. It took another three
years for the largest rebel organization to sign on. Wrangling over the fine points and negotiations with
the second largest group, the PALIPEHUTU/FNL, were still dragging on when Deo flew home to
Burundi for a visit, his fourth trip back, in 2004.
He went via Nairobi. During his layover there, he ran across half a dozen of the Burundian peace
negotiators. He recognized many of them from photographs. Following at a distance, he watched the
group go en masse into the airport liquor store, laughing and slapping each other on the back—a bunch
of men in suits, Hutu and Tutsi, who seemed like the very best of friends. Deo flew to Bujumbura on the
same plane as the negotiators, and he watched those men transform themselves into stage enemies when
they entered the airport and faced the press. “They arrived and everyone was arguing. It was, ‘No, we
didn’t agree on that,’” Deo remembered. “And they are fighting with each other like desperate pigs.” He
had felt indignant at the spectacle. He described it indignantly to me, and I thought this was remarkable,
that politics as usual could still surprise and disappoint him. In spite of all he’d been through, I thought,
he still hadn’t acquired the reflex of cynicism.
But Burundi’s transition to peace had succeeded in spite of extraordinary obstacles. In 2005 a new
constitution was ratified. It provided for multiethnic government. The largest of the Hutu rebel groups
won the elections that followed, but it had by then become a multiethnic party, and the new president, a
former Hutu militia leader, had pledged an end to ethnic war. When Deo and I arrived in Bujumbura,
curfews were still observed, and there were reports of sporadic fighting between the government and the
PALIPEHUTU/FNL, which still hadn’t agreed to terms. But there were reasons for optimism. Most
important, all militias except the FNL had been demobilized and the army and police had been fully
integrated. Each was half Hutu and half Tutsi, a great measure of security for all Burundians.
International diplomatic efforts at peacemaking had been ingenious, even daring. Attempts at rebuilding
the country had been less impressive so far. According to Peter Uvin, international aid work had fallen
back into its old uncoordinated patterns. The total amount of foreign assistance came to about $300
million a year. This was considerably less than Rwanda was receiving. It represented most of Burundi’s
national budget, and a lot of the money wasn’t going to ordinary people but, as Uvin writes, to “experts,
consultants, managers.”
Since the onset of civil war, Burundi’s per capita gross domestic product had fallen from roughly $180
per year to about $80, the lowest in the world, and of course that paltry figure understated the general
penury. In 2003 a United Nations agency had attempted to rank countries by the suffering of their
women and children; Burundi was among the bottom five. More recently, Burundi had been designated
one of the world’s three worst countries in which to do business.
This last conclusion seemed unfair to the general population, famously diligent and hungry for jobs.
Burundians, Deo believed, were also hungry for peace—a notion borne out emphatically in Uvin’s book.
Reading Uvin’s postwar research, I felt that in many ways Deo embodied the general feeling of
Burundians: far from declaring despair for the future, but also far from being able to forget. According to
some estimates, 100,000 had died in the war. Another said 200,000, still another 300,000. If you read too
many numbers like those, they begin to take on a pornographic quality—all those lives turned into
integers, the bigger the more titillating, and the more abstract.
Chapter FOURTEEN
Burundi,
June 2006
We left Bujumbura for several days and drove into the high country, where we stopped again and again
so Deo could gaze at the yellow top of Ganza and snap at least one hundred pictures of it. And then one
morning we drove farther into the country, toward Deo’s birthplace. The roads went up and up through
the mountains of his childhood, and the day grew sunnier, windier, cooler. Vistas widened. Now and
then we had to stop to let herds of cows go by, their long horns nearly scraping the windows of our
vehicle, Deo and our driver declaring like old codgers that cow horns weren’t what they used to be. We
passed a hut with a Coca-Cola sign on a wall. “Coca-Cola can reach here, but not medicines,” said Deo.
He laughed. Several American friends of his—three medical students, a young PIH doctor—had arrived
to help with Deo’s clinic project and had joined us on this side trip. One of them wondered if the World
Health Organization might not enlist the services of Coke. After that, Deo grew increasingly quiet.
It was on the last ascent, on a single-lane dirt road, that I first heard the word gusimbura. When Deo
warned me not to speak the name of his dead friend Clovis, I heard the more general warning that
gusimbura implied: that reviving painful memories was worse than inconsiderate. Deo had stayed away
from his “hill,” from his hometown and its neighborhood, for almost fourteen years. Maybe he was also
warning himself, or trying to brace himself for what he knew was coming.
We stopped first in Sangaza, the town where he had gone to elementary school. We walked toward the
schoolhouse, across what had been the cemetery of his childhood. I wondered if we were walking over
Clovis’s grave, but Deo couldn’t remember its location, and all the wooden crosses had vanished. It was
just a lumpy pasture now—owned, Deo said, by someone from Bujumbura—which meant that people
from around here had to carry their dead a great distance now.
We walked slowly on toward the schoolhouse. Classes were over for the year, the place deserted. The
building looked shabbier than he remembered, but otherwise much the same. He pointed through an
open window of the fourth-grade classroom, at a sheaf of eucalyptus switches, standing upright in the
corner beside the teacher’s desk.
Then we headed toward Butanza. It had been thirteen years since his parents had abandoned the place,
but many relatives still lived there, including his grandmother, whom he planned to see, of course. We
went on foot, Deo leading the way along the paths he had taken as a schoolboy, the paths and scenery
largely unchanged, except that the bald hilltop had been replanted in pine trees, and there were no
chimps or monkeys anymore.
His grandmother’s appearance was a little delayed. She’d grown wary of visitors, Deo had been warned.
“Every time she sees someone coming, she’s afraid he’s bringing bad news. She will say, ‘Go and ask
what he’s bringing,’ before she’ll meet a person entering the compound.” But in a moment, on the arm of
a young girl, she came tottering out, a tiny woman covered from head to toe in colorful cloth so that only
her weathered face was visible. She had bright, observant eyes. She hugged her grandson and asked him
why it had taken him so long to come.
He was visiting Grandmom, but the occasion wasn’t as joyous as the Burundian saying implied. Deo
towered over her, his arm around her. He was laughing softly. I thought he was on the verge of tears. I
imagined Lonjino was probably there in his mind, as an absence, but for once I knew better than to
gusimbura him and ask.
Deo had wanted to return to Butanza unannounced, but it seemed as though half the village was waiting
for him when we arrived. Every relative still living in the area, and some who seemed to have become
relatives since he’d been away, crowded in on him. One after the other, they recited their troubles. An
elderly cousin of Lonjino’s grasped Deo’s hand and said what all the others were indirectly saying:
“Give me money. Help me.”
Deo escaped up the steep slope of the mountain Runda. “Gosh, I think this is the first time I took this
trip in shoes.” He pointed to a hillside, a rocky outcropping, the place where Clovis had begun to die,
and he lingered at the site of his family’s hut, a patch of shrubs in the middle of a pasture. More than a
decade of rainy seasons had washed away the ashes of the house. He turned and walked uphill toward a
piney woods, but then turned back again and gazed toward the site of the old homestead.
It was getting on toward evening, the shadows of the trees lengthening onto the grassland. Deo was
saying that life up here was “harsh,” the soil poor, the journeys steep and long just to gather water, and
never mind the distances they’d covered taking cows to summer pastures. And then it was as if the
words he was speaking carried his thoughts across one of nature’s narrow boundaries, like the line
between rain and snow. He smiled. “You know, I really love it up here in the evening. It’s so quiet and
cool and the stars are already out. I remember the first time I saw étoiles filantes. What’s the English
name? Shooting stars. I went running to my father, frightened. ‘There’s fire coming from the sky!’”
Deo was still smiling as we started back down the mountain, and then the spell was broken.
