The hills around town do not ring with gunfire anymore. Terrified civilians have stopped trudging down muddy paths seeking shelter. Areas that had been cut off for years because of fighting are finally opening up. And a cautious optimism seems to be spreading across the land.
“It looks like peace,” said Ama Hayyarimana, a father of eight. “But you never know.”
After 15 years of off-again-on-again civil war, the last of Burundi’s rebel groups has finally come to the negotiating table. A ceasefire signed late last month is still holding, and for the first time all the decision makers — including top rebel leaders who until recently had been demonized as terrorists and commanded troops from exile — are in the same place, here in the capital, Bujumbura.
PHOTO: AFP
COMBUSTIBLE MIX
Burundi, with a population of 8.7 million, is one of the smallest countries in Africa. The same combustible mix that exploded in neighboring Rwanda in 1994 exists in Burundi. Both countries are desperately poor, beautifully hilly and divided between Hutus and Tutsis. In both places, Hutus make up a vast majority of the population, while Tutsis hold much of the power and wealth. Resentment among Hutus had been bubbling for years, and in Burundi the spark was a 1993 coup by mostly Tutsi army officers who assassinated the country’s first Hutu president.
Burundi then cracked open into a violent free-for-all involving warring militias, rival politicians, criminal gangs and child soldiers. More than 200,000 people died.
“It was an inferno,” said Jean Marie Ngendahayo, an opposition member of Parliament.
He said the situation got so bad that mobs of children stoned people to death while their parents cheered them on.
The conflict soon morphed from Hutu against Tutsi to Hutu against Hutu. Peace deals in the early 2000s brought most of the Hutu rebel groups into the government fold — except for one, the National Liberation Forces. In 2005, Burundi held a landmark election, with Burundians choosing a Hutu-led government. Still, the National Liberation Forces fought on.
“We were fighting to end discrimination,” said Agathon Rwasa, the group’s leader. “Even with the new government, ethnic troubles are still a problem.”
Rwasa said that the government was corrupt and incompetent and that it had stunted development in Burundi, which remains one of the poorest nations on the planet.
RETURN OF RWASA
Last month, Rwasa returned to Bujumbura after nearly two decades in exile and fighting in the bush. In the past two weeks, rebel leaders have been meeting with Burundian government negotiators to put together a durable peace. The first step was last month’s ceasefire. The next will be getting the thousands of rebel fighters — the rebels say that they have 15,000, but the government says the number is closer to 3,000 — to disarm or to be integrated into the national army. Many rebels are teenage boys who seem confused about what they are actually fighting for.
“We are fighting the government army so we can join them,” said one young rebel soldier named Clapton, who had an AK-47 assault rifle slung over his shoulder and a steak knife tucked into his belt.
Clapton and his baby-faced, beret-wearing comrades are the beneficiaries of a new rebel feeding program, in which a German aid agency is providing beans, oil, rice and salt to rebel fighters who agree to participate in the peace process.
While the sacks of food were being unloaded, government troops in blue uniforms mingled with rebel fighters wearing a hodgepodge of camouflage.
“This has always been a complex war, a war between brothers,” said Lieutenant Colonel Adolphe Manirakiza, a spokesman for the Burundian army, referring to the fact that government and rebel leaders had been allies during the guerrilla fighting of the 1990s.
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