Josh Kron: Burundi and Rwanda, Mirror Images of Each Other
[Josh Kron is a freelance journalist based in Kampala, Uganda.]
Behind one of the beaches that line Burundi's capital city, Bujumbura, 10 men sat at a bar in the afternoon sun, passing cigarettes, buying bottles of beer. I had just arrived on the bus from Rwanda to report on the neighboring country. They welcomed me to their group, and soon I asked, nervously, whether ethnicity was still a problem. One of them threw his arm around my shoulder and gave me a cold Primus beer. He laughed and started pointing.
"He's Hutu," the man said, going down the circle. There were even students from Rwanda, on vacation at the beach. "Hutu, Hutu, Tutsi." The men smiled and raised their glasses. "That one over there is a Tutsi, a colonel in the army." It didn't matter that ethnic war had decimated Burundi, as it had Rwanda; the banter wasn't taken offensively, and the men were drunk. This was life in Burundi -- in your face, but honest....
The national boundaries in Africa's Great Lakes region can be fluid. Many Burundians and Rwandans have family in both countries, as well as in eastern Congo, and travel between them often. If one home is not working out, they try another. But the two countries followed very different historical paths, which helps explain the differences in their current political trajectories.
Hutu and Tutsi lived together in Burundi for centuries under a Tutsi monarchy. Under the kings, relations between the two groups grew strained. Upon independence in 1962, the monarchy held onto power, but not without violently putting down Hutu uprisings that led to massacres of Tutsis in response and the creation of a Tutsi military state. In 1972, approximately 200,000 Hutus were massacred by government troops after hundreds of Tutsis were killed in the country's south. In 1993, the first Hutu president was kidnapped and murdered by Tutsi extremists. Then Tutsis were massacred. Then Hutus again. Ethnic civil war broke out, but after a decade the struggle was more about each militia group jockeying for power.
Rwanda's history is much more one-sided. Under the rule of Tutsi King Kigeli IV in the middle of the 19th century, relations between Hutu and Tutsi also grew polarized, but after gaining independence on the same day as Burundi, power was thrown suddenly to the majority Hutu who, after generations of social inferiority, launched a series of measures -- and later pogroms -- against the Tutsi, causing many of them to scatter. There were not only rigid definitions -- there was an insider-outsider mentality. After the 1994 genocide, when the victims took over, those riptides switched again....
This time the current is feverish. Kagame's ruling Tutsi party has tried to undo 30 years of history by delegitimizing Rwanda's post-independence Hutu government, blaming it for all the country's ills. Last April, the national tomb of the country's first president, a Hutu, was dug up and given back to his family. Rwanda's foreign minister and government spokeswoman recently told the New York Times, "Reconciliation starts with the killer asking for forgiveness." Sixteen years after the genocide, guilt remains political currency, and the Hutu are in debt. Increasingly, it is taking the tone of a permanent revolution....
Read entire article at Foreign Policy
Behind one of the beaches that line Burundi's capital city, Bujumbura, 10 men sat at a bar in the afternoon sun, passing cigarettes, buying bottles of beer. I had just arrived on the bus from Rwanda to report on the neighboring country. They welcomed me to their group, and soon I asked, nervously, whether ethnicity was still a problem. One of them threw his arm around my shoulder and gave me a cold Primus beer. He laughed and started pointing.
"He's Hutu," the man said, going down the circle. There were even students from Rwanda, on vacation at the beach. "Hutu, Hutu, Tutsi." The men smiled and raised their glasses. "That one over there is a Tutsi, a colonel in the army." It didn't matter that ethnic war had decimated Burundi, as it had Rwanda; the banter wasn't taken offensively, and the men were drunk. This was life in Burundi -- in your face, but honest....
The national boundaries in Africa's Great Lakes region can be fluid. Many Burundians and Rwandans have family in both countries, as well as in eastern Congo, and travel between them often. If one home is not working out, they try another. But the two countries followed very different historical paths, which helps explain the differences in their current political trajectories.
Hutu and Tutsi lived together in Burundi for centuries under a Tutsi monarchy. Under the kings, relations between the two groups grew strained. Upon independence in 1962, the monarchy held onto power, but not without violently putting down Hutu uprisings that led to massacres of Tutsis in response and the creation of a Tutsi military state. In 1972, approximately 200,000 Hutus were massacred by government troops after hundreds of Tutsis were killed in the country's south. In 1993, the first Hutu president was kidnapped and murdered by Tutsi extremists. Then Tutsis were massacred. Then Hutus again. Ethnic civil war broke out, but after a decade the struggle was more about each militia group jockeying for power.
Rwanda's history is much more one-sided. Under the rule of Tutsi King Kigeli IV in the middle of the 19th century, relations between Hutu and Tutsi also grew polarized, but after gaining independence on the same day as Burundi, power was thrown suddenly to the majority Hutu who, after generations of social inferiority, launched a series of measures -- and later pogroms -- against the Tutsi, causing many of them to scatter. There were not only rigid definitions -- there was an insider-outsider mentality. After the 1994 genocide, when the victims took over, those riptides switched again....
This time the current is feverish. Kagame's ruling Tutsi party has tried to undo 30 years of history by delegitimizing Rwanda's post-independence Hutu government, blaming it for all the country's ills. Last April, the national tomb of the country's first president, a Hutu, was dug up and given back to his family. Rwanda's foreign minister and government spokeswoman recently told the New York Times, "Reconciliation starts with the killer asking for forgiveness." Sixteen years after the genocide, guilt remains political currency, and the Hutu are in debt. Increasingly, it is taking the tone of a permanent revolution....