Monday, January 31, 2000

Burundi's imminent catastrophe
 

Jonathan Kay
National Post

In Burundi, a massacre is coming. And it will be a true Central-African-style massacre: the kind where the dead go uncounted; the guilty go unpunished; and the survivors tell unthinkably brutal tales of family members hacked to bits with machetes and panda knives.

There is nothing bold in my prediction. In Burundi, a bloody reprisal has followed every instance in which Hutu tribesmen have challenged Tutsi domination. It happened in 1965, 1969, 1972, 1988 and 1991. And it will happen in 2000, because the Burundi government recently herded 350,000 Hutu into grubby containment camps as part of its strategy to undermine support for Hutu guerillas. The situation is explosive.

Most Westerners couldn't find Burundi on a map. The only reason the country has received a smidgen of press attention in recent weeks is that Subsaharan Africa's only name-brand potentate, former South African president Nelson Mandela, has adopted the Burundian cause as a personal crusade. Two weeks ago, Mr. Mandela called on leaders to negotiate a peace deal: "The fact that women, children and the aged are being slaughtered every day," he said, "is an indictment against all of you."

But Central Africa's leaders prefer to place the blame elsewhere. Speaking at a press conference last week, Pasteur Bizimungu, the Tutsi president of neighbouring Rwanda, argued that Tutsi and Hutu "had been living in harmony for more than seven centuries. Then, when the Europeans came ... they started a system of discrimination and segregation, which resulted in dividing the nation."

Mr. Bizimungu has a point. Neither the Germans nor the Belgians cared much about what is now Burundi and Rwanda. Because their focus lay westward, in resource-rich Belgian Congo, colonial rules simply deputized the Tutsi, who lorded over the Hutu in the name of the sovereign. Missionaries took the same approach, schooling Tutsi children and ignoring others. At the time Rwanda and Burundi gained independence in 1962, their societies were stratified along tribal lines. To this day, the governing institutions in both nations are dominated by Tutsi -- despite the fact Hutu make up more than 80% of both populations.

And long-standing Tutsi dominance has created a bitter cult of Tutsi-envy among Hutu. As former Washington Post Africa bureau chief Keith Richburg wrote in Out of America, "with their narrow noses and sharp features, the Tutsi were considered the more physically attractive tribe ... What the Hutu really aspired to was to look like a Tutsi, to actually become a Tutsi. There were even earlier provisions for it in law; a Hutu with enough wealth could go to the local government office and apply to be reclassified as a Tutsi."

But it was not by chance that European rulers chose the Tutsi as their administrative deputies. Mr. Bizimungu was quite wrong when he argued that Tutsi and Hutu had been "living in harmony for more than seven centuries" before the Europeans arrived. In fact, it was not until the 15th century that Tutsi cattle herders moved into the area now covered by Rwanda and Burundi. Upon arriving, they immediately established dominance over the Hutu farmers who had settled there centuries earlier. The tribal enmity that begat the 1994 Rwandan massacre and the instability in Burundi is no mere withering artifact of colonialism. Tutsi privilege and hegemonyis a problem that goes back five centuries.

And there is little evidence it can be resolved through the West's usual prescription of democratic reform: A democratically elected Hutu government took control of Burundi in 1993, but was overthrown in a 1996 coup after three years of intertribal violence. And the 1994 massacre in Rwanda followed a rare period of majoritarian Hutu rule. During the Hutu governing stint, the ethnic question didn't recede. Rather, the government's agenda became increasingly dominated by an obsessive fear of a Tutsi return to power.

Rwanda is now relatively stable. But that is only because Rwandan Tutsi have hunted down the murderous Hutu guerrillas responsible for the 1994 genocide like the animals they are, pushing them into Eastern Congo (where their presence eventually led to the current Congolese conflict). The situation in civil war-riven Burundi is very different. The government there isn't strong enough to decisively overpower Hutu rebels. This explains the desperate decision to put 5% of the country's population into camps festering with cholera and anti-Tutsi hatred.

At this point, the only move that will prevent massive bloodshed is a Western intervention -- one informed by the lessons learned during the UN's disorganized and tragically ineffectual Rwandan mission in 1994. But the chances of that appear slim. To save Rwanda, the UN barely scraped together 550 peacekeepers. Since several times that number may soon be deployed in Congo as part of a UN-brokered peace deal, it seems unlikely Western leaders will have the political will required to send thousands more to a nation whose conflict is even more obscure.

This is a great pity: The report of an independent UN inquiry into the failure of the Rwandan mission concluded that "a force numbering 2,500 should have been able to stop or at least limit the massacres of the kind that begin in Rwanda." The same is presumably true of Burundi, a country that is the same size and has a smaller population.

Barring such an intervention, a massacre will take place. The only uncertainty is exactly how many tens of thousands will die.