Burundi and Rwanda joined in tug of war
Neighbouring countries adversely affect each other while scourge of ethnicity still lurks
BURUNDI and Rwanda can seem deceptively like conjoined twins. They share a common history, geography and language, and their populations are divided ethnically between Hutu and Tutsi.
Both were devastated by some of the worst mass slaughter of the 20th century.
Since the guns fell silent, they have charted very different courses though. But trouble in one seems inevitably to spill into the other, and their politics are becoming intertwined again, in dangerous ways.
Burundi is under threat of collapse, its capital rocked by violence and divided by political intrigue. The country’s fragile democratic fabric has been shredded in recent months by President Pierre Nkurunziza, who brushed aside a constitutional bar to secure a third term in office and put down an attempted coup meant to stop him. As Mr Nkurunziza struggles to retain control, his top officials accuse Rwanda of tacitly aiding his enemies.
Then on Sunday, a top general close to the president was assassinated, threatening to further inflame a volatile situation. The general, Adolphe Nshimirimana, was feared for his brutal tactics. He played a major role in crushing protests in the spring, leaving scores of people dead, and was credited with helping to foil the coup. No one has yet claimed responsibility for his death.
There is no evidence that Rwanda had a hand in it. But top Burundian officials insist Rwanda played a part in the failed coup. “We know some of the coup leaders now live in Rwanda; at least three of them,” said Foreign Minister Alain Nyamitwe on July 22.
Mr Nyamitwe said the disaffected officers, who have called for open rebellion, present a clear threat to Burundi, and he castigated Rwanda for allowing them to find sanctuary there. But he was careful to say that there was no evidence of official Rwandan state support for the rebels.
Rwandan officials categorically deny that the coup leaders were in their country and said Burundi’s problems were of the government’s own making.
Rwanda has concerns about how the crisis next door could embolden another group of rebels who pose a threat to its own government.
The remnants of the losing side in its long civil war, a Hutu militia force known as the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, or FDLR, fled to the forests in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. For a while, Burundi co-operated with Rwanda in hunting the rebels, but a Rwandan government official says that co-operation stopped last year.
“We know that some leaders of the FDLR met with officials in Burundi,” the official says.
Mr Nyamitwe denies Burundi is assisting the group and says there is not “a single FDLR” soldier in Burundi.
Against a backdrop of deepening distrust, the assassination of Gen Nshimirimana sent tremors through the region. Mr Nkurunziza went on state radio to urge calm, calling on “every Burundian, in the hills and the capital, to stay united”. And the US state department issued a statement calling “on all sides to renounce violence and to redouble their efforts to engage in … political dialogue”.
In another ominous turn, leading human rights lawyer in Burundi Pierre Claver Mbonimpa was shot by unknown assailants outside his home in Bujumbura on Monday night and was in hospital in critical condition, according to people who have spoken to his family.
Filip Reyntjens, a professor of African law and politics at the University of Antwerp, says that if history was a guide, the current crisis could quickly spread to engulf the region. He says Rwanda and Burundi “are really false twins” that “have always had perverse influences on one another”.
In Rwanda, where Tutsi rebels won a clear victory in the civil war, the Tutsi-led government “follows a policy of what you could call ethnic amnesia”, Prof Reyntjens says, by essentially making it illegal to talk about ethnicity. But under the surface, he says, field research suggested ethnic divisions were now worse than in the 1990s.
Rwandan officials call that analysis flawed and say the country has worked hard to encourage citizens to see themselves as Rwandans, not Hutu or Tutsi, and to hold perpetrators from both groups to account for atrocities committed during the war.
But in Burundi, there was no clear victory, and peace was achieved only through painstaking negotiations over power-sharing along ethnic lines. Mr Nkurunziza, who is from the Hutu side of the conflict, often points out that in the decade of his leadership since the peace agreement, there has been no ethnic killing.
The relationship between the governments of Rwanda and Burundi seems coloured by the histories of the two countries’ leaders. Each was a rebel soldier before winning presidential election.
Though many countries have condemned Mr Nkurunziza for evading the two-term limit in the peace agreement, Rwanda has not objected on those grounds. Instead, President Paul Kagame of Rwanda says Mr Nkurunziza should not run again because he has failed his people, a remark that angered Burundian officials.
Mr Kagame appears likely to seek a third term of his own, after the Rwandan parliament recently amended the constitution to allow it.
Mr Kagame, 57, has led Rwanda since 1994, when an offensive by his Rwandan Patriotic Front rebels took over after a genocide campaign by Hutu extremists. He is widely credited with helping to bring peace, stability and what the World Bank has called “impressive development progress”.
Burundi, on the other hand, remains one of the poorest countries in the world, with a dependence on foreign aid for half the national budget.
Critics say Rwanda achieved stability in part by pushing its problems outside its borders, keeping peace at home but destabilising its neighbours. Some of the most troubling clashes in the current crisis have occurred in villages along the borders of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda and Burundi.
Prof Reyntjens says if Mr Kagame were to think the FDLR group posed an imminent threat, he would not hesitate to use military force.
After 10 years of ethnic peace in Burundi, though, people may not be easily persuaded to view the current political struggle through the prism of ethnicity.
The experience of Evode Nkeshima, 31, offers a glimpse at the complexities in Burundi. When he was 14 in 1993, the rest of his family was slaughtered in Cibitoke, a part of Burundi where there were clashes last month. His family was Tutsi, and its members were killed by Hutus. But Mr Nkeshima is now president of a branch of the ruling party’s youth wing, the Imbonerakure, in Bujumbura.
Rwandan officials view the Imbonerakure as a danger, and compare it to the youth militia of its own past known as the Interahamwe, which carried out some of the worst atrocities in the genocide. Western officials have accused the Burundian government of using the group to stifle dissent.
Mr Nkeshima says ethnicity has nothing to do with his support for the president.
While Rwanda might view Mr Nkurunziza with suspicion, stemming from his days as the leader of a Hutu militia group, Mr Nkeshima says since then the president has helped the country to heal.
Even so, he says, there could still be war. And when he voiced his worry about Rwanda’s role, he cast it in ethnic terms.
“The Tutsis in the (Rwandan) government are helping the Tutsis in the Burundi opposition. We cannot allow the opposition to take our country.” NYTimes. com
Tutsis in the Rwandan government are helping Tutsis in the Burundi opposition