Big News From Burundi - "To Set Up War Crimes Court"

The article is so short that it pretty much speaks for itself. Sorry I've been rather lax with my blogging but the end of the year was crazy with exams and being Assistant Stage Manager of a show, plus I'm getting ready to go to France for a month of study in less than a week.

Tanzania's Unannounced Expulsion of Refugees

Going on a year now the government of Tanzania has expelled persons of Rwandan and Burundian descent according to an article from Reuters news service. The article reports that in the process upwards of 15,000 people (a vast majority of whom are from Rwanda) have been forced to leave. What is most shocking about this is not that those being expelled are refugees (though that would certainly be shocking enough) but that even some who have lived in Tanzania all their lives, having been born to parents from Rwanda or Burundi, are also being targeted.



Thanks to Human Rights Watch the president of Tanzania, Jakaya Kikwete (pictured), has heard word that the world will not stand idly by and watch this flagrant abuse of the mandates governing the protection of refugees. Since it is not party to the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees but since it is a member-state of the United Nations I am not sure what legal implications would apply here but what Tanzania is doing is certainly unsettling.



Article 1 (full-text of the Convention to be found here) requires that, "The Contracting States... apply the provisions of this Convention to refugees without discrimination as to race, religion or country of origin." That's strike one. As for subsequent strikes, look to Article 32, which states that refugees cannot be expelled unless it's for reasons of national security, one must have been given "due process" before being expelled, and that one must be given sufficient opportunity to seek refuge in another state.



As I said I don't know what the legal ramifications would be in this case since Tanzania is not party to the Convention. However, according to the article Allison des Forges of HRW seems to think that what Tanzania is doing is "in serious violation of international law." At the very least I think that what Tanzania is doing is morally reprehensible and it should be made to think twice about removing the welcome mat for these people who have gone through so much.

Place for torture in Burundi?

Hello again. This week I turn to an issue that has been recently examined in the United States: the place of torture in modern states, an issue that Ana will be contributing to as it pertains to the debate domestically. Here's the rundown: on July 31, 2006 Alain Mugabarabona was arrested, among others, for having confessed to being the leader behind an attempted coup d’état; the next day, the former Vice-President of Burundi Alphonse-Marie Kadege (pictured left) was also arrested. I mention these two among the others who were arrested for specific reasons: first, Mugabarabona because of his associations with the FNL-Incanzo Party, a former Hutu rebel group; second, Kadege as a Tutsi member of UPRONA (Union pour le Progrès national, or Union for National Progress). While detained it is believed that they were tortured, Kadege being bound at the hands and feet and whipped with a leather belt.

What I find interesting about this is that in this instance, members of both sides of the "racial divide" in Burundi were arrested and subject to torture at the hands of their own government. What motivations did the government have? Mugabarabona had already confessed his involvement in the attempt and was himself a Hutu (the same ethnic background of the slim majority of members of the government of Burundi, including its president). Kadege, a Tutsi, had been high up in the government and of the same background of those in the relatively well represented minority of the heads of government in Burundi.

Here is an example of how the line between whom is targeting whom and which ethnic group is being victimized becomes ever blurrier. A further question: what drove members of both ethnic classifications to band together in an attempt to overthrow their government? Surely, something must have driven them to see beyond race, an issue which some would assume would divide them.

In the end it seems to me that in this particular case the issue is less about race and more about the government's wish to maintain its control by those means it chooses. Granted, modern states reserve the right to maintain their sovereignty but they do not reserve the right to target their own citizens for acts which would demoralize or bring them bodily harm or distress. The state is legitimate only so long as it is accorded the blessing of those it governs. By resorting to torture, assuming the allegations brought against it are true, the government of Burundi has added further tension to an already fragile situation within its borders. No matter how injurious the deeds committed against it are deemed no government has the right to torture its own citizens or any other, for that matter: there is no place for torture, neither in Burundi nor elsewhere.

I invite you to read the following for more information:

http://hrw.org/english/docs/2006/08/04/burund13916.htm

And this blog by Richard Wilson who has written about Burundi at commentisfree.

Correction - Massacre at Gatumba, August of 2004

Hello again. So in this whole business of being new to blogging I realize how quickly mistakes in note taking and drawing from multiple documents at once can turn into gross rewritings of history. Thanks to a poster named Olivier my attention was brought to a BIG mistake in my last post. The genocide in Burundi was not sparked by the massacre at Gatumba, which did not take place until August 13, of 2004 (a Friday, no less)... NOT 1972 as I'd mistakenly written. My mistake is from mixing up a reference made to a separate Hutu rebellion which did take place in 1972. There's no excuse for mixing up the dates, by any means, but I've learned that while terms like "massacre" and "rebellion" might connote relatively similar images their range of use can certainly describe different incidents that should not be confused as I did.

As reported here by the US Department of State the massacre at Gatumba was carried out by a number of people, some of whom had ties to the National Liberation Front of the Party for the Liberation of the Hutu People. A wealth of information on the massacre at Gatumba can be found by following this link which will take you to a website maintained by Human Rights Watch. Located in the summary of the article by HRW they report that 152 were killed and 106 wounded; most of those targeted were of Banyamulenge (a category within "Tutsi") descent from the DRC. Here I'd like to point out that in my previous post I mentioned 160 were killed while HRW counts 152 fatalities.

The first figure comes from an article in The Economist called "The 'Jews' of Africa" dated August 21, 2004. Since both sources are highly reputable I believe that there's ambiguity over the exact number. I'm reminded of words I heard from a professor who said something to this effect: " 'History' is merely a representation of events in the past, just as a map of a country is only a representation of the country and not the country itself." Whether it was 160 fatalities or 152 or any other number is only representative of one account of an event and tells you nothing of that event's historical significance. That any more blood was spilled in this long history of back-and-forth fighting between Hutu and Tutsi is what is historically significant.

The course of conflict between the Tutsi and the Hutu is one that is complicated because of it's nature as a vicious cycle of reciprocating violence. I mentioned that I like the fact that I get to learn while blogging about this particular subject just as the rest of the Board is learning about their topics. Clearly, there was more than one lesson to be learned here: one, that the chance to learn means nothing if you learn or report something incorrectly; and two, that in such a wonderfully open place as the Internet any mistakes I make are instantaneously submitted to scrutiny, and by extension, I myself am open to that same scrutiny. I thank the poster who rightfully noted my error and I hope that this post has cleared things up. Next time, we'll start all over, you and I, and begin to examine the early history of the conflict and from there make our way into the present to look at the lingering effects of Hutu-Tutsi conflict in Burundi.

Genocide in Burundi - General Background

Hello everyone. I want to apologize for being absent from the blog for a little while but I'm excited to be back now and starting on my first blog about ethnic conflict in Burundi. One of the things I consider so important that we as bloggers and members of the Student Board have is the ability to learn more even while we serve as activists for genocide prevention now. I certainly am learning in this process of researching ethnic conflict in Burundi and I have been surprised at how its history, while unique to its own set of circumstances, is a microcosm representative of a larger conflict that has consumed countries in central Africa.

The Republic of Burundi (bordered by Rwanda, the DRC, and Tanzania) is a country roughly the size of Rwanda that shares a similar trajectory as the former in terms of ethnic conflict. Home to roughly 7,500,000 people the state has had to deal with the crisis between Hutu and Tutsi, which was not merely contained within Rwanda’s borders, since even before it officially became a nation upon gaining its independence from Belgium in 1962. Once again, in Burundi it is those of the Tutsi “race” which have held power since the beginning though they are in the minority with respect to Hutus.

Generally, conflict in the region between the two groups has been going back and forth since the end of the 1950s with one side attacking the other and then the other retaliating. In Burundi, however, that which has become known as the Burundi genocide of 1972 was sparked by a particular incident. During the night of August 13, 1972, Hutu rebels took the lives of some 160 Tutsi in the camp of Gatumba. In response the Tutsi government, between April (the same month as the onset of the genocide in Rwanda which would come 22 years later) and September of that year, took the lives of anywhere between 100,000 to 150,000 lives of Hutu living in Burundi.