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.

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.