Life After Violence Read online
About the author
Peter Uvin is the Henry J. Leir Professor of International Humanitarian Studies and Academic Dean at the Fletcher School, Tufts University, USA. In recent years, his research and practice have dealt with the intersection between development aid, human rights, and conflict, mostly in the African Great Lakes region. His previous books include Development and Human Rights and Aiding Violence: The Development Enterprise in Rwanda, which received the African Studies Association’s Herskowits award for the most outstanding book on Africa in 1998. He spends a large amount of his time working for various agencies in the Great Lakes region.
African Arguments
African Arguments is a series of short books about Africa today. Aimed at the growing number of students and general readers who want to know more about the continent, these books highlight many of the longer-term strategic as well as immediate political issues confronting the African continent. They get to the heart of why Africa is the way it is and how it is changing. The books are scholarly but engaged, substantive as well as topical.
Series editors
ALEX DE WAAL, Social Science Research Council
RICHARD DOWDEN, Executive Director, Royal African Society
Editorial Board
EMMANUEL AKYEAMPONG, Harvard University
TIM ALLEN, London School of Economics and Political Science
AKWE AMOSU, Open Society Institute
BREYTEN BREYTENBACH, Gorée Institute
CRAIG CALHOUN, Social Science Research Council
PETER DA COSTA, journalist and development specialist
WILLIAM GUMEDE, journalist and author
ALCINDA HONWANA, Open University
ABDUL MOHAMMED, InterAfrica Group
ROBERT MOLTENO, editor and publisher
Titles already published
Tim Allen, Trial Justice: The International Criminal Court and the
Lord’s Resistance Army Alex de Waal, AIDS and Power: Why There is No Political Crisis – Yet
Raymond W. Copson, The United States in Africa: Bush Policy and Beyond
Chris Alden, China in Africa
Tom Porteous, Britain in Africa
Julie Flint and Alex de Waal, Darfur: A New History of a Long War, revised and updated edition
Jonathan Glennie, The Trouble with Aid: Why Less Could Mean More for Africa
Peter Uvin, Life after Violence: A People’s Story of Burundi
Forthcoming
William Gumede, The Democracy Gap: Africa’s Wasted Years
Camilla Toulmin, Climate Change in Africa
Published by Zed Books and the IAI with the support of the following organizations:
InterAfrica Group The InterAfrica Group is the regional centre for dialogue on issues of development, democracy, conflict resolution and humanitarianism in the Horn of Africa. It was founded in 1988 and is based in Addis Ababa, with programmes supporting democracy in Ethiopia and partnership with the African Union and IGAD.
International African Institute The International African Institute’s principal aim is to promote scholarly understanding of Africa, notably its changing societies, cultures and languages. Founded in 1926 and based in London, it supports a range of seminars and publications including the journal Africa.
Justice Africa Justice Africa initiates and supports African civil society activities in support of peace, justice and democracy in Africa. Founded in 1999, it has a range of activities relating to peace in the Horn of Africa, HIV/AIDS and democracy, and the African Union.
Royal African Society Now more than a hundred years old, the Royal African Society today is Britain’s leading organization promoting Africa’s cause. Through its journal, African Affairs, and by organizing meetings, discussions and other activities, the society strengthens links between Africa and Britain and encourages understanding of Africa and its relations with the rest of the world.
Social Science Research Council The Social Science Research Council brings much-needed expert knowledge to public issues. Founded in 1923 and based in New York, it brings together researchers, practitioners and policymakers in every continent.
PETER UVIN
Life after violence
A people’s story of Burundi
Zed Books
LONDON | NEW YORK
in association with
International African Institute
Royal African Society
Social Science Research Council
Life after violence: A people’s story of Burundi was first published in association with the International African Institute, the Royal African Society and the Social Science Research Council in 2009 by Zed Books Ltd, 7 Cynthia Street, London N1 9JF, UK and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA
This ebook edition was first published in 2013
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Copyright © Peter Uvin, 2009
The right of Peter Uvin to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data available
ISBN 978 1 84813 724 0
Contents
List of tables
Foreword
Introduction
ONE | Background
1 A brief political history of Burundi
2 Methodology and location
TWO | The view from below
3 Peace and war as read in Burundi
4 ‘If I were in charge here’: Burundians on respect, corruption, and the state
5 Hard work and prostitution: the capitalist ethos in crisis
6 ‘I want to marry a dynamic girl’: changing gender expectations in Burundi (with Kim Howe)
7 Justice, silence, and social capital (with Ann Nee)
8 Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Tables
1.1 Election results, 2005
2.1 Rural sample by category
2.2 Urban sample by category
2.3 Sample by age
3.1 Definitions of peace
4.1 Respect and the rule of law
5.1 General trends
5.2 Education per category, in years, by region
5.3 Discussions, and explanations, of men’s marginal behavior
5.4 Discussions, and explanations, of women’s marginal behavior
5.5 Answers to the ‘who helps you’ question, by area
6.1 Traditional expectations of young men and young women
6.2 Expectations of young men and young women: frequency of responses based on 260 participants
7.1 Attitudes toward entente
Foreword
Burundi was the first country in Africa I set foot in. I still recall my first impressions, in 1985 – the heat and the humidity; the seriousness of the faces and the deep sense of humor of Burundians; the perfect combination of brochettes, fries, and Primus beer; my first taste of ndagala (small, salted fried fish) at the Cercle Nautique; the beauty of the men and women, and the ugly scars poverty inflicted on them. Over the years, I went there tens of times, to work in development projects, to do research, to advise agencies, to evaluate projects. I saw friends’ children grow up, and heard about other friends who died, fled, married. The civil war intervened, and this poor country became poorer still, and sadder, and more afraid. The smiles disappeared, the scars were more common.
At about the same time, I married, moved continents, and stopped working for the development business. The genocide in Rwanda happened, less than a year after the sad reversal of democracy in Burundi and the outbreak of civil war there, and I was sick of the inefficiency, the blindness, the self-centeredness of the development business of which I had been a junior member until then.
I ended up writing a book, Aiding Violence, which was based on a detailed study of Rwanda but was equally inspired by my experiences in Burundi. This book came at a propitious time, when people everywhere were beginning to rethink their ‘normal professionalism’ of development and humanitarianism. Many changes have occurred since: rights-based approaches, conflict-sensitive development, and so on. I became a player in these changes, consulting about them on the ground, first in Rwanda and then in Burundi, and writing about them in policy and scholarly documents. These were heady times, with fascinating mandates, long discussions, and a feeling that we were building something new. My previous book, Human Rights and Development, explores some of this.
In the meantime, I slowly and unexpectedly made a career in the academic world and became a professor. In 2006/07, I got a sabbatical, and decided it was time to go back to the source: the people of Burundi, where I had started. I wanted to know the ideas of the international development and peace-building community (of which I had been a more or less enthusiastic cog), the aims it seeks, the agendas it sets: do they make sense to regular people? Do Burundians talk about the same things as I do, even if they use different words? Or are people like me and my international colleagues, and the ideas/ideologies we represent, basically living in a totally different world, unrelated to the real lives of the poor and the excluded in whose names we claim to speak?
At that point in time, I was lucky enough to run into Maria Correia of the World Bank. She encouraged me to do this research, and found funding for it. She and her colleague Pia Peeters provided me not only with funding but also with major intellectual support, including a new focus I would not have attempted by myself: a focus on youth, masculinity, and conflict. Indeed, in my years of working in Africa, I rarely met or seriously talked to young people, and I surely never paid particular attention to how they view the future. I talked to a good friend and colleague of mine, Marc Sommers, who knows a lot more than I do about youth in that part of the world, and he enthusiastically encouraged me. I am grateful he did: without him and Maria Correia I would have missed out on the great conversations I had with young men and women in Burundi, and I would never have learned what I did. I am also profoundly grateful to the World Bank for its financial support of this research.
I was fortunate enough that the Simon Guggenheim Foundation awarded me a fellowship the same year: this was very important in helping me defray the many remaining costs of a year living far away, without other income, and with many unforeseen research and living expenses. Without this support, I would have had to end this project much sooner.
CARE-Burundi, finally, and its great director, Kassie McIlvaine, assisted me logistically in Burundi and provided a comfortable place to go to when I got lost.
Many people helped in writing this book, and foremost among them the many Burundians who gave me their time, their energy, intelligence, and humor: I hope this book does justice to them all. Kim Howe was a true friend and intellectual partner in both Burundi and the USA. Burundian friends such as Adrien Tuyaga, Benoit Birutegusa, and Pie Ngendakumana devoted hours and hours to me, giving me all their honesty and intelligence: what great friends you all are! My wife, Susan Cu-Uvin, let me go and live in Burundi for eight months in 2006, never once complaining, taking care of the household while having a full-time job herself. Heartfelt thanks to her.
Finally, the dedication. It is common to demonstrate one’s impeccable taste and political correctness by dedicating a book to either local heroes or one’s immediate family. I will depart from this path, and dedicate this book to a group of foreigners, all part of the much-maligned international development enterprise. They are all women who work in Burundi and whom I admire for their strength, their humanity, their real contributions to the country.
This book is dedicated, then, to
Kassie McIlvaine, country director of CARE-Burundi
Leanne Bayer, chief of party for PADCO-Burundi
Jill Morris, manager of PADCO’s CBLP project
Liz McClintock, director of BLTP
Introduction
Burundi has arrived at a crossroads. A long history of conflict, ethnic polarization and politicization, authoritarian rule, a decade of civil war, and growing impoverishment lies on one side, and power-sharing arrangements, democratic elections, peace agreements, demobilization, and an infusion of development aid on the other. In between lies a generation of young people raised during a brutal war – years of education lost, hearts traumatized, and possessions lost. Some have fought, some have fled, some have stayed, but all have faced dramatically limited opportunities. These young adults who came of age during the war now represent the future of Burundi. But until now, there have been few if any attempts to accurately understand them.
The following pages present a snapshot of life as lived and analyzed by ordinary Burundians. This book is based on the voices of people – primarily young people – throughout Burundi: people who have been refugees, internally displaced, dispersed, ex-combatants; in the city and the collines, Hutu and Tutsi.
We set out to answer many questions. How are youth faring in post-conflict Burundi? Do young men pose a risk of renewed fighting and conflict? What does peace mean to them? How do they see socio-economic progress taking place in their own lives? How do gender norms and expectations influence their behavior and how have these norms changed as a result of the conflict? What do youth perceive to be their opportunities for the future? How is this different between ex-combatants and those who never fought? How do they relate to the state and development programs? What do they identify as their primary needs? How can internal and external organizations respond to their needs to help reduce the potential for violence in the future? The following report provides people’s answers to all of these questions.
Chapters 1 and 2 provide the background: they present the methodology used and a brief political history of Burundi up “g to the time of our research. Chapters 3 to 7 present the results: they synthesize, and interpret, what ordinary Burundians told us about their definition of peace and war, their understanding of governance, their strategies for development, as well as gendered expectations of life. The last chapter synthesizes key insights, teasing out the implications of this work for the broader post-conflict, peace-building, and development literatures and for the policies of international agencies.
Definitions of youth vary dramatically. UNICEF defines it as twelve to twenty-five years old; Burundian law declares people to be adults at eighteen; in a conversation with the director-general of the Ministry of Youth, he set the age limit at thirty-five; and many ordinary Burundians, finally, define youth as being unmarried (although others differed with that, arguing that more is required than simple marriage – responsible adult behavior is the key). When designing the research, we operationalized youth as p
eople aged fifteen to thirty – the time during which a young person typically ends his or her studies, enters the work market, and establishes a family.
One more word. Fundamentally, the lives most of the people we interviewed lead are an affront to human dignity and totally deny any notion that there is an international community that stands for any values of equity or justice. The Burundians we met lived lives of stunning deprivation. Most of them never see any international aid. They die from easily preventable or curable diseases – tetanus, malaria – at scandalous rates. They work, or seek work, for endless hours, and go to sleep tortured by the cries of their hungry babies. The women and girls who have been raped are not treated; the young men who desperately try to survive are not helped; the local heroes who quietly fight for change are not recognized. The poverty Burundi, and the stinginess of the international community when dealing with it, is revolting in our world of over-consumption.
Yet this is not how this book will feel. Speaking to Burundians, what emerged over and over is their quiet determination to improve their fates, their hope that the right things will be done, their dreams for personal and social change – and, frequently too, their condemnation of their fellow man, their desire to forget the past, their anger at the present.
PART ONE
Background
1 | A brief political history of Burundi
The pre-colonial period
Before the arrival of the colonizer, Burundi was a kingdom with a fine socio-political hierarchy. At the top, the king (Mwami) was surrounded by an aristocratic/princely class (Ganwa), which was in competition for the next kingship. The king was neither Hutu nor Tutsi – he embodied the nation. In the middle, various levels of Tutsi existed – first those at the royal court in Muramvya, the Tutsi-Banyaruguru; below them the ordinary pastoralist Tutsi, mainly Tutsi-Hima. Below, there were the large masses of Hutu. All these groups were divided and united by lineage and clan and by the changing vagaries of closeness to the court. The Twa, few in number, were ill considered by all. Hutu chiefs existed at different levels, and some Hutu played major roles in the royal administration. Finally, there were the Bashingantahe – wise men, appointed by local communities themselves, acting as local mediators and judges. Many of them were Hutu. This is very similar to neighboring Rwanda, but Burundi’s pre-colonial set-up was more inclusive, more stable, than Rwanda’s.