Burundi is descending into an abyss, but the silence among African states is deafening.
It seems that it is only the AU Chairperson Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma who has consistently raised her voice on the deteriorating situation, calling for more human rights observers and urgent investigations. Dlamini-Zuma was very affected by what happened in Rwanda in 1994, and would not want history to repeat itself on her watch.
There was a word “gukora” which was used before and during the Rwandan genocide to incite people to mass violence – it means “to work”. Two weeks ago the President of the Senate in Burundi repeatedly used the word gukora with reference to how the government of Burundi plans to deal with its opponents.
Ten months before the genocide in Rwanda began in April 1994, a new radio station emerged which was funded by the political elite called Radio Mille Collines. The radio station told people “to work” or “Gukora”, and everyone knew that was the code word which meant to get your machete and kill Tutsis.
It was no accident that Burundi’s President of the Senate Reverien Ndikuriyo told local officials on October 29th: “The day we give people the authorisation to ‘work,’ it will finish and you will see what will happen.”
Ndikuriyo was well aware that his choice of words had spurred people to commit mass murder in neighbouring Rwanda just 21 years ago. But that was not all he said which was frighteningly reminiscent of the language used to provoke the Rwandan genocide.
Ndikuriyo also used expressions such as “pulverise” and “exterminate” opponents, who he said were “good only for dying”. Referring to the deadline of November 7th, which the government set for its opponents to hand in their illegal weapons, Ndikuyiyo warned that those who refused would be “sprayed like cockroaches”. Rwanda’s radio stations in 1994 had also referred to the government’s opponents as cockroaches.
Just as Hutu officials in Rwanda in 1994 had promised their henchmen they would be rewarded with the properties of Tutsis, Ndikuriyo recently told “heads of districts” in Burundi that nothing would happen to them if they abided by the government’s instructions, and they would be rewarded with properties belonging to “traitors”.
While experts claim that a majority of Burundi’s Hutu do not support Nkurunziza, the danger lies in the propaganda which has already started being propagated by certain radio stations, calling on people to help the authorities. Messages have been spread such as, “if the police fail and the army fails, the 9 million Hutu will not fail”.
So far the targeting killings, torture, and illegal detentions which have become a daily phenomenon in Burundi have not taken on a specifically ethnic dimension, given that the victims tend to be both Tutsi and Hutu political opponents of the ruling party, members of civil society, as well as members of the ruling party.
But Burundi is a country where genocide has been a cyclical occurrence – often spurred by opportunistic politicians resorting first to inflammatory language, and then to statements targeting peoples’ ethnicity. The 1993-2006 genocide in Burundi left 300 000 people dead, and there were two genocides prior to that in 1972 and 1988.
Just as Rwanda’s Hutu leaders had used Hutu youth militias in the form of the Interahamwe to carry out their dirty work in 1994, Burundi’s ruling party has been using its youth wing known at the Imbonerakure to carry out killings and torture alongside the police and intelligence services. Dead bodies are now being found on a daily basis in the capital Bujumbura.
The International Crisis Group warned this week that Burundi risks sliding back into conflict, and the Head of the UN’s Human Rights Office Scott Campbell has also warned that the UN is less equipped to deal with violence in Burundi than it was during the Rwandan genocide.
As we know, the UN peacekeeping force in Rwanda in 1994 did not have either the mandate, budget or capacitated battalions on the ground to have stopped the genocide. As the UN Force Commander in Rwanda in 1994 General Romeo Dallaire said in his book Shake Hands With The Devil, “I was unable to persuade the international community that this tiny, poor, overpopulated country and its people were worth saving from the horror of genocide – even when the measures needed for success were relatively small”.
The lessons garnered from Dallaire’s experience in Rwanda were that the outside world simply did not have the political will to do anything about the bloodletting in Burundi. We are now seeing the warning signs that Burundi could again descend into civil war and even genocide. The only saving grace will be if our own leaders are already discussing how they would operationalise a rapid reaction force to stem the carnage and not waiting until it is too late.
INDEPENDENT FOREIGN BUREAU