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NEWS DESK
APRIL 27, 2016
On the Run in Burundi
BY JAMES VERINI
“Where there are people, there is conflict,” a Burundian saying goes. It has been relevant in this tiny Francophone country for as long as most of its inhabitants can remember. Perhaps no African state has suffered so much to so little outcry, or even notice, from the world, for which Burundi holds little geopolitical or economic significance. “There’s no social contract sealed among Burundians,” Melchior Nzigamasabo, a Burundian political observer and a liaison to the British High Commission, told me.“The country’s defining characteristic is disagreement.”
Four decades of Belgian colonial government fostered little development and a lot of ethnic animosity. In 1961, the first elected Prime Minister was assassinated; in 1965, another was killed. In 1972, as many as three hundred thousand Hutus were killed by the Tutsi-led army. (This “first genocide,” as it is sometimes called, passed almost without notice outside Burundi, but did incense Richard Nixon. “I’m tired of this business of letting Africans eat”—meaning kill—“a hundred thousand people and doing nothing about it,” he said to Henry Kissinger, who in turn noted that more people had been killed in three months in Burundi than had died in eight years of war in Vietnam.) That was followed by a coup in 1976, another in 1987, and another in 1993; after the President was assassinated in the last, as many as a hundred and fifty thousand Burundians were killed in a bout of violence that some consider a second genocide. A Hutu rebellion spurred a civil war that lasted from 1993 to 2005 and left another estimated three hundred thousand dead. In 1994, yet another President was killed when the plane in which he was flying with the Rwandan President was shot down, touching off the more famous genocide next door.
Pierre Nkurunziza was in his thirties when he left the army to join the Hutu rebellion. His father and five of his six siblings had been killed in 1972. After a peace accord in 2005, Nkurunziza was elected President by a broad coalition of Hutus and Tutsis in parliament, who were excited by his claims to be the candidate of reconciliation. And, for a few years, he seemed at least to want to be sincere, building an inclusive government and reducing ethnic strife. But, around the 2010 election, Nkurunziza began trampling his opposition. There was a string of political assassinations. His party formed the Imbonerakure, a citizen militia. Then, in April of last year, after nearly a decade in office, he announced his intention to run for a third term, defying popular will and, many believe, the Constitution, which limits Presidents to two terms. (Nkurunziza’s supporters claimed that, because he’d come to power in a special vote of parliament, he was eligible.) The Constitutional Court ruled in his favor, but there were allegations of intimidation, and one of the justices fled to Rwanda, saying he had been threatened into the ruling.
By the time Nkurunziza formally announced his plans, a mass movement known as Halte au Troisième Mandat, or Stop the Third Term, had sprung up. It was conceived by opposition politicians and civil-society figures, but peopled by ordinary Burundians. Among them were Jean and Émile (as I will call them), two men whom I met in a safe house in a poor enclave of Bujumbura, the country’s capital. The enclave—a dense grid of cobblestone and dirt roads and stucco houses—had, along with many other poor parts of the city, been the scene of violent demonstrations against Nkurunziza last year. But by February, when I met them, the area was tensely calm: Nkurunziza had suspended non-governmental organizations and shut down the independent radio stations. Politicians, activists, lawyers, and reporters had gone into exile in neighboring countries and the West, often after escaping attempts on their lives. Well over two hundred thousand Burundians had fled to refugee camps in Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, and Congo. And demonstration leaders like Jean and Émile were being hunted down.
The two friends were living on the run, sleeping on the floors of friends and relatives. They avoided going outside in the day, when police and soldiers patrolled, and were constantly anxious about house raids after dark. Imbonerakure informants were everywhere. When they did travel, they took taxis, with drivers they knew, and ducked down in the backseat. Our host, a journalist and clandestine activist, suspected that he was being sought by the government, and had sent his wife and son to live abroad, while he stayed in the safe house.
“Everything was going down, everything was declining,” Jean said, when I asked why they had joined the demonstrations last April. They explained that they might have considered supporting Nkurunziza’s staying in power if he had done anything for average Burundians like them. He hadn’t. Burundi had always been poor—it ranks second to last in the world in gross domestic product per capita, according to the World Bank—but Nkurunziza had, incredibly, made it poorer. “He says he develops the country, but it’s not true,” Émile said.
At first, the protests had been peaceful, they recalled, but soon police started to shoot tear gas into the crowds, then live ammunition into the air. The demonstrators erected barricades of scrap metal and burning tires, and threw stones at the police. The police responded by beating and shooting protesters. Dozens were killed and hundreds maimed. Some protesters responded by beating, and in a few cases killing, police.
Jean was arrested in June, he told me, and stretched out a forearm covered in scars. He lifted a pants leg to reveal a scarred ankle. Police beat him for two days with metal wires and wooden sticks, he said. Eventually his family bribed the police to let him go. Around the same time, Émile’s home was raided and his wife and child detained. An officer told his wife that he would kill Émile. When Émile tried to sneak home one night, police were waiting. Émile showed me the scars of two bullet wounds in his left calf. The bullets had shot straight through the leg before he ran from the scene, but there was one still embedded in his right foot. He showed me a sewn-up hole on his New Balance cross-trainer, which he didn’t want to abandon—it was a really good sneaker, he said.
A point on which many Burundians with whom I spoke agreed, whether they respected Nkurunziza or hated him, was that the current crisis is an improvement on previous crises in one significant respect: it is political, not ethnic. The opposition is ethnically mixed—for example, Jean is Hutu, Émile is Tutsi—and so is Nkurunziza’s ruling party. And yet, as Jean-Marie Ngendahayo, a former politician, pointed out, the fact that Nkurunziza is not an ethnic fanatic may make him more dangerous. “He can kill anyone,” he said.
Nkurunziza’s bid for a third term was probably inspired by Paul Kagame, the President of neighboring Rwanda, who, last year, pushed through a constitutional amendment that will allow him to stay in power for almost two more decades. Kagame’s turn toward despotism is forgiven because Rwanda is arguably the best-managed country in Africa, and, while Kagame is a figure of awe among Africans, including Burundians, Nkurunziza is, increasingly, an object of contempt and ridicule. He is referred to by his detractors as Peter, as though he does not deserve the title “President,” or a surname, or even the use of the French version of his name. “He’s always in the rural area, playing football,” Émile told me. Nkurunziza is known to be a great lover of sport. An ordained pastor, around the time of the election, he could be found on Sundays preaching at different churches around the country—though not in the capital, which locals say he has avoided since a feeble attempt at a coup, by a breakaway general, last May. It was put down in two days but gave Nkurunziza license to brand the demonstrators “insurgents” and “enemies of democracy.” Still, anyone who wants to see him—his ministers, legislators, and even, recently, a United Nations Security Council delegation—must travel to his home in Gitega. The word “messianic” comes up often in discussions of his psychology. He likes to say that he was chosen by God to lead Burundi.
Nkurunziza was elected to his third term in July, supposedly beating his nearest opponent by fifty per cent. When I went to Bujumbura shortly after the election, I found that his propaganda had become a reality; by then there really was an insurgency, well-armed and making threats on social media. Nearly every night gun battles broke out, and in the mornings bodies lay in the streets. Arbitrary mass arrests and disappearances had become routine.
By February, the city had been divided into military sectors, and the gun battles had been replaced by grenade attacks, presumably the work of insurgents. Sometimes the grenades were set off near police posts, but more often they blew up in random spaces, where they killed only bystanders. The theory was that they were being tossed from motorbikes, but no one I spoke with had seen this. A newspaper headline read “LA MYSTÈRE DES GRENADES”; the reporters had no more information than anyone else. Bujumburans soon grew accustomed to the explosions. Early one morning, I arrived at the aftermath of one in the lot of a gas station. Less than thirty minutes after the grenade had gone off, the police had already come and gone, the one corpse had been removed, and a station attendant was washing away the last of the blood with water from a plastic margarine tub. There were two more explosions that day.
With every new grenade, soldiers and police were sweeping through the poor districts and dragging off more men. I spoke with a man I’ll call Auguste. A barber, he hadn’t been politically active before Nkurunziza sought a third term. “If he gets another term, we’ll all die of hunger,” Auguste told me he remembers thinking. He joined the protests, at first occasionally, then every day. His barbershop closed after the police shot a tear-gas cannister into it, and, as the state’s reaction became more brutal, he grew more committed to the movement. He was arrested in October, after police surrounded a bar where he and a group of friends were hanging out. The group was brought outside and their forearms tied behind their backs. They were pushed into a truck and driven to a prison.
Auguste wasn’t charged with a crime. He wasn’t asked any questions. Instead, he was brought into a courtyard with three other prisoners. Their money, phones, belts, and shoes were taken. They were made to lie down on their fronts, their forearms still tied. Stones were placed in their mouths so that they could not scream. Security agents whipped them with rods of rebar. The beating went on, intermittently, for two hours. When the prisoners were taken to a cell, they could barely walk. After sitting on a cement floor, his wounds untreated, for a week, Auguste was taken to talk to an officer. Auguste was informed that he was responsible for a grenade attack, and told to confess. He refused, and was whipped again. (Auguste told me he knew nothing about that attack or any other.)
After another week, he was brought to court. Without asking about the circumstances of the case, the judge remanded Auguste to Bujumbura’s central jail. After two months, Auguste managed to arrange for enough money (about two hundred dollars) to bribe the judge for his release. As we spoke, Auguste pulled from his wallet his release papers, which instructed him not to hinder the investigation—which investigation, it wasn’t clear; the papers listed no charges—or to “cause scandal.” Since his release, he has been staying at the homes of friends. “I can’t face the policemen anymore,” he said.
The prison where Auguste was tortured, which belongs to the National Intelligence Services, is known around Bujumbura as “the secret prison.” In fact, everyone knows where it is, in the middle of downtown, in a residential-looking compound near Regina Mundi, the central cathedral, and by a primary school whose khaki-uniformed students walk by the torture chambers every morning and afternoon. I spoke with several men who were beaten there, and their stories were very similar: the tied forearms, the rebar rods, the stones in the mouths, the unanswerable accusations. In July, the U.N. reported that, of the roughly three hundred prisoners who were known to have been taken there, most had been “subjected to torture and cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment.”
I also spoke with men who’d been tortured in local police stations and army installations. One was whipped with wires for hours. Another had his mouth smashed with a rifle butt and was held for days without treatment. He parted his lips to show me a line of broken teeth. At least they were alive. In December, after a group of insurgents raided a weapons depot in Bujumbura, several nights of summary executions by security forces and the Imbonerakure followed. Later that month, France 24 reported that it had possibly found a mass grave that was the result of these massacres. On Monday, the International Criminal Court announced that it will begin an examination in Burundi.
Many more people—no one is sure how many—have simply vanished. When this happens, families have little recourse. They can go to the jails, where guards may accept bribes to find out if the son or brother or father in question is there. Sometimes the guards locate him, usually not. If a guard takes pity, he might admit that the prisoner was there but has been “sent up country,” which means that he is dead.
After the day of the three grenade explosions, the government banned motorbikes in the city center, to reassure citizens. This was typical of its public slant on the crisis, which was that there was no crisis. Nkurunziza’s deputy spokesman, Jean-Claude Karerwa, told me that the foreign press was engaged in “media hype against our country.” The demonstrations had included perhaps a few hundred people, Karerwa said, not thousands, as had been reported, and had “nothing at all” to do with the third term. Rather, they had been the work of “anti-democratic” insurrectionists “trying to deceive opinion and the world.” He suggested that footage of police abusing protesters had been staged, as had photographs of corpses with their forearms tied behind their backs. The Burundian politicians, activists, and journalists who’d fled, as well as the Constitutional Court justice, were part of the plan, as was Rwanda. (Given Paul Kagame’s history of meddling in the region, this last assertion is entirely conceivable.) So, too, Karerwa insisted, was the international community.
Many Burundians I spoke with believe that Nkurunziza’s turn toward despotism is creating a multiethnic generation of radicals. Those who had been tortured, like Auguste and Jean, said they not only supported a rebellion against the government but were actively trying to aid it. So is a growing faction of the military, it appears—the source, presumably, of the insurgency’s weapons. Three of Nkurunziza’s favorite commanders have been killed, and the sophistication of the attacks suggests they were likely perpetrated by other soldiers. “Many of us are on the side of the insurgents,” a colonel told me in the safe house one day. But when I asked why there had not been another attempt at a coup, he said, “They kill you if they suspect you’re connected to the insurgency. Every week a soldier is arrested on suspicion.”
Even some in Nkurunziza’s party have tired of him. Many disagreed with his decision to run again. According to one party official, a petition opposing the move was circulated among party members before the election. Nkurunziza ignored it. “Only assassination can put an end to this,” the official said. He begged me not to write anything that might identify him. “They would kill me, I’m telling you,” he said.
One afternoon, in February, I went to speak with Leonce Ngendakumana, one of the few opposition leaders who has managed to stay in Burundi while also staying alive. Ngendakumana, the president of one of the country’s oldest independent parties, was living under an informal kind of house arrest. The road to his home was guarded by a tired-looking policeman and soldier and a coil of rusting razor wire they had laid across the road. It was up to this pair to decide when Ngendakumana could come and go and who could see him, a responsibility they were bearing with the despondent sadism common to police states. As my driver turned off the engine, the soldier left the wall he and his partner were leaning against and approached the car. He ambled around it, eyeing it appraisingly. He walked to the razor wire and pushed at it with his foot, as though to let us pass. The driver restarted the engine. The soldier then turned around and looked at us with a deliberative expression for a few seconds, took hold of the razor wire, placed it across the road again, and returned to the wall. He and the policeman stared at us flatly. That was that.
Ngendakumana was able to get out and meet me some days later, at my hotel. This was only the fifth time he’d left his home since the crisis began. “I’m in prison,” he sighed. He expressed his hope that the “international community” would force Nkurunziza into line. I said I suspected that was unlikely. He agreed. He lamented the will of African Presidents to hold on to power. “It’s a kind of sickness,” he said. So desperately embarrassed was he of his country at the moment, he was contemplating a foreign-policy suggestion of Donald Trump’s—or, at least, he thought it was Trump’s. (Trump appears not to have said it.) “The world should return to the colonial period so that Africans can really value democracy and do it right this time,” Ngendakumana said. “If a colonial power offered to occupy this country and improve all our institutions, it wouldn’t take long for Burundians to agree.”
I asked why he hadn’t left Burundi. He explained that the country’s political upheavals had forced him to grow up in exile. During his political career, he had fled four times for fear of assassination. He would not leave again. “I will be buried in Burundi,” he said. “Even the ruling party knows this.”
The day before I left Bujumbura, I called the journalist at the safe house to try to arrange another conversation with Jean and Émile. It would not be possible, he told me. Jean had been arrested again.
On the Run in Burundi - The New Yorker
