The Country in the Mirror

As international darling Rwanda becomes increasingly authoritarian, neighboring Burundi experiments with a unique and chaotic brand of central African democracy.

BY JOSH KRON | JUNE 14, 2010

Behind one of the beaches that line Burundi's capital city, Bujumbura, 10 men sat at a bar in the afternoon sun, passing cigarettes, buying bottles of beer. I had just arrived on the bus from Rwanda to report on the neighboring country. They welcomed me to their group, and soon I asked, nervously, whether ethnicity was still a problem. One of them threw his arm around my shoulder and gave me a cold Primus beer. He laughed and started pointing.

"He's Hutu," the man said, going down the circle. There were even students from Rwanda, on vacation at the beach. "Hutu, Hutu, Tutsi." The men smiled and raised their glasses. "That one over there is a Tutsi, a colonel in the army." It didn't matter that ethnic war had decimated Burundi, as it had Rwanda; the banter wasn't taken offensively, and the men were drunk. This was life in Burundi -- in your face, but honest.

The contrast with Rwanda couldn't be more striking. Later this summer, Rwandan President Paul Kagame will face a test as the country holds its second presidential election since the 1994 genocide. The test is not so much the vote itself -- Kagame is almost guaranteed to win -- but whether he can survive the political lightning storm surrounding the vote. In April, Victoire Ingabire, a Hutu presidential hopeful, was arrested for challenging Kagame over crimes committed in the genocide's immediate aftermath. In May, her American lawyer was arrested too, over genocide denial. In what many see as a fit of defensiveness, Kagame has clamped down on newspapers, other politicians, and members of his own cadre, and has delivered fiery sermons defending his virtue.

From their economies to their geology, Rwanda and Burundi are virtually identical in almost every way. The two countries share the same two ethnic groups and the same tensions between them -- specifically, that from roughly the 16th century on, the minority Tutsi have ruled over the pastoral, majority Hutu in varying degrees of strictness, and the two countries' conflicts have affected one other's with often tragic results.

But recently, the two countries have taken starkly different paths. In contrast to orderly Rwanda, the darling of the international aid community, Burundi is violent, dysfunctional, and chaotic. On the plus side, civil society in Burundi is indigenous and true, and unlike in Rwanda, ethnicity is not being ignored. Politics can breathe.

Burundi is also holding elections this summer, a series of local, presidential, and parliamentary votes. The playing field in Burundi is more open than in Rwanda, and with myriad parties, politics more reflective of society. But it is also more tumultuous. So far, five leading parties -- including one led by one of the country's most notorious rebel veterans -- have announced intentions to boycott June's presidential vote over allegations that President Pierre Nkurunziza already rigged the first set of local-level elections, held in May. Politicians have been shot. People have already taken to the streets. Tear gas has already been fired.

The parallel contests offer an opportunity to reflect on which political system stands a better chance of solving ethnic tensions that have gripped this war-wracked region for generations -- and the results might confound our assumptions.

ROBERTO SCHMIDT/AFP/Getty Images

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Josh Kron is a freelance journalist based in Kampala, Uganda.

ALLENELI

4:50 AM ET

June 15, 2010

Belgium?

How can an article that gestures at the history of ethnic conflict in Rwanda-Burundi not mention AT ALL the ways in which ethnicity became the foundational aspect of Belgian colonial rule? The way this "analysis" reads, it sounds as if politics just grew more tense in the nineteenth century by happenstance. Why not have someone write about these countries who knows more about them?

 

ALLENELI

5:01 AM ET

June 15, 2010

And yes,

I recognize that Belgium didn't get Rwanda-Burundi till after WWI, and that the Germans had it first. My point is, there are ways to convey the complicated international political histories of these two countries, even in short pieces like this. Ethnic politics in the region were not solely indigenous creations.

And incidentally, for a freelance writer based in Uganda, I'm surprised the author didn't talk about the complicated politics surrounding the change in the national language from French to English, and the rise of the Uganda-Rwandan anglophones.

 

TOMMIE NOEL

2:15 AM ET

July 14, 2010

Burundi Democracy

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