In his book about Burundi, Uvin describes what he calls “the micro-politics” of the country’s long war, not just the competition for power among national elites, but the facts of life in urban neighborhoods and on rural hills. The justified grievances of the Hutu majority. The increasing segregation of the two ethnicities, and the ever-growing fear between them, which made violence, especially preemptive violence, a rational strategy for self-defense. The ability and willingness of local elites to organize and foment violence. Uvin writes: “In societies where the rule of law is close to nonexistent and security forces are neither effective nor trusted, small groups of people willing to use violence can create enough chaos and fear to force everyone into making violent choices.”
The Rwandan genocide was a carefully planned case of scapegoating, launched by a government of the majority against a powerless minority. Burundi’s mass violence was an ethnic civil war between a minority government and rebels drawn from the majority, a war between two equally powerful armed factions. In Rwanda, ordinary people killed mainly out of prejudice. In Burundi, it was mainly out of fear. These were different catastrophes, Uvin insists, not to be conflated. But they had essential ingredients in common: “Social exclusion and the ethnicization of politics … are the two central elements to violent conflict in Burundi and Rwanda that, like electrons, spin around a core of massive poverty and institutional weakness.”
Rwanda’s genocide began in April 1994, and ended about four months later, in July, after the Rwandan Patriotic Front had conquered most of the country. Estimates of the dead vary, from around 500,000 to a million; most split the difference and put the number at around 800,000. Some two million Hutus fled the country. Many of the killers went with them, carrying their weapons. By 2006, most of the refugees had returned, forced back by the government of Tanzania and by civil war in what was then called Zaire. Since the end of the genocide, leaders of the RPF had ruled Rwanda. The RPF‘s former commanding general, Paul Kagame, was now Rwanda’s president. Criticism, indeed condemnation, of Kagame’s government was widespread, but far from universal. By the time I set out with Deo, Rwanda was said to have achieved a stable peace—or, as the critics might have said, an absence of war.
Burundi’s tragedy was less notorious but much more prolonged. It continued through the 1990s and into the new millennium. Rather early on, a host of African and Western countries initiated peace negotiations. After four years, an agreement was signed, but the fighting went on. Actually, it may have increased, because the principal Hutu rebel groups weren’t included in the talks. It took another three years for the largest rebel organization to sign on. Wrangling over the fine points and negotiations with the second largest group, the PALIPEHUTU/FNL, were still dragging on when Deo flew home to Burundi for a visit, his fourth trip back, in 2004.
He went via Nairobi. During his layover there, he ran across half a dozen of the Burundian peace negotiators. He recognized many of them from photographs. Following at a distance, he watched the group go en masse into the airport liquor store, laughing and slapping each other on the back—a bunch of men in suits, Hutu and Tutsi, who seemed like the very best of friends. Deo flew to Bujumbura on the same plane as the negotiators, and he watched those men transform themselves into stage enemies when they entered the airport and faced the press. “They arrived and everyone was arguing. It was, ‘No, we didn’t agree on that,’” Deo remembered. “And they are fighting with each other like desperate pigs.” He had felt indignant at the spectacle. He described it indignantly to me, and I thought this was remarkable, that politics as usual could still surprise and disappoint him. In spite of all he’d been through, I thought, he still hadn’t acquired the reflex of cynicism.
But Burundi’s transition to peace had succeeded in spite of extraordinary obstacles. In 2005 a new constitution was ratified. It provided for multiethnic government. The largest of the Hutu rebel groups won the elections that followed, but it had by then become a multiethnic party, and the new president, a former Hutu militia leader, had pledged an end to ethnic war. When Deo and I arrived in Bujumbura, curfews were still observed, and there were reports of sporadic fighting between the government and the PALIPEHUTU/FNL, which still hadn’t agreed to terms. But there were reasons for optimism. Most important, all militias except the FNL had been demobilized and the army and police had been fully integrated. Each was half Hutu and half Tutsi, a great measure of security for all Burundians.
International diplomatic efforts at peacemaking had been ingenious, even daring. Attempts at rebuilding the country had been less impressive so far. According to Peter Uvin, international aid work had fallen back into its old uncoordinated patterns. The total amount of foreign assistance came to about $300 million a year. This was considerably less than Rwanda was receiving. It represented most of Burundi’s national budget, and a lot of the money wasn’t going to ordinary people but, as Uvin writes, to “experts, consultants, managers.”
Since the onset of civil war, Burundi’s per capita gross domestic product had fallen from roughly $180 per year to about $80, the lowest in the world, and of course that paltry figure understated the general penury. In 2003 a United Nations agency had attempted to rank countries by the suffering of their women and children; Burundi was among the bottom five. More recently, Burundi had been designated one of the world’s three worst countries in which to do business.
This last conclusion seemed unfair to the general population, famously diligent and hungry for jobs. Burundians, Deo believed, were also hungry for peace—a notion borne out emphatically in Uvin’s book. Reading Uvin’s postwar research, I felt that in many ways Deo embodied the general feeling of Burundians: far from declaring despair for the future, but also far from being able to forget. According to some estimates, 100,000 had died in the war. Another said 200,000, still another 300,000. If you read too many numbers like those, they begin to take on a pornographic quality—all those lives turned into integers, the bigger the more titillating, and the more abstract.
FOURTEEN
Burundi,
June 2006
We left Bujumbura for several days and drove into the high country, where we stopped again and again so Deo could gaze at the yellow top of Ganza and snap at least one hundred pictures of it. And then one morning we drove farther into the country, toward Deo’s birthplace. The roads went up and up through the mountains of his childhood, and the day grew sunnier, windier, cooler. Vistas widened. Now and then we had to stop to let herds of cows go by, their long horns nearly scraping the windows of our vehicle, Deo and our driver declaring like old codgers that cow horns weren’t what they used to be. We passed a hut with a Coca-Cola sign on a wall. “Coca-Cola can reach here, but not medicines,” said Deo. He laughed. Several American friends of his—three medical students, a young PIH doctor—had arrived to help with Deo’s clinic project and had joined us on this side trip. One of them wondered if the World Health Organization might not enlist the services of Coke. After that, Deo grew increasingly quiet.
It was on the last ascent, on a single-lane dirt road, that I first heard the word gusimbura. When Deo warned me not to speak the name of his dead friend Clovis, I heard the more general warning that gusimbura implied: that reviving painful memories was worse than inconsiderate. Deo had stayed away from his “hill,” from his hometown and its neighborhood, for almost fourteen years. Maybe he was also warning himself, or trying to brace himself for what he knew was coming.
We stopped first in Sangaza, the town where he had gone to elementary school. We walked toward the schoolhouse, across what had been the cemetery of his childhood. I wondered if we were walking over Clovis’s grave, but Deo couldn’t remember its location, and all the wooden crosses had vanished. It was just a lumpy pasture now—owned, Deo said, by someone from Bujumbura—which meant that people from around here had to carry their dead a great distance now.
We walked slowly on toward the schoolhouse. Classes were over for the year, the place deserted. T
he building looked shabbier than he remembered, but otherwise much the same. He pointed through an open window of the fourth-grade classroom, at a sheaf of eucalyptus switches, standing upright in the corner beside the teacher’s desk.
Then we headed toward Butanza. It had been thirteen years since his parents had abandoned the place, but many relatives still lived there, including his grandmother, whom he planned to see, of course. We went on foot, Deo leading the way along the paths he had taken as a schoolboy, the paths and scenery largely unchanged, except that the bald hilltop had been replanted in pine trees, and there were no chimps or monkeys anymore.
His grandmother’s appearance was a little delayed. She’d grown wary of visitors, Deo had been warned. “Every time she sees someone coming, she’s afraid he’s bringing bad news. She will say, ‘Go and ask what he’s bringing,’ before she’ll meet a person entering the compound.” But in a moment, on the arm of a young girl, she came tottering out, a tiny woman covered from head to toe in colorful cloth so that only her weathered face was visible. She had bright, observant eyes. She hugged her grandson and asked him why it had taken him so long to come.
He was visiting Grandmom, but the occasion wasn’t as joyous as the Burundian saying implied. Deo towered over her, his arm around her. He was laughing softly. I thought he was on the verge of tears. I imagined Lonjino was probably there in his mind, as an absence, but for once I knew better than to gusimbura him and ask.
Deo had wanted to return to Butanza unannounced, but it seemed as though half the village was waiting for him when we arrived. Every relative still living in the area, and some who seemed to have become relatives since he’d been away, crowded in on him. One after the other, they recited their troubles. An elderly cousin of Lonjino’s grasped Deo’s hand and said what all the others were indirectly saying: “Give me money. Help me.”
Deo escaped up the steep slope of the mountain Runda. “Gosh, I think this is the first time I took this trip in shoes.” He pointed to a hillside, a rocky outcropping, the place where Clovis had begun to die, and he lingered at the site of his family’s hut, a patch of shrubs in the middle of a pasture. More than a decade of rainy seasons had washed away the ashes of the house. He turned and walked uphill toward a piney woods, but then turned back again and gazed toward the site of the old homestead.
It was getting on toward evening, the shadows of the trees lengthening onto the grassland. Deo was saying that life up here was “harsh,” the soil poor, the journeys steep and long just to gather water, and never mind the distances they’d covered taking cows to summer pastures. And then it was as if the words he was speaking carried his thoughts across one of nature’s narrow boundaries, like the line between rain and snow. He smiled. “You know, I really love it up here in the evening. It’s so quiet and cool and the stars are already out. I remember the first time I saw étoiles filantes. What’s the English name? Shooting stars. I went running to my father, frightened. ‘There’s fire coming from the sky!’”
Deo was still smiling as we started back down the mountain, and then the spell was broken.
A couple of boys had been following our little party—out of curiosity, I’d imagined wrongly. Now each in turn sidled up to Deo and told him that their mothers wanted private audiences. Deo turned to me, issuing orders for a quick getaway: “When we get back to Butanza, get right in the car. Tell the others.”
He didn’t blame the people here. How could they know that back in Iburaya he was just a student with a pocketful of debts? He’d known that this would happen. It was one reason he had stayed away so long. Afterward I asked whether he had told himself he would never come back to Butanza, and whether, now that he had, he regretted his return. He allowed as how the whole experience had been painful, that it was tempting to reject all the obligations of family, and even of affection, and to become a loner in the world, never setting foot in one’s old life. But he had tried that strategy, during his first months in New York and often in his mind since then, and had always found it wanting. “It’s more painful than ‘I’m me, and I come from here,’” he said.
The previous summer, when Deo was working at the PIH hospital in Rwanda, a patient had arrived with a painfully enlarged spleen. The cause was not mysterious; untreated bouts of malaria often lead to splenomegaly. But around the swelling in the patient’s abdomen there were several round burn marks, and these puzzled the American doctors. Deo recognized them at once. Someone in the patient’s family, probably the father, had heated the end of a metal pipe and applied it to the place that hurt. Deo’s own father had done this to him as a boy, applying the red-hot end of a spear around an abscess on Deo’s thigh. The pain of the burns, and the hatred he felt toward his father, had obscured the pain of the abscess—temporarily.
“Distracting pain with pain,” Deo called this practice. It was common among peasants in Rwanda and Burundi, who had little access to pharmacology but a lot of experience with pain. It was a gruesome and harmful form of palliation, and for Deo it expressed a psychological truth with broad application—that pains exist in layers, with the most excruciating at the top obscuring the pains beneath. So many years of paying attention to the topmost pain of war, he felt, had left many of his people numb to all the rest. In his country now, any death that wasn’t violent was accounted “a good death,” he said.
I remembered this idea many times while we were traveling in Burundi.
We stayed several days in the mountains of Bururi province. On one afternoon, Deo and his young American friends scaled a cliff beside a waterfall. Deo still relished a hike—against all odds, I would have thought. Above another waterfall and another cliff, he and his party of hikers came upon a settlement of six Tutsi families. Deo had to fend off one of their bulls—“Of course, being a cowboy, I knew how to handle it.” He spoke with some of the settlers. They told him they had fled the civil war with their cows and seedlings and ended up there on their mountaintop, in splendid isolation, beyond the reach of any road or even trail. “It’s beautiful up there,” Deo said, and I wondered if, for a moment, he envied them.
On another day we visited the Séminaire du Buta, a Catholic high school in that mountainous region, one of the best secondary schools in Burundi, and a significant place to Deo’s family. It was here, in 1997, that one of his brothers had been killed. (Another brother had narrowly escaped.) This was just the sort of thing one didn’t talk about, at least not in Deo’s family. He didn’t tell me that he had lost a brother at the school, not until after we had visited the place. Even then, he didn’t talk about that brother, not what he remembered about him, not what they had done together, nothing. The only things Deo conveyed were affection for him and grief—via silence, as I understood that silence.
An old friend of Deo’s family gave us our tour, Abbé Zacharie Bukuru, a tall, broad-shouldered priest. He had been the school’s director back in 1997. In the midst of the civil war, brutal on all sides, Zacharie had pulled off something remarkable. He’d managed to make peace within the student body.
He had forbidden the students their radios. Night after night he had cloistered them and let them talk, intervening only now and then to limit the invective between the Hutu and the Tutsi boys. The proof that this had worked arrived in a dreadful way. “Hutu, Tutsi were everywhere here together, praying together. We were an example of unity,” Zacharie told me. He added, “They wanted—how do you say in English—eradicate this example of living together.” By “they” he meant the contingent of rebel Hutu militia which, on the morning of April 30, 1997, came out of the mountains and descended on the school, like the wolf on the fold.
The soldiers busted open the doors to the dormitory, and their commander—weirdly enough, a Rwandan woman, a veteran of that genocide—ordered the students to divide themselves: “Hutu brothers over here, Tutsi cockroaches there.” The Hutus would not abandon their schoolmates. The soldiers tried to kill them all. It was said that some of the dying boys quoted Jesus on the cross, crying
out to God to forgive their killers because they didn’t know what they were doing. There were 150 students at the school. Some were wounded, and many escaped. Deo’s brother, the one who survived, the one he could talk about, had climbed down a rope ladder; he got away with a minor injury to his foot and a grave wound to his psyche. In all, forty students were murdered.
Zacharie had been the militia’s main target. I didn’t ask him how he’d managed to escape. I had the strong impression that he had long been asking himself that question and all its corollaries. He simply began to tell me the story. (Zacharie was at ease in several languages, but not in English, which he spoke out of courtesy to me.)
He was in his bedroom when he heard the first shots. “I said, ‘God, what happened?’ I said, ‘Oh, my children, what can I do?’ I wanted to go out, to get to them, to protect them. Then I heard the second gun.” He imitated the sound of a heavy machine gun.
He had hidden in the storeroom behind his office. He took Deo and me there. “I was dead! Try to imagine. There was three hundred soldiers here outside. There was perhaps five hundred altogether. They were drunk. Can you imagine? Was terrible. Inferno. They shattered this wall. We have repaired it.”
He took us to the memorial, forty crypts painted magenta outside a small chapel. Portraits of the murdered boys were painted on a wall above the altar. “Oh, my poor boys,” Zacharie said in a squeaky voice, a choked parody of his deep baritone.
I stared at the faces of the dead students. “You know, Zacharie, just looking at them, I can’t tell you which ones were Tutsis, which Hutus.”