Download Managing Ethnic Conflict through Political Reform

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Friday, August 28, 2015
Burundi's Balancing Act
Making Peace After Genocide
Alan J. Kuperman
ALAN J. KUPERMAN is Associate Professor at the University of Texas at
Austin, and editor of Constitutions and Conflict Management in Africa:
Preventing Civil War Through Institutional Design [1].
Throughout Burundi’s history since independence, intermittent bouts of
political turmoil have escalated tragically into genocide between the country’s
Hutu and Tutsi ethnic groups. Many international observers warned that this
year would be no different. The country was hit by a succession of political
shocks starting in the spring, when President Pierre Nkurunziza ignored the
constitution’s two-term limit to announce that he was running again, on
grounds that his first term should not count because he had been appointed
rather than elected. His defiance triggered mass protests in April, an
unsuccessful military coup in May, a call from the opposition in June to
boycott the July election, and an incipient rebellion.
This summer, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights declared [2] that
Burundi was “on the brink of devastating violence.” A UN human rights panel
alarmingly warned [3] of “mass atrocities.” And yet, those predictions have not
borne out. Burundi made it through the controversial elections, and
Nkurunziza was inaugurated for a third term in August—without the country
erupting into ethnic violence.
How Burundi accomplished such a feat might surprise those who believe that
preventing genocide requires humanitarian military intervention. Instead, in
this case, ethnic violence was averted through ingenious political reform,
which offers important lessons for managing ethnic conflict elsewhere,
particularly next door in Rwanda.
The story begins with the ethnic balance of power at Burundi’s independence
in 1962. A small Tutsi minority, only 15 percent of the population, ruled by
monarchy over the Hutu majority. In 1965, Tutsi forces responded to a coup
attempt by slaughtering much of the Hutu elite. Oppression of Hutu continued,
spurring a rebellion in 1972 that provoked a much larger retaliation: the Tutsi
killed an estimated 200,000 Hutu in about four months. In 1988, the Tutsi
government overreacted yet again to localized inter-ethnic violence by killing
thousands more Hutu.
The latest round of ethnic violence exploded in 1993, when Tutsi soldiers
derailed a transition to majority rule by assassinating the newly elected Hutu
president, Melchior Ndadaye. That murder sparked a decade-long civil war,
killing an estimated 300,000, both Hutu and Tutsi.
Gradually, the international community fostered a peace process by imposing
sanctions, offering mediation, and deploying peacekeepers. Yet, forging a
peace agreement proved daunting, since it required simultaneously
addressing three contradictory concerns: Hutu demands for majority rule,
Tutsi fears of retribution and exclusion, and the pathological role of ethnicity in
politics. Nelson Mandela, the lead mediator for three years, needed to utilize
all of his moral authority, charisma, and experience to accomplish that unlikely
hat trick.
The outcome, Burundi’s 2005 democratic Constitution, gave the Hutu their
long-sought goal of majority rule. At the same time, to alleviate the minority’s
physical insecurity from surrendering control, the power-sharing deal gave the
Tutsi half of the positions in the army and police, as well as in the senate. The
accord also guaranteed the Tutsi one of two key security posts—minister of
the army or police—and reserved one of two vice presidential slots for a Tutsi
from one of the group’s traditional political parties to ensure a legitimate
representative.
The minority’s anxiety about political exclusion was further addressed by
guaranteeing the Tutsi 40 percent of the slots in the cabinet and national
assembly, and one-third of all mayoral posts, ensuring their overrepresentation at all major levels of governance. Since constitutional
amendments require an 80 percent vote, and major legislation a two-thirds
super-majority, the Tutsi effectively obtained a legislative veto on vital issues,
protecting them against the tyranny of the majority.
Perhaps the most important innovation in the peace deal was a requirement
that each political party run a multi-ethnic slate of candidates in each
prefecture, for election by proportional representation. For example, a
traditionally Hutu party now needed to insert a Tutsi in every third slot in its list
of parliamentary candidates, so that if it won nine seats, three would go to
Tutsi. As a result, politics stopped revolving around the existential battle
between Hutu and Tutsi, and instead focused on the electoral competition
between Hutu-led parties. Since these parties could succeed only through
ethnic inclusion, there was little incentive for extremist rhetoric. The ethnic
identities of Hutu and Tutsi were not eroded—if anything, the power-sharing
system reinforced them—but they lost political salience.
As the leading Belgian scholar Filip Reyntjens explains in his chapter of my
new book, Constitutions and Conflict Management in Africa: Preventing Civil
War Through Institutional Design [1], “Burundi’s main divide is now between
parties rather than ethnic groups, and when violence occurs it is political
rather than ethnic.” Overcoming the country’s primary political cleavage—the
ostensibly ancient hatred between Hutu and Tutsi—and doing so within barely
two decades, is an absolutely stunning achievement of conflict management
through constitutional reform. No humanitarian military intervention has ever
prevented genocide so successfully.
Burundi, of course, still faces serious challenges. The former Hutu rebels who
came to power in the 2005 elections turned out to be corrupt and
authoritarian. That has fostered low-level political violence and, since 2010, a
boycott by opposition parties of presidential and parliamentary elections. This
year’s nascent rebellion, in response to Nkurunziza’s term-limit violation, has
resulted in dozens of deaths. To avert escalation of such violence, the
international community should encourage the opposition to focus instead on
the next election cycle—when even the president admits he is term-limited—
and use foreign aid to pressure the government to conduct a free and fair
election.
But what is most notable, in light of Burundi’s history of genocidal bloodletting,
is the absence of violent ethnic extremism in the current crisis.
The lesson—that ethnicity is best defused by acknowledging and addressing
it—should be applied more broadly and especially to neighboring Rwanda,
which has an almost identical ethnic mix. Regrettably, in Rwanda, the minority
Tutsi regime still clings to power, by denying the existence of ethnicity and
outlawing even the mention of Hutu and Tutsi. That effort to erase history and
identity has backfired, however, by exacerbating the seething resentment
among Rwanda’s Hutu majority. Indeed, until the Rwandan regime embraces
Burundi’s example of majority rule and minority inclusion, Rwanda will remain
central Africa’s true genocidal powder keg.
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Source URL: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/burundi/2015-08-28/burundisbalancing-act
Links
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Constitutions-Conflict-Management-AfricaInstitutional/dp/0812246586/ref=as_sl_pc_tf_til?tag=n0b3f20&linkCode=w00&linkId=TKMKBI46OO74WKDC&creativeASIN=08122
46586
[2]
http://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=16221&
LangID=E
[3]
http://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=16243&
LangID=E