January 1, 2004
Civil war ended in most of Burundi in late 2003 after the government concluded several agreements with the major rebel group, the Forces for the Defense of Democracy (FDD). The government and army are dominated by the Tutsi minority while the FDD and another smaller rebel group, the Forces for National Liberation (FNL), are drawn from the Hutu, the majority population in Burundi. At the end of 2003, government forces, aided by their new FDD allies, continued the war against the FNL, particularly in and around Bujumbura, the national capital.
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Civilians Targeted by Combatants
All parties to the war commit violations of international humanitarian law (http://hrw.org/reports/2003/burundi1203/). Among the massacres attributed to government forces in 2003 were the killings of dozens of civilians at Kabezi, Muyira, and Ruziba. Rebel forces deliberately kill civilians who refuse their demands for support or who are thought to support the government. Combatants of all forces rape women and girls, with rebels sometimes abducting them for service as "wives" and for other kinds of domestic labor. All parties have incorporated children into their forces, sometimes against their will, generally making them serve as laborers, porters, or spies, and exposing them to the risks and rigors of military life. Soldiers and rebels also require adults to transport goods or to perform other services for them. Combatants on all sides also pillage and destroy the goods, food stocks, and homes of civilians identified as supporters of their opponents and force them to flee their homes for weeks or months at a time. The arrangements between government soldiers and former FDD combatants fighting the FNL at the end of 2003 were often informal, making it difficult to attribute responsibility for the conduct of their forces.
Justice
In the domain of justice, the government of Burundi seems driven more by expediency than commitment to accountability. When the FDD insisted that "provisional immunity" for violations of international humanitarian law and other crimes was a condition for any agreement, the government accepted the deal protecting both FDD forces and its own soldiers from prosecution. If the arrangement results in no prosecutions for these crimes, the government will have both violated international law and reinforced impunity for the kind of grave ethnically-based crimes that have troubled the country for three decades. Under the Arusha Accord, the first of several agreements to end the Burundian war, the parties asked the United Nations to provide an international commission to investigate violations of international humanitarian law committed in Burundi since 1962. Despite Burundian government requests to have the commission named, the Security Council had not done so by the end of 2003. Burundian authorities continued to insist that they wanted an international investigation even after signing the "provisional immunity" agreement, but it was unclear what purpose an investigation would serve if its results would not lead to prosecution.
Some 8,000 detainees awaited trial at the end of 2003, many of them held for years without trial because of the slowness and inadequacy of the judicial system. According to the late 2003 agreement, several thousand FDD supporters who had been jailed for rebel activities were to be classified as political prisoners and to be provisionally released. In addition, judicial reforms in 2003 increased from three to seventeen the number of chambers for trying crimes punishable by death or life imprisonment. Implementing the reform will be difficult because the panels of magistrates must be balanced by ethnic group and gender: Hutu, the majority group, and women, are few in number among magistrates. Once the new panels are set up, however, the backlog of persons awaiting trial should be quickly reduced.
The military justice system, lacking in material and human resources, did little to render justice for crimes committed by soldiers. In 2003 it carried out one highly inadequate court martial of two officers accused in the 2002 massacre of 173 persons at Itaba and found them guilty of only a minor infraction punishable by time already served.
Land and the Return of Refugees
Land is highly valued by Burundians, most of whom live by raising crops or animals on small holdings in the largely rural country. With the prospect of an end to the conflict, some 300,000 refugees and displaced persons may return to claim property that they left behind, some of them many years ago. In some parts of the country, particularly along the fertile lakeshore of Lake Tanganyika, their land has been appropriated by other persons—including important military officers. In similar circumstances ten years ago, the return of an earlier generation of refugees and ensuing contests over the control of land sparked the tensions that led to the beginning of the civil war. Finding solutions to land conflicts that respect the rights of the various parties poses a major problem for the government.
Key International Actors
International actors are committed to avoiding a genocide like that which occurred in Rwanda, the neighbor and demographic twin of Burundi, but find it hard to muster either the resources or the consistent involvement necessary to contribute to a permanent end to the conflict. Unwilling to be enmeshed in what might be a long war in Burundi, the U.N. declined to provide a peace-keeping force after the Arusha Accords were signed. The newly re-organized African Union instead sent troops to enforce the cease-fire and assist in disarming combatants. Even with African nations providing soldiers under the direction of South Africa, foreign donors could not find the money to fully fund the operation. South Africa, on which peace-keeping duties were a major financial burden, brokered the late 2003 agreement between the government and the FDD, eager for such a settlement that would lead to the U.N. taking over peace-keeping duties.
International leaders generally were prepared to sacrifice justice for a fragile, uncertain, and perhaps short-term stability; they hailed the government-FDD agreement and made no mention of the "provisional immunity" it guaranteed. They were willing to make occasional protests about violations of international humanitarian law, but did not insist on accountability for the criminals.
