Civil War In Burundi Preventable
Flying into Burundi you cross the calm waters of Lake Tanganyika and the lush, verdant hillsides of eastern Zaire. You drive into the capital, Bujumbura, and it looks to be a charming little lakefront town, where longhorn cattle mingle amid the traffic and the banana trees.
Your first stop is the prime minister’s office, where America’s U.N. representative, Madeleine Albright, is delivering a message. The first thing you notice about the buildings is that they have all their windows - a vast improvement over Liberia.
The air is clear. The city is quiet. And then a young Burundian official waiting outside the Prime Ministry pierces your mirage. “We are all buying guns,” she says softly. “We are living hour by hour here.”
Welcome to Burundi, a country tottering on the edge of the abyss, deciding hour by hour if it is going to follow neighboring Rwanda and plunge itself into a full-scale tribal war between Tutsi and Hutu, or somehow pull back.
For the moment, Burundi is Rwanda in slow motion. The ethnic cleansing here by Tutsi and Hutu - the same tribal mix as in Rwanda - happens just every other day, in every other village. There is still a shred of order. But the best-case scenario is for increasing violence; the worst case is for a Rwanda-style cataclysm that will spill hundreds of thousands more refugees across central Africa.
The more agrarian Hutu make up 85 percent of Burundi’s population, the Tutsi 15 percent. But the Tutsi are the elite in business, army and government - which they controlled until the early 1990s, when, under pressure from Western powers, an election was held and a Hutu naturally won.
But in October 1993 the Hutu president was killed, igniting a brief ethnic war in which 100,000 people (mostly Hutu) died in clashes between the small but heavily armed Tutsi minority and the large but machete-armed Hutu majority.
Since then the two sides have tried to negotiate a more stable power-sharing agreement, but the 1994 Tutsi-Hutu civil war in Rwanda has only encouraged extremist Tutsi and Hutu in Burundi to seize what they want by force. They are two communities trying to divide a pie while each holds a gun to the other’s head.
A year ago Bujumbura was still a mixed city of Tutsi and Hutu, but lately most Hutu have been driven out. In reaction, rebel Hutu, who control parts of the countryside, have tightened a ring around the capital, where they look down on the Tutsi from the surrounding hilltops. Two weeks ago, rebel Hutu cut the electricity and water to Bujumbura. The capital has an eerie feel - so much beauty, so much fear.
The United States learned in Bosnia that it, and only it, had the power to catalyze the world to get organized to stop mass killing once it starts. Should the Clinton administration use that power to try to stop potential genocide in a country of zero strategic interest to the United States? I say yes, because I don’t think it would take that much, and a little preventive diplomacy here can go a long way and save a lot of anguish later. One reason Rwanda became the humanitarian disaster it did was because the international community was so slow to react when it commenced.
The Clinton administration has explored with its allies the idea of putting together a rapid reaction force - with the U.S. contribution confined to logistical support - to curb any mass killing in Burundi if it starts. The administration also sent Madeleine Albright, where she appealed to the parties to avoid “committing national suicide.”
But what’s needed now is a high-level international diplomatic effort that employs carrots and sticks to get the parties in Burundi into a new power-sharing agreement, and only Washington has the power to catalyze such a mission.
Preventive diplomacy by the West can only work, though, if the people of Burundi are prepared to step back from the abyss. That’s hard to tell. It is a small source of hope, but the one time Madeleine Albright’s appeals to the Burundian officials met with a visible nod of recognition was when she told the Burundi army generals what the Liberian warlord Charles Taylor recently told her in Monrovia about the seven-year-old Liberian civil war: “I started it, and now I don’t know how to stop it.”
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