bout de papier, Vol. 11, No. 3 (1994) — Fall 1994 // Automne 1994, pp. 4–6
Burundi and Rwanda — Hutu and Tutsi Hatred. Presidential Assassinations. Ethnic Slaughter. Two tides of refugees into Tanzania.
urundi lies between the two great
Victoria not far to the North East and Lake Tanganyika forming its western boundary. Its capital, Bujumbura, is located at the head of Lake Tanganyika where Dr. Livingstone believed that the waters of the lake flowed north to form the source of the White Nile. Rwanda is north of Burundi. Like its southern neighbour its population is divided largely between the majority Hutu and the minority Tutsi tribes. Both countries will see massive refugee movements sparked by the assassination of their president which sets ablaze the tinderbox of ethnic hatred.
Burundi October 1993
In October 1993, President Melchoir Ndadaye was assassinated by the army in an attempted coup d’état. Ndadaye was a Hutu and the first democratically elected President of the country. His assassination sparked nationwide ethnic violence between the minority Tutsi and majority Hutu ethnic groups, resulting in over a million displaced persons within Burundi and almost three quarters of a million refugees fleeing to Rwanda, Zaire and Tanzania, and this in a country with a population of six million.
Since its independence from Belgium in 1962, this unfortunate country has been plagued with ethnic strife: in 1972-3 over 150,000 Hutu were massacred, following a failed uprising against the then Tutsi government; in the summer of 1988 ethnic clashes lasting ten days resulted in 5,000 killed and over 100,000 homeless. And now in 1993, the Hutu-Tutsi rivalry once again erupted.
When news of Ndadaye’s assassination spread, many students fled to neighbouring countries. Past troubles had shown them that they would be targeted for extermination by the army, as leaders of the next generation. Then, as coup leaders assassinated ministers and their families, fighting broke out in all the regions of the country. As the violence spread, so the numbers of refugees swelled until, by December 1993, almost bout de papier Vol.
300,000 had crossed the eastern border into Tanzania.
The people of north-eastern Tanzania are the same people as in Burundi, Hutus and Tutsis, who live side by side without ethnic strife in one of Nyerere’s miracles, a non-tribal Tanzania. So when the refugees poured into Tanzania, they were seeking help from their own. Many had families on both sides of the border and they spoke the same tribal language.
And they were helped. Families took in family members, communities opened their doors, clinics, schools, churches. Help was immediate and heartfelt. But it was not adequate to meet the waves of refugees flooding the region.
The western border area of Tanzania is a beautiful, fertile area which is chronically poor. Kigoma, the regional capital is a run down provincial town, with no community facilities to speak of, bad roads, no public transportation and an air of having been forgotten by the far off central authorities.
The rural areas of the region, which were the most affected by the refugee influx, were worse: very remote with appalling roads (even in the dry season, and now the rains had started) and no public transport; poor community facilities with antiquated and ill equipped clinics, and run down schools. Subsistence farmers at the best of times, the local people were facing difficulties themselves. But with amazing generosity, they shared unstintingly of the little they had.
On the front line of those receiving refugees was the village of Mabamba, in the Kibondo District. Situated three miles from Burundi, across rolling hills and the river which forms the border, the village was a focal point for the first wave of students who fled the fighting. They were welcomed by the village leaders and by the Missionaries Fathers of Africa, known as the White Fathers, who operated a mission there. One of the White Fathers, a Canadian, Maurice Carpentier from Sudbury, has been in the area for twenty years. He is working with missionaries in the area, under the direction of the Bishop of Kigoma, to bring help to the refugees, and to those Tanzanians who welcomed them.
The first international assistance was from CONCERN, an Irish relief organization which was working in the Tabora region of Tanzania. It was quickly followed by teams from Médecins sans Frontières (MSF) and then several other well known emergency NGOs including the Red Cross, CARITAS, OXFAM, Tanganyika Christian Refugee Service the Swedish Free Mission and the International Rescue Committee, all working under the umbrella of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to provide co-ordinated relief to the refugees.
March 1994
By mid-March the number of refugees in Tanzania had dropped to 40,000, most of them women and children and many of them ill. The dramatic shrinking of the refugee community occurred in January because many returned to Burundi at the approach of the planting season, but primarily because of the lack of adequate food supplies in the camps; a full food basket was achieved only in late December. By then refugees had been eating only maize flour for two months, which resulted in widespread malnutrition. This in turn made them particularly vulnerable to the real treat of dysentery and malaria. One White Father stated that those who returned preferred to die at home rather than in a foreign land
Those remaining are being moved from the many sites in which they squatted to three semi-permanent camps. These are equipped with first rate, well-supplied field hospitals established and operated by MSF, potable drinking water better than that available locally in the towns of the region, a half-acre of land per family on which to build homes and small gardens, and building materials and seeds with which to get established. In time these camps will become self-sufficient communities, like those in the central region of Tanzania which house refugees from the troubles in Burundi of the 70’s and 80’s.
Most refugee communities are well organized amongst themselves. Indeed, whole communities in Burundi fled across the border into Tanzania and have re-established their own community structures. Refugee students are helping UNHCR officials to register their people; refugee doctors, nurses and mid-wives are working in the field hospitals beside MSF staff. Even the children are helping each other. In one semipermanent camp a group of ten orphans, whose parents had either disappeared or been killed, were gathered together in one shelter, under the care of the oldest girl of twelve years. The will to survive is apparent in the efforts the refugees are making to re-establish themselves, and in the faces of the myriad of children who throng the camps.
In this emergency Tanzanians have been wonderful. The government granted all Burundians prima-facie refugee status and local authorities, overcoming their usual bureaucratic lethargy, have offered complete co-operation. The local Tanzanians, subsistence peasants for the most part, by their whole-hearted and unstinting generosity have given us a living definition of humanity.
Rwanda April 1994
In Rwanda the Hutu formed the government, driving many of the Tutsi north to seek refuge in Uganda. There the refugees had created a military liberation force called the Rwandese Patriotic Front (RPF), and since 1990 had invaded northern Rwanda, in an attempt to wrest power from the Hutu dictator, President Juvénal Habyarimana, who himself had seized power in a military coup 21 years before.
The RPF were not the only Rwandese who wished to share Habyarimana’s power. Many Hutu opposition factions had grown up and since political parties were outlawed, led resistance to the dictator from within the country.
So successful was the RPF invasion that they forced Habyarimana to sue for peace and negotiate a settlement. The peace settlement, which was brokered by the Tanzanian government, was named the Arusha Accord after the northern Tanzanian city in which it was negotiated. It was on April 6, 1994 when returning from a mini summit in Tanzania held to discuss implementation of the Arusha accords, that Habyarimana’s plane was rocketed killing all occupants, including the new President of Burundi who was a passenger. Then Rwanda exploded in a bloodbath of barbaric slaughter.
We have come to see that slaughter as genocide, since it was directed by Habyarimana’s troops and militia against the Tutsi minority. In the three months since the deaths of the Presidents possibly 500,000 Rwandans have been hacked or clubbed to death, including nearly half of the Tutsi population.
In Northern Rwanda, the RPF were waging a successful war and advancing south. As they advanced, the Hutu civilian population retreated until they were backed against the borders of Tanzania on the east and Burundi in the South. The borders were closed by Habyarimana’s troops, who refused to see the population flee before the hated RPF. And so they waited, if they survived, displaced in their own country.
Then. at 4:30 pm on April 28, Habyarimana’s troops fled before the advancing RPF and the flood gates were opened. In the space of twenty-four hours, a quarter of a million people walked across a narrow bridge over the Rusumo river into Tanzania. The UNHCR called it the largest movement of a refugee population in history.
This avalanche of refugees, 250,000 strong, poured into a thinly populated area of Tanzania. The Ngara district, located on the far west side of Lake Victoria is beautiful, fertile but remote, very much like the area immediately south where the Burundi refugees had fled several months earlier. The districts shared the same problems; poor roads and no public transport, rudimentary communications, appalling medical facilities and services, little potable water. The avalanche into Ngara could have been a catastrophe.
Several factors averted disaster: there was already a refugee reception infrastructure in place established for the Burundi refugees; a new influx of refugees was expected from Rwanda, and the UNHCR had prepared contingency plans, although no one could have imagined the size of the tidal wave; and COGEFARIMPRESIT, a major Italian construction company, was in the area, working in the roads. Then too, most of the refugees were in good health and had prepared their flight. They were fleeing in fear but most of them, in the first wave at any rate, had not been involved in actual fighting. They carried household goods with them, they drove cattle ahead of them, and some even rode on bikes. Walked across a narrow bridge over
I learned of this amazing mass movement from an Italian colleague who reported that refugees were entering Tanzania at the Rusumo River crossing at the rate of 200 a minute. I thought this number was hyperbole, but further reports confirmed the numbers, so I gratefully accepted a seat on a COGEFARIMPRESIT twelve-seater plane and flew to Ngara on the border with Rwanda, to see for myself.
From the air the line of refugees stretched twelve kilometres, moving slowly, weighed down by possessions and herding cattle ahead of them, but moving purposefully towards a temporary camp where they set up their makeshift shelters in their thousands.
The UNHCR were already working their miracles. They had flown out from Geneva an extraordinarily efficient and calm Scottish lady called Maureen Connelly to act as Emergency Co-ordinator, and she was drawing on the fine talents of Anne Vincent, a French Doctor who did marvellous work in directing the Médecins sans Frontières team’s efforts for the Burundi refugees. As well, UNHCR had the good fortune to have in place a Newfoundlander, Sheila Wilson, who headed the International Red Cross team sent to help the Burundi refugee camps. As I flew back to Dar, over a vast field of tiny fires, I remember thinking that the crisis was in good hands.
June 2, 1994
A month later on a cool, fresh morning, I flew out in a five-seater plane across the breadth of Tanzania, to the border with Rwanda. We flew over this lovely land of green hills, vast stretches of desert and scrub and then across the marvellous inland sea of Lake Victoria. In the distance I could see Speke’s Bay and Emin Pasha’s gulf gleaming in the distance, and wondered if the thousands of bloated Rwandan corpses that were flowing into Lake Victoria from the Rusumo River had yet washed up on their white sands.
As we approached Ngara I could see the vast field that had been covered with camp fires. Now it was transformed into a huge, busting town, complete with streets and markets, alive with colour and noise. It was now BENACO camp, home to over 200,000 Rwandan refugees, the largest refugee camp in the world at the time.
When I toured Benaco with Maureen Connelly, I was struck by its vitality: many large markets, whole commercial areas with shops of different merchandise and commodities, restaurants, bars, even discos for dancing in the evenings. More important it had superb field clinics set up by MSF and other charitable medical organizations, and even a hospital for major surgery; potable water piped to water distribution areas, regular food distribution outlets, areas for registration of new refugees, all run with the efficiency and care I had come to expect of UNHCR operations after my tour through the Burundi refugee camps.
Of course life was not easy for those who had lost homes, farms, possessions and often family. Many children had been traumatized by the death of their parents, often killed in front of them. But in the circumstances the camp was a miracle. Two hundred thousand refugees fed, clothed, housed and tended-to in this far off, remote area of Tanzania. Most looked in good spirits and in good health. It was only when you looked into their eyes and the eyes of their children that you could see the bitterness, it was only as you saw them listening to radio broadcasts from Kigali denouncing the RPF and “Tutsi killers” that you saw the hate.
These camps are testimony to the humanitarian efforts of the international community, the Tanzanian people and the care and concern of the many hundreds of aid workers who worked selflessly to aid the refugees. But the camps are also time bombs, full of bitterness and ethnic hatred waiting to explode. To look into the eyes of the children is to understand why ethnic bloodbaths re-occur every ten years.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 11, No. 3 (1994) — Fall 1994 // Automne 1994, pp. 4–6. Read the rest of this issue →
