originally published in Africa Review, Kenya
For the first 25 years of Evariste Ngenkumana’s life, he fought in an armed rebellion that terrorised the northeastern corner of this tiny Central African country.
Evariste was born into the National Liberation Front, a Hutu-extremist militia his parents joined in the face of a decades-long stranglehold on power by a powerful Tutsi minority.
Now, with his group disbanded and guns taken away, but with no jobs available, Evariste has left the FNL and joined a new movement, run by a Tutsi.
“There have been many disappointments,” says Evariste, who was taught from an early age to fight for, and only for, his Hutu ethnic group. Now he is with the Movement for Security and Democracy, and the reason for the switch, a chance at power and prosperity, may be no less romantic.
Yet this time, reality is staring at many people like Evariste. For him and hundreds of other former gunmen, who killed for the sake of ‘Hutuness’, disillusionment is setting in.
Mass upheaval
“Ethnicity is the axis upon which everything spins,” says Firmin Sindaye, from local human-rights group Ligue Iteka.
“But it is being used for politics. The problem of the country is not ethnic, it’s political.”
For centuries, the Hutu-Tutsi story in this triangle where Burundi, Rwanda, and Congo meet, has spun an ugly story of violence and mass upheaval.
This region lying between lakes Tanganyika and Kivu has a fluid group of two peoples, with different versions of one history, where waves of ethnic violence, in both directions and across all borders, have come and gone nearly each decade.
Thee hundred thousand Hutu killed in Burundi in 1973; 800,000 Tutsi killed in Rwanda in 1994, and both sides killing each other in eastern Congo to this day.
Now, wherein in Rwanda a silent wall has grown of That-Which-Must-Not-Be-Named, in Congo, it is virulent and haemorrhagic. In Burundi, ethnicity simmers and crackles at a slower pace.
The ethnic bullet
Paradoxically, as successive rebel groups have come to power and failed to make good on their promises of inclusivity, the ethnic bullet is beginning to lose its bite.
“We were used as killers,” says Jean-Claude, an FNL fighter until last month. “The things that we fought for, they were never realised.”
Most of the time, this simply means money. Recently demobilised soldiers were offered both money and jobs, but many thousands still go without both.
Now, a rush of discontented former combatants – be it from CNDD-FDD, FNL or anyone else – are realigning themselves with whoever promises the best prospects after elections, scheduled for June.
Before, many would shift to the next Hutu-centric party. Now, though they may have no real love for their Tutsi peers, practicality, labour and money have replaced ethnicity as the top priority.
“We were told we’ve been oppressed and must only fight for the Hutu people,” says Evariste. “We used to fight together with the CNDD-FDD (President Pierre Nkurunziza’s Hutu-centric insurgency that is now Burundi’s ruling party). But now they fight against us.”
Mass migration
The most telling sign of this Hutu disillusionment is the mass migration of former FNL and CNDD-FDD combatants to the Movement for Security and Democracy, a still-unregistered party led by former BBC journalist – and Tutsi – Alex Sinduhije.
“There’s been a lot of disappointment,” says Metu Habimana, a 28-year old former FNL rebel, who was offered money to join FRODEBU, Burundi’s largest opposition party, but refused. “They have no vision either, they just care to be a Hutu group.”
Instead, either for ideals or something more tangible, he joined Mr Sinduhije’s MSD.
Bernard, a 25-year-old former CNDD-FDD member, makes it clear. “It’s the same story forever; killing, corruption, embezzlement.”
“Presidents come and go here and never leave a good name,” says Mr Sinduhije, who hopes to be president himself in 2010, but whose party is still not formally registered. He says the government is actively trying to freeze him out of the political scene.
Now, Mr Sinduhije counts dozens of former FNL and CNDD-FDD fighters in his group, not to mention members of FRODEBU and others.
Battlefield anthem
“They try to give me a hard time because of my ethnic origin,” says Mr Sinduhije, “but people know that earlier time is gone.”
Maybe it has, maybe it hasn’t. Ethnicity is still in abundance here. It is spoken of in the streets, in newspapers and on radio stations.
In a letter forwarded to President Nkurunziza, a recently-kidnapped judge who almost lost his life, revealed that the kidnappers had mistaken him for a Hutu though he is Tutsi.
Ethnicity does resemble a battlefield anthem, especially for upcountry peasants and those who remember a long reign of terror in both directions that culminated in the 1993 assassination of the country’s first democractically-elected Hutu president (Melchior Ndadaye) at the hands of his Tutsi army generals.
But more and more, those with the guns and those who have been used as pawns in the battles of before, are seeing those identifications as merely convenient tools for the government.
A number of Mr Sinduhije’s party’s members have been arrested since the beginning of the year, and two have been killed. One party member, who was arrested in April on suspicions of trying to assassinate President Nkurunziza, says he was tortured for weeks and told to leave the party.
“They said a Tutsi could never run this country again.”
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