Excerpts

CHAPTER 1 The Beginnings of War "Everywhere, desolation and tears." I remember the day when the war began. It was in the middle of planting season. I was four years old. I was standing outside on the lawn in front of our house with my mother, Maman Clémence, and my brother Asvelt. A man who had been herding cows near our home came toward us. He was listening to a small radio he carried in his hands. "Where is he?" the man asked Maman Clémence, speaking of my father. "He is not home," she said, reaching out her hand as they exchanged the greeting "Amahoro"--peace. The man was a childhood friend of Maman Clémence, a Hutu from the same mountain village where she grew up. My parents were Tutsi, but before the war, especially in the countryside, this interethnic friendship was not uncommon. This old friend shook my mother's hand. He looked at her with a somber expression. "No, there is no peace," he said. Then he told her some terrible news. Burundi's recently elected president, the first democratically elected president and a Hutu, had been assassinated. The story had been aired on the BBC. The local radio station in Burundi had stopped broadcasting that day. Hutus in the country blamed the Tutsis. This was also true in our village, Kigutu. "They are very agitated," my mother's friend said of our Hutu neighbors. "Look for a place to hide." Our Hutu neighbors had just destroyed a small Catholic church and smashed the drums inside. They had also destroyed two newly built houses that belonged to a Tutsi family. Maman's old friend had overheard some of our neighbors calling to others to remain vigilant so none of our family could escape. Maman Clémence started worrying aloud: "Where am I going to hide my children?" We wondered, Would my father make it back home? Had he already been killed? For me and my family, this was the beginning of the thirteen years of civil war. My memories of the war's early years are truncated--mostly a collection of isolated events, memorable because they were traumatic and misremembered for the same reason. But I have assembled these memories as best I can. I have also relied on research and the memories of Asvelt and Maman Clémence. Burundi's civil war began on October 21, 1993. It was an ethnic war, between the Hutus, who represent 85 percent of the population, and the Tutsis, who make up most of the rest. Generally speaking, it was waged over the grievances of Hutus against the Tutsis, who had ruled for most of the thirty years after Burundi's independence from Belgium in 1962. But I believe that the war's beginnings lay further back, with the Belgians' colonial policies. They occupied Burundi for forty years (following the German occupation), from 1916 to 1961, and during that time they excluded Hutus from the national administration. Most damaging of all, they destroyed Burundian traditions and institutions, including the Bashingantahe, the Institution of Wisdom. The sparks of the war were unknown plotters in the Tutsi army who orchestrated the assassination of Burundi's president, Melchior Ndadaye. Because of his ethnicity, the Hutu radio station Milles Collines in Rwanda--soon to become the bullhorn of the genocide there--started calling on Hutus in Burundi to rise and avenge their assassinated leader. In only a few days, thousands of people were killed, mostly Tutsis, and mostly with machetes, by extremist Hutus. Soon afterward, the Tutsi army started hunting down the extremists who were committing the massacres, sometimes shooting indiscriminately and taking the lives of many innocent Hutus. Thousands of Hutus fled to Rwanda, Tanzania, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and some of them formed militias that united against the Tutsi army. Collectively, these militias soon vastly outnumbered the army of the Burundi government, which, however, was better trained and had superior weapons. The two sides, the militias and the government army, began what would be a long fight, a brutal thirteen-year stalemate. On December 6, 1993, two months after the assassination, President Ndadaye was buried along with some other murdered officials of his cabinet. There were a lot of Burundians at the funeral, and European ambassadors and expats. The Burundian archbishop, Joachim Ruhuna, presided at the funeral and read his sermon to the audience: Dear brothers and sisters, Burundian men and women who listen to me, all of you, friends of Burundi: . . . Look at the crime that is in front of our faces! Now the land of Burundi is littered with corpses, and soaked in the blood of our brothers and sisters. Yes, look everywhere. Let your gaze wonder over the hills, and in the groves of banana plantations. You only see ash and rubble. Throughout the country, you hear weeping and wailing. You can no longer count widows and orphans. Everywhere, desolation and tears. . . . Among the survivors, many are discouraged and fleeing . . . The country is disfigured, pitiful. Those of us who are still here are afraid and ashamed . . . . . . In the name of God and of the president deceased, whose corpse lies here before our eyes, I beg you to please stop the massacres and shed no more blood. Our Burundi is so deeply wounded that it needs a president of great wisdom and full of humanity, who loves truth and justice, filled with great passion for the country and respected by all. For that president, we pray the Lord . . . Another Hutu was appointed president and sworn into office. But he too was killed, along with Rwanda's Hutu president, Juvenal Habyarimana, when his airplane was shot down as it landed. Those killers also remain unidentified, though many theories persist. That assassination happened in 1994, when Burundi's civil war was about six months old. In Rwanda, the genocide of the Tutsis had been in the planning for two years. Shooting down the plane was like the signal for the genocide in Rwanda to begin. The presidents' deaths also intensified the civil war in Burundi. When we heard the news of the assassination of President Ndadaye, everyone at home was scared. "I felt a different kind of fear than I had ever felt before," Asvelt told me later. What scared us the most was to see adults scared. You felt shocked to realize for the first time that your mom and dad could no longer guarantee your protection, that they were just as vulnerable as you were, that hardly anything was predictable anymore, and that to trust anyone outside the family was to be imprudent. Our world order had been shattered. The life that had been jolly and playful just yesterday suddenly showed me its dark side and forced me at four years old to see life through a Hobbesian lens for the next decade of war--a war that made life nasty, brutish, and short. After her childhood friend had told her the news and warned her about our neighbors, Maman Clémence declared that we must leave the village. There were four of us children still at home. "Collect your clothes," she told us. We did as she said: we left the house dressed in clean clothes, carrying bags on our backs. It was obvious to everyone we passed that we were leaving the village. All of the villagers except for three families were Hutu, and for some of them, our family and the two others in the village became their quarry. Some Hutu men cut a bunch of tree branches and made a blockade across the main path that led out of the village toward the mountains. The local chief of this effort was named Fere, short for Frederick. The villagers called him Gorgo, but Fere had just declared himself Shetani mukuru--the great Satan. There must have been fifteen men standing in front of their barricade. They were brandishing spears and machetes. Other Hutu neighbors were passing by, men and women. Many of the women seemed to hide their eyes, as if embarrassed. But one of them shouted, speaking of us, "Don't let those tombs escape!" I didn't know that to call someone a tomb was an old insult, but it was frightening to hear someone speak as if we were already dead. Gorgo and his men had stopped a Tutsi named Musa who had just fled to Kigutu from a nearby town called Mugara. He was lying on the ground, off to one side of the barricade, with several of Gorgo's gang standing over him. We heard Musa begging for mercy and offering to give the men his cows in exchange for his life, but they kept yelling at him. Meanwhile, my siblings and I stood facing the men at the barricade. One of them, a Hutu neighbor, stepped up to us and asked, with a menacing look, "Where is your father?" We said he wasn't home. "Did he go to bring soldiers?" Before we could answer, the neighbor said, "Why did you kill Ndadaye?" He added, "Stay here. We will show you." Another of Gorgo's men made a quick and sharp cut with his machete in the dirt road in front of us. Another looked into our eyes and, showing us his teeth, slid his index finger across his throat with one hand, holding a machete in the other. And then, one of the gang yelled at us, "Go back home!" We ran back to our house. A few men followed us and camped in the road outside, evidently to make sure we didn't go anywhere. Excerpted from The Tears of a Man Flow Inward: Growing up in the Civil War in Burundi by Pacifique Irankunda All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. 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