Limited options leave Burundi refugees reluctant to return

KIGOMA, TANZANIA

One by one the adults left the converted German warship MV Liemba, sometimes surrounded by anxious, often shoe-less children.

The women carried their clothes in traditional hand-woven baskets balanced on their heads, with a jiko on their hands.

The men, too, carried their clothes but the possession they decided to save before leaving their homes was a small transistor radio, not a jiko.

The scene by the avocado green waters of Lake Tanganyika at the port town of Kigoma in Western Tanzania last week summed up the desperation of the refugees from Burundi whose lives, not for the first time, have been turned upside down by the cyclical crises in the small East and Central African country.

More than 100,000 civilians have fled the country for refugee camps in Uganda, Rwanda, the DRC and Tanzania amid instability triggered by President Pierre Nkurunziza’s decision to run for a third term which opponents say contravenes both the constitution and a peace accord that ended the last decade-long civil war which claimed 300,000 lives.

Uniformly, the refugees described a climate of fear and menace at home and blamed armed youths allied to the president’s ruling party for making their life unbearable.

“They kill people at night and in the morning you just see blood,” said Kuguimana Innocent, a 34 year-old farmer. “Nobody knows where they take the bodies. Two of my friends were killed in the last two weeks.”

The armed youths are former members of a militia known as the Imbonerakure, which was the rebel group headed by Nkurunziza before the rebel leader turned into a politician and took power in 2005 as the head of the CNDD-FDD party.

Although they were supposed to have been demobilised, numerous reports indicate that the ruling party is using them to intimidate opponents.

The crisis in Burundi has deep historical roots. After a colonial period in which first the Germans and then the Belgians exploited divisions between the dominant Tutsi and Hutu groups, the country was faced with a devastating cycle of coups and counter-coups, numerous assassinations of key political figures, massacres and at least two major episodes of genocide in its first three decades after independence.

The most recent assassination of a Hutu President, Melchior Ndadaye, in 1993 triggered a decade-long civil war which ended in peace talks that saw Nkurunziza installed as president.

Amid all this, the civilians have paid a steep price for the endless instability and the recurring cycles of conflict.

Deudeone Barantiriza, 24, told the Sunday Nation he did not want to make the same mistake as his parents and was one of the first to sign up for the grim voyage across Lake Tanganyika and into Tanzania.

“In 1997 during the civil war, my father and mother said they would not leave. They had survived the war in 1972 and told us there was no reason to run. They were both killed. I could not wait for the same fate and will never go back. If we die here, that is fine.”

Amid crowded conditions in the holding camps, the threat of disease has become the biggest problem facing aid agencies.   

A cholera outbreak has claimed 31 lives and aid agencies are warning that far more help is needed to avert a bigger catastrophe. About six in 10 of the refugees are women and children, all seeking to be allowed into buses transporting refugees to a bigger camp inland.

“The predominant emotion among them is fear and tiredness,” says Aimee Brown of Oxfam. “Many have walked for days and weeks and fear what will happen to them if they go back. The key need now is water and clean water vessels to beat the threat of disease.”

Problems which will be familiar to Kenyans where hundreds of thousands of refugees have been offered shelter before the welcome from host communities has gradually worn thin are slowly becoming apparent in Kigoma.

Every single hotel in the quiet, pleasant lake port town last week was fully booked by the numerous aid agency officials who have arrived in the town, leading some locals to complain that tourists would have nowhere to sleep and would stay away.

And the refugees overwhelmingly expressed a reluctance to ever return home, saying they were fed up with being uprooted from their lives and livelihoods every time a crisis struck.

Clutching his radio, Msihoku Mbugayo Joseph, a 65-year-old father of six, said roaming bands of ruling party supporters had made life unbearable.

“They go from house to house saying our sons must join the war against opposition supporters or die,” he said.

Minani Neema, a 23-year-old mother of two sons said she could not bear the thought of tilling her field to take care of her young family again and finding everything was lost due to political conflict.

“I am a young person but I have fled my country twice. The UN is a big agency. Let them give us farms in another country so we build new lives.”

At the centre of the whole crisis is the enigmatic figure of Nkurunziza, a 51-year-old football-mad politician who still retains enormous popularity in many rural areas but whose reluctance to leave power has plunged his country of 10 million people into a fresh crisis.

Born to a Hutu father and a Tutsi mother, Nkurunziza’s path to politics was paved by his father’s fate in Burundi’s many wars.

A provincial governor, Nkurunziza’s father was one of the thousands of Hutus killed by members of the Tutsi-dominated army during the 1972 conflict.

Nkurunziza attended the University of Burundi where he obtained a degree in physical education. When the 1993 civil war broke out and after surviving an assassination attempt, he became a rebel leader and eventually was elected by the two chambers of Parliament as president in August 2005 following peace talks mediated first by Julius Nyerere and later by Nelson Mandela.

The current crisis stems from Nkurunziza’s insistence that he should effectively serve for three terms because his first election was based on parliamentary votes unlike the election by the masses boycotted by the opposition in 2010. Nkurunziza claimed 90 per cent of the vote.

In the last few weeks, independent radio stations which serve as a critical source of news have been shut down, many opposition leaders have gone underground after the killing of a key leader in downtown Bujumbura and the leaders of a coup attempt are either on the run or in detention.

Foreign ministers from East Africa met in Tanzania on Saturday ahead of a heads of state summit to discuss the crisis.

For many of the refugees, though, their only desire is to find another country in which to settle and escape the cyclical wars at home.

“These people in Bujumbura care about power and nothing else,” said father of four Nyandui Odisto, 30. “They will never change. I have to find a new life elsewhere.”