Burundi - November 2009 - Journal Letter

Cathrin Daniel - American Friends Service Committee (AFSC)

Dear Friends,

Since arriving in Burundi just over a month ago, I have often been struck by the conflicting feelings that this country stirs in me. On the one hand there are signs of terrible poverty, injustice, hatred and violence but on the other hand great dignity, courage, faith and love. It is easy in a context such as this to dwell on the hopelessness of the situation and talk only about challenges and failures, but through my work with AFSC I am learning how ordinary people are able to transform hatred and violence into forgiveness and peace and this was brought into sharp relief on a visit I took last week into the heart of this small East African country.

My colleague, Ramillo Rudaragi, and I had been invited to Gitega, Burundi’s second-largest city, to participate in a four-day training for local partners, funded as part of AFSC’s capacity building programme. As we sat in the taxi, winding up a steep hill towards Gitega, we passed the burnt-out shell of a petrol station and a sombre monument bearing the words for all passersby to read: ‘Plus jamais ça!’ ‘Never again. This is Kibimba, one of the few places I have been to so far in Burundi where there is a physical and permanent reminder of la crise - the protracted and bloody civil war that started in 1993 which defines the most violent period in Burundi’s history and which divided and traumatised an entire population.

Kibimba is a small community set on the steep green slopes above the Mubarazi valley about an hour and a half by car from the capital, Bujumbura. Kibimba was where the first Quaker mission station was established in Burundi in 1934. The Quaker mission in Kibimba sits perched on top of a hill and there the Friends Evangelical Church built a small hospital, a primary school and a secondary school, which, by the time of la crise, had become a successful teacher training college. In 1993, however, Kibimba became the scene of one of the worst atrocities in Burundi’s history, when approximately seventy Tusti schoolgirls and schoolboys were rounded up and burnt alive inside the petrol station that now stands gutted at the roadside. The petrol station has been preserved as a reminder to everyone that passes on Burundi’s second most important transport route of the massacre that was committed here and as I sat in the back of the taxi driving by, I struggled to understand how any community could ever recover from such an event.

Ramillo and I were on our way to Gitega to attend a training module on Organisational Development, run by MiPAREC (a Quaker-based peace organisation) and funded by AFSC. The training was the second in a series of five, designed specifically with the needs of AFSC’s partners in mind and delivered with the aim of increasing their ability to strengthen their own organisations from within. Twenty participants representing twelve different community and faith-based organisations (CBOs and FBOs respectively) attended the training; men and women, Hutu and Tutsi, all working tirelessly for peace in Burundi.

AFSCs partners are often resource-poor organisations, run by local volunteers with minimal financial support and working in those communities which have experienced the most violence and hate. One of the participants was Jean Paul Nduwumana, the young and energetic vice president of JAMAA, a youth-led organisation based in Bujumbura for which he volunteers full-time. Jean Paul told me how, at the height of la crise, JAMAA used the uniting power of Bob Marley’s music and football to bring together young people from different suburbs of Bujumbura to promote solidarity and reconciliation. At the time when JAMAA was established in 1995, gangs of youths in Bujumbura were patrolling their neighbourhoods at night, killing anyone from the other ethnic group who strayed across their paths. JAMAA, in a courageous move, brought together the leaders of these groups and succeeded in creating dialogue in a climate of extreme violence and hatred. Today they are still active and have an important role to play in job creation and reintegrating demobilized ex-combatants; mostly unskilled young men with little in the way of job prospects, who bring with them a culture of violence, developed over years of brutality in the rebel forces. JAMAA is struggling however to manage its resources, source funding for its work and expand its projects. This is one area where AFSC can support them and enable them to build upon their reputation, contacts and experience to further our mutual aim of bringing lasting peace and social development to Burundi.

During the training, I also had the privilege of meeting Matthias Ndimurwanko, a tall, silent man with dark eyes and gentle manner. A Tutsi born and raised in Kibimba, Matthias was one of the few people who managed to escape from the burning petrol station with his life on that terrible night in October 1993. He gives an account of this experience in Nigel Watt’s seminal book ‘Burundi: Biography off a Small Nation’ . Matthias is now President of the Kibimba Peace Committee, arguably one of the most successful peacebuilding CBOs in the country. It is widely credited for having transformed the community of Kibimba, so bitterly divided by the massacre and the events that followed, and for having created an environment where healing, reconciliation and peace have been able to emerge from the devastation caused by the war. As a teacher, survivor and Chair of the newly-formed peace committee, it was Matthias who called for the primary school in Kibimba to be reopened, employing Hutu and Tutsi staff and providing a safe place for children of both sides to play and learn together merely a year after the massacre. Despite the bitter opposition and the many hurdles to reconciliation - that included death threats and personal attacks – the Peace Committee gradually began to see lasting change and in the year 2000 the secondary school at Kibimba (where most of the victims of the massacre had been pupils) was finally reopened, with over 500 boys and girls from both ethnic groups enrolled and peace education embedded in the curriculum.

Over the coming months I will be working with our Burundian partners to explore how best I can support them to develop their own capacity. I will also be learning myself from the remarkable strengths of these organisations and their dedicated members who are working so tirelessly for peace in their country. When developing any human organisation (be it a charity, a community or a nation) it is easy to dwell on the weaknesses and challenges that it faces and ignore or neglect its strengths. One of the methods which we will be exploring with partners is that of appreciative enquiry, an organizational development process that is based on the idea that change can be best achieved when you focus on what works within an organization and build on the strengths that are already there, rather than focusing on weaknesses and inadequacies. The traditional method of focusing on ‘problem solving’ tends to lead to the appropriation of blame and a feeling of hopelessness when faced with the huge task of transformation which lies ahead. In the words of Dr. D. L. Cooperrider who developed the theory, appreciative enquiry “requires of us to pay special attention to the best of the past and present” in order to “ignite the collective imagination of what might be”.

As Burundi prepares for its elections in 2010, many fear the return to violence and at times the possibility of lasting peace seems a mere dream, existing outside of the realms of possibility in this divided and traumatised nation. However, while there are people like Matthias and Jean Paul holding the light of love, forgiveness and reconciliation – even in the most painful and dark of places - then the hope for lasting peace can never be extinguished and as peaceworkers we should build on that hope. AFSC and Friends in Burundi all dwell in the hope of “what might be” and as I passed by the petrol station and memorial at Kibimba on my way back to Bujumbura on Saturday it occurred to me that while memorials are important, it is the work of people like Matthias and the Peace Committee that will stop the cycle of violence and heal this country and that supporting them is also the best way to ensure the cry of Plus jamais ça! is indeed never needed again.

Amohoro (Peace)
Cathrin Daniel, 
November 2009