2007_04_01_archive

Bujumbura

After 38 hours of flying and visiting airports in the USA, Europe, and

Africa, I arrived in Burundi on Tuesday. Locating Burundi on a map is

not easy. Even the least geographically challenged will find

themselves squinting at the maze of borders and lakes. There are lakes

in Africa that could swallow Burundi whole. Yet this tiny country,

much like it twin to the north, Rwanda, manages to have a magnitude of

problems disproportionate to its size.

War, for starters. Since 1993 300,000 people have died because of the

conflict that's been haunting this country off and on since the 1960s.

It's usually painted as an ethnic conflict, one marked by fear,

mistrust, repression, killings and reprisals, but of course the

reasons move well beyond the simplicity of "ancient tribal hatreds."

The majority Hutu have been dominated by successive Tutsi governments

since independence, governments always afraid of losing their power to

the majority Hutu population. In 1972 a failed coup attempt by Hutus

crystallized the atmosphere of mutual mistrust. 200,000 Burundians -

many of them education Hutus - were massacred. Since then there have

been a few more coups and attempted ones, with opposition to the

increasingly consolidated Tutsi government power becoming outright

violent in 1993. Atrocities have been committed on all sides, with no

actions escaping retalitations. Fast-forward to the present, after

more than a decade of attempts by the international community to

mediate peace between rebels and the government, and you'll find a

country that is putting conflict behind it only to face a mire of

other problems inherently tied with its violent past - extreme

poverty.

Still, better to be poor and at peace than poor and at war. Because in

this neck of the woods, war is against civilians. I don't think it

should even be called "war," which calls to mind armies facing off.

It's groups exercising their frustration, their greed, and their

disregard for human life and dignity by turning against innocent

people. Stealing from them, oppressing them, raping them, and killing

them.

Burundi is currently the poorest country is the world. If you look at

average income, or lack thereof, this is it. Of course, it's hard to

trust statistics. As far as I'm concerned any country within the

poorest ten, if not twenty or thirty, are pretty much interchangeable

in terms of poverty. A man in rural Chad isn't jumping for joy that

his country beat Burundi in terms of absolute poverty. He's very very

poor, a Burundian's very very poor, and the likelihood of either of

them accessing basic healthcare or paying their child's school fees is

minimal.

And yet these thoughts are in the way back of my mind as I sit in

Bujumbura. War, hopelessness, the mess that is Africa - I never feel

this. Alright, except for the mess part. But I mean that in an

endearing way. Most of the time. Or at least some of the time.

I was very ambivalent about coming back to Central Africa, indeed

within spitting distance of Congo, my former home-away-from-home.

Maybe I was too stressed to think about it - I'd just flown to London

on a day's notice to interview for a job there, and within five days

of returning booked a flight and left for Burundi. Such hurried

logistics do not exactly lend themselves to introspection. Driving