The current turmoil within Burundi, a tiny landlocked country in the middle of Africa with a population of nearly 11 million, poses a threat to regional peace and security and could hinder East African Community (EAC) political and economic integration. The fighting stems from Burundi President Pierre Nkurunziza’s decision last year to run for a third term, apparently in violation of the constitution created after Burundi’s 1993 – 2005 civil war. Burundi’s constitutional court ruled in favor of Nkurunziza, and he won the presidential election in July 2015.
Nkurunziza remains in power and violence has reportedly intensified over the past 10 months. The United Nations puts the death toll from this latest conflict at nearly 500. But Cara Jones, an expert on the Great Lakes region, says her latest count is 1,467 deaths. The political science professor at Mary Baldwin College told The Cipher Brief that in the academic community, more than 1,000 deaths classifies as a civil war.
While Burundian Ambassador to the U.S. Ernest Ndabashinze acknowledges that civil unrest and violence “have become prevalent in the past year,” he also says the country is not at risk of spiraling into civil war.
The academics watching Burundi and the Burundian government do agree on one thing: the extreme ethnic discontent that helped fuel the ethnically-driven civil war in the 1990s is not there. The institutional system created and implemented after 2005 – a power-sharing arrangement between Hutus and Tutsis – has effectively taken ethnicity out of politics. The army is a particularly notable success story, with a 50-50 split between Hutus and Tutsis.
Africa expert and Professor in African Politics at the University of Oxford, Nic Cheeseman, told The Cipher Brief, “The capacity for that violence [in Burundi] to scale up into something that looks like a civil war is much less now because we are not seeing it following ethnic lines in the same way [as in the early 1990s].” Cheeseman explained that to have that kind of extreme violence, warring parties need strong communal identities. When people fight along political party lines, those ties tend to be weaker.
Yet this does not mean the political conflict in Burundi is incapable of reverting to some sort of ethnic conflict or turning into a civil war. Indeed, both opposition forces and government hardliners have used ethnic rhetoric to paint the current conflict.
The political opposition hopes that the notion of genocide – whether real or only in speech – will move the international community to action, for example, by sending in arms to fight the government. The government, for its part, seems to have hoped that ethnically-charged language would shore up political support, explains Jones. Neither strategy has worked.
The African Union backtracked on its plan to send 5,000 troops into Burundi earlier this year, and current talks in the UN leave the organization with only one option that is supported by the Burundian government: sending in “a light footprint of 20 to 50 police personnel” with “a limited and periodic presence outside the capital region” that would “not respond to expectations to provide protection.” Negotiations are ongoing.
“Recognizing that a political crisis, in which civilians are targeted and regional stability is put at risk, is grounds for international action would be a significant shift for multilateral efforts,” notes Cipher Brief expert Hilary Matfess, who is a researcher and co-editor at the National Defense University’s Center for Complex Operations.
Yet the possible deployment of 20 to 50 police personnel seems quite insufficient to deal with violence in any meaningful way. And the only other international action that has been taken – the suspension of aid – could exacerbate the problem. Burundi is already the poorest country in the world, with 50 percent of its budget officially dependent on aid, with some experts indicating it is closer to 80 percent dependent. Funding cuts by the European Union and others will really come into play this year, according to Jones, which means a deepening economic crisis that will likely make the political crisis even worse and the threat of civil war higher.
And external support for the opposition is widely thought to be coming from the Rwandan government. A UN Security Council committee report in January 2016 indicated that 18 Burundian combatants said they were recruited in a Rwandan refugee camp and given military training by Rwandan military personnel with the ultimate goal of removing the Burundi President from power. A month later, the U.S. State Department’s Assistant Secretary for African Affairs, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, and U.S. Special Envoy for the Great Lakes of Africa, Thomas Perriello, testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that they are concerned about Rwanda’s alleged recruitment of Burundian refugees.
Ambassador Ndabashinze told The Cipher Brief that Rwandan President Paul Kagame wants to “extend his hegemony to all neighboring countries” and is being protected by the U.S. “The U.S. and the UK protect Rwanda always and forever,” he said.
In Washington last month, Rwandan Foreign Minister Louise Mushikiwabo said, “What is happening in the region today […] has a lot to do with the mismanagement after the genocide,” referring to the ethnically-motivated armed groups that fled to surrounding areas following the 1994 Rwanda genocide. She suggested that it is these groups, and not the Rwandan government, who may be involved in any kind of efforts to destabilize Burundi.
Burundi’s current political instability could turn into civil war, which would have grave ramifications across the region. Increased turmoil in Africa’s Great Lake countries – Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo – would negatively affect any U.S. business interests there, could open the door for terrorist infiltration (for example, Islamic State), and would ultimately show a failure in U.S.-backed democracy efforts.
Kaitlin Lavinder is an International Producer with The Cipher Brief.
