On August 28, 2000, the government of Burundi and several rebel groups signed the Arusha Peace and Reconciliation Agreement for Burundi, which outlined a framework for ending the civil war.
However, two major rebel groups – the CNDD-FDD and the FNL – did not sign the agreement, and despite efforts to install a transitional government, the war continued for several years. In 2003, the CNDD-FDD signed a ceasefire agreement and power-sharing with the government, starting a two-year transition period, in which the government integrated members of the various rebel factions (except the FNL) into government and army positions. I use this event as the marker of the end of
31 Author Interviews.
32 Royer 2006.
the civil war as the primary rebel group had signed on to the peace agreement, and the transition period and implementation of the Arusha Accords began in earnest. In 2005 the country held national elections which brought the CNDD-FDD to power as the ruling party of Burundi. The FNL, however, remained active until 2008, when it signed its own ceasefire agreement with the CNDD-FDD led government.
Between 2002 and 2012, nearly 500,000 refugees returned to Burundi from Tanzania (in addition to approximately 8,000 returnees from Rwanda and 15,000 from DRC).33 Between 2000 and 2002, with signs that peace might be on the way, some refugees began returning voluntarily from abroad. However, with the continuation of rebel activity and uncertainty about whether the peace agreement would hold, mass return did not begin in earnest until around 2003. Return then tapered off around the elections in 2005, picking up again en masse in 2008. Makamba Province, Burundi’s southernmost district which shares a border with Tanzania, was one of the regions with the highest concentration of refugee returns.34
In 2007, Tanzania began looking into how to close down the refugee camps that housed refugees who fled in 1993. Over the next several years Burundians in the New Settlements were strongly encouraged to return to their country-of-origin. This “encouragement” reportedly included tactics like decreasing the supply of food rations and surrounding camps with soldiers to intimidate the refugees.35 Worried that they would have no land or home to which to return, tens of thousands of Burundians in these camps refused to go back to Burundi voluntarily.36 Some found ways to remain
33Fransen and Kuschminder 2012; UNHCR 2009a.
This 500,000 includes only those documented by the UN. There was also likely a significant amount of undocumented return.
34 UNHCR 2008.
35 Amnesty International 2009; Rema Ministries 2012.
36 Author Interviews 2015-2016.
in Tanzania illegally rather than repatriate, living under the radar in small towns in the same region and farming for Tanzanian villagers. Then in 2012, in light of the alleged positive developments in Burundi, Tanzania revoked the prima facie refugee status awarded to the 1993-caseload Burundians, allowing only some 2,700 to remain as individual asylum seekers. The Tanzanian government, with the help of the international organizations including UNHCR and IOM, worked to return the remaining 37,000 of what had been several hundred thousand refugees residing in the New Settlements to Burundi through a course of action they termed “Orderly Repatriation.”37 There has been little official documentation of the process, but both refugees and NGO staff familiar with the situation report that numerous human rights violations occurred, including burning down refugees’
residences and beating them on to buses.38
While Tanzania was forcibly closing the New Settlements, the government agreed to let UNHCR propose an alternate solution for refugees in the Old Settlements, the majority of whom originally fled in 1972. Based on these refugees’ overwhelming preference to stay in Tanzania, UNHCR formulated an agreement with the Tanzanian government called the Tanzania Comprehensive Solutions Strategy (TANCOSS) under which Burundian refugees in the Old Settlements – not the New Settlements – were offered the choice to return to Burundi voluntarily or apply for Tanzanian citizenship. Providing 200,000 refugees with a choice between naturalization and repatriation was unprecedented – and a keen political move by the Tanzanian government. Not only would the money UNHCR raised to implement the TANCOSS program help promote development in the region, but Tanzania could also develop a reputation as a progressive-host country among
37 While this report glosses over the human rights violations which occurred during this process, it provides some useful statistics on the closing of Mtabila camp and transfer of asylum seekers to Nyarugusu. International Organization for Migration, Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the World Food Programme (WFP) 2012.
38 Author Interviews; see also Amnesty International 2009; Rema Ministries 2012.
international donors and effectively curtail the international community’s ability to chastise the country for brutal treatment of Burundian refugees in the future. In interviews I conducted between 2015 and 2017, UNHCR and IOM representatives would repeatedly bring up the Tanzanian government’s exceptional goodwill in agreeing to the naturalization program as a reason why they needed to tread lightly when criticizing the country’s strict refugee encampment policies. To date, approximately 170,000 Burundian refugees from Old Settlements have received naturalized Tanzanian citizenship, and several thousand more applications are still pending.39
Thus, by mid-2014 when I arrived in Burundi, return migration from Tanzania to Burundi had largely concluded (for lack of a better term). Early waves of returnees came from both the Old Settlements and New Settlements, but the vast majority of Burundian refugees who lived in the Old Settlements opted to seek citizenship in Tanzania through the government’s promise of naturalization.
Approximately 55,000 returnees returned to Burundi from the Old Settlements,40 while the remaining 445,000 came from either the New Settlements (or received returnee status after returning from living or elsewhere in Tanzania.
Though it is only one phase of several related cycles of migration, I focus on the impact of this wave of return migration, when 500,000 Burundians living in Tanzania repatriated to Burundi between the end of the civil war in 2003 and the closure of the last of the New Settlement refugee camps, Mtabila, in December 2012.
39 For a full discussion of the TANCOSS program see Kuch 2016. Due to recent political developments in Tanzania in 2017, the naturalization program was suspended, however the most recent estimates suggest that well over 200,000 Burundians’ gained Tanzanian citizenship before the suspension. See also Ensor, Charlie, “As risks rise in Burundi, refuge in Tanzania is no longer secure,” IRIN, Tanzania, 8 May 2018,
<https://www.irinnews.org/feature/2018/05/08/risks-rise-burundi-refuge-tanzania-no-longer-secure>, accessed 15 May 2018.
40 Wolfcarius, Eveline, and Edwin Seleli, “Repatriation of 1972 Burundian Refugees Hits 50,000 Mark,” UNHCR, 16 September 2009, <http://www.unhcr.org/en-us/news/latest/2009/9/4ab0db636/repatriation-1972-burundian-refugees-hits-50000-mark.html>, accessed 15 May 2018.