DESCRIPCIÓN GENERAL DE LA PROPUESTA DE NORMA DE GESTIÓN DE ACTIVOS PAS 55 PAS 55

It is clear from the discussions above that migration-related divisions altered social dynamics in communities, and were linked in many cases to pervasive violence between neighbors and within families. Interactions with institutions like the CNTB hardened these identity categories, and sowed hostility across the resident-rapatrié cleavage.

In addition, community politics and civic engagement began to coalesce around résident-rapatrié competition. In this section, I explore how the résident-rapatrié divide played into politics at the local and national level.

3.1 Collectively Contesting the CNTB

On March 20, 2015, just one month before protests in Bujumbura would plunge the country into a new era of political crisis, the protests of note were not in Bujumbura. They were in Makamba. For

67 Curtis 2013.

68 Curtis 2013, 78.

69 See also Wittig 2017.

several years there had been growing public debate around the purpose of the CNTB and the perceived biased toward rapatriés. Members of the UPRONA party (the primary opposition party at the time, with a traditionally majority Tutsi membership), were particularly vocal in accusing the commission of favoring only rapatriés from 1972 and otherwise serving the interests of the CNDD-FDD. Many résidents felt the CNTB’s new policy of reopening cases in which the parties had agreed to share the land to give all the land back to the rapatriés was extreme and discriminatory.

Dissatisfaction with the new policy soon grew to a boiling point. Résidents in several villages led protests and organized to keep the CNTB from operating in the area. In Nyanza-lac, Kibago, Vugizo, and Mabanda résidents (supported by some rapatriés as well) placed large stones and tree trunks in the road and a make-shift check-point to ensure that no CNTB personnel could not get in.⁷⁰ In other cases villagers chased the CNTB cars out by throwing stones, wielding farming tools like machetes, and threatening the CNTB staff that if they came back again they would not leave alive.⁷¹ Reports suggest that while the majority of those fighting the CNTB were résidents (who stood to lose the most from the Bambonanire CNTB administration), some rapatriés also joined as they worried the CNTB’s policies could create further instability.⁷²

The situation had gotten so bad, that after the March 2015 protest the governor of Makamba halted the implementation of CNTB rulings in the province “to avoid a blood bath.” ⁷³ The President then followed suit and announced a nationwide suspension of CNTB activity.⁷⁴

70 Bigirimana and Hakizimana 2015; Keenan 2015; Nyenyezi Bisoka 2013; RFI 2015b.

71 Author Interviews.

72 Bigirimana and Hakizimana 2015.

73 “Burundi: le président Nkurunziza limoge son chef des services secrets,” RFI, 19 February 2015a,

http://www.rfi.fr/afrique/20150219-burundi-president-pierre-nkurunziza-limoge-son-chef-services-secrets-cndd-fdd-hutu-godefroid-niyombare>, accessed 17 May 2018.

74 RFI 2015a; Wittig 2017.

3.2 Civil Society in the Peace Villages

The résidents were not the only ones organizing around migration divides. While the CNTB became the epitome of institutionalized favoritism of returnees, this did not mean it was exclusively résidents who felt discriminated against. As explained in the previous chapter, both returnees and non-migrants believed their neighbors were biased against them because of their identity as a rapatrié or résident.

Take for example the case of Hassan.^* I met with Hassan on all of my trips to Burundi, and subsequently found him in Nyarugusu refugee camp in Tanzania when he fled Burundi again in 2015.

Hassan’s parents had fled during the 1972 genocide, seeking refuge in the DRC, where Hassan was later born. When Hassan returned to Burundi in November 2010, he was one of many who did not know where to find his familial land. The government allocated him and several others small plots of land as a part of the Nyabigina Peace Village in Makamba. However, the government did not provide those living in the Peace Village with adequate paperwork demonstrating their ownership of the land, and résidents in Nyabigina town refused to accede to the land allocations (which included plots with palm oil trees – a particularly lucrative crop). The returnees in Nyabigina Peace Village were repeatedly harassed by non-migrants claiming to be rightful owners of the property. Hassan described situations where returnees in could not harvest palm fruit on their property without threat of violence from the résidents, or were not allowed to plant seeds unless they provided résidents with the future profit. The situation was so untenable – dilapidated houses, lack of food, violence and threats of future violence from neighbors – that many of the returnees in the Peace Village, including one of Hassan’s sons, sold their iron sheet roofs for money to re-migrate to Congo.

* Hassan is a pseudonym used for anonymity.

Hassan decided to organize the peace-villagers to lobby various ministries, political representatives, and the international community to do something about the situation. He and his fellow returnees in Nyabigina formed a civil society organization called Dukumbane Burundi or “Love each other, Burundi.” Representing about 34 families of returnees in Nyabigina Peace Village, the organization wrote several letters to try and get the government’s attention – one to the Ministry of Solidarity which was in charge of ensuring the welfare of returnees, one to UNHCR, and another to a governmental Ombuds office. While UNHCR intervened to try and encourage the government to attend to the issues highlighted by Hassan’s group, the returnees saw little improvement in their daily lives. So, they decided to protest. Dukumbane Burundi gathered a group of returnees to sit for three days outside the commune administrator’s office, and on the fourth day a representative from the government came to see if they could find a solution. However, Hassan believed that the protestors were essentially “chased” from the commune administrator’s office. The government had promised the protestors that they would receive new land, but in the two years since the protest, nothing had happened.

In Hassan’s view, part of the problem was that both the government and the international community only paid attention to returnees from Tanzania and their counterpart résidents (so as not to promote favoritism of returnees over non-migrants). But they seemingly ignored returnees from DRC.

Other returnees from DRC that I interviewed felt equally slighted. They recounted how NGOs would hold meetings on the issues facing returnees, inviting returnees from Tanzania and non-migrants, but that returnees from DRC were not notified. Hassan recalled another situation where an international organization, started a program to provide access to a grinding machine for processing crops like rice, cassava, and palm oil. The program was meant to help individuals find employment. But the perception among those in Nyabigina Peace Village was that returnees from DRC were excluded from accessing these new jobs. Whether the neglect of returnees from Congo was as extreme and intentional

as Hassan and others portrayed it or not, the perception of relative deprivation and discriminatory treatment was quite strong. These perceptions fueled the hostility between returnees, the government, and residents and reified the migration-based collective identify divisions and sub-divisions.

As the national elections approached, Hassan’s neighbors told him and others in Nyabigina Peace Village that if the elections brought conflict to Burundi, those in the Peace Village would be the first to be killed. This fear, and relative lack of resources and status, precluded their ability for further collective action; if it failed they would likely face much worse repercussions. Given the threats these rapatriés faced, I was not surprised when I found that out in April 2015 that Hassan was among the very first to flee Burundi when national protests broke out in Bujumbura [this is explored in further in the following chapter].

3.3 Local Political Representation

Counter-intuitively, even creating local government posts to try and increase political representation for returnees generated problems. In many of the towns I visited, there was an official representative of the returnees recognized in the local administration. In some cases, a returnee was appointed by the national Ministry of Solidarity as the representative of returnees for that area. In other cases, a returnee was able to win a seat on a local administrative council, and was then referred to as the representative for the returnees by default. The “representative” title could also be informal, organized by the returnees in the community as a way to lobby the government and international community on various issues like land, housing, food, and employment. While there may have been instances where conflict was avoided through increased representation, many interviewees noted that singling out posts for returnees was also a source of tension in the community. As one appointed returnee-representative explained to me, “The people who stayed here they are complaining and jealous that there is this

position of representative of the returnees. They fear us or are jealous that there is going to be special attention.”⁷⁵

3.4 Utilizing alliances between migration identities, political parties, and ethnicity

Finally, national political actors could utilize résident-rapatrié competition to their own advantage. For example, there was a common perception that national political parties used return migration policy to gain voter support around the national elections – either by providing favorable outcomes to their constituent base, or by triggering ethnic resentment to invigorate their traditional voter base.⁷⁶ The CNDD-FDD’s extreme favoritism toward the 1972-returnees in the lead-up to the 2010 and 2015 elections was seen as one method to win returnee votes, as returnees often fit the demographic of the party’s traditional base of Hutu paysans. In fact, many returnees I spoke to believed that they were encouraged to return to Burundi between 2007 and 2009 because the ruling party wanted them to vote in the 2010 elections. By playing on stereotypes of résidents as Tutsi, the UPRONA’s criticism of the CNTB could equally be interpreted as trying to drum up electoral support among their traditional Tutsi base. The CNTB thus became an easy site for elite manipulation along multiple national and local cleavages, including political party competition, ethnic narratives, and résident-rapatrié divisions.⁷⁷ Moreover, there was a pervasive perception among the returnees I interviewed who arrived after 2012 that they were discriminated against because they failed to come in time to vote for the President in 2010, and therefore must be allied with the FNL opposition party.⁷⁸ Some may have

75 Interview 08/01/2014.

76 See also Wittig 2017.

77 See also Wittig 2017.

78 The FNL opposition party was the political wing of the more extreme Hutu-nationalist FNL rebel group. As a rebel group, the FNL did not sign on to the peace agreement until 2006, and therefore continued sporadically fighting the CNDD-FDD led government through 2008.

indeed been FNL supporters, but many of the refugees who did not return to Burundi until 2012 were avoiding return because they knew their land had been occupied in their absence. Upon arrival, they described how their neighbors would accuse them of being FNL in order to get ruling-party loyalists in the community to support them in their efforts to prevent the returnees from claiming land. This is a very clear embodiment of the type of national-local cleavage alliance Kalyvas describes as determining where violence is targeted during civil war – though here we see it in “peacetime.” (I describe this trend more detail in the following chapter on who migrated during the 2015 third-mandate crisis).

Thus, return migration not only created new identity divisions and catalyzed local violence between returnees and non-migrants, but hostility between returnees and non-migrants proved in at least some settings to be an important dimension of broader political dynamics and efforts at mobilization. In some cases, this took the form of bottom-up organization of protests and civil society engagement. In others, individual actors used alliances between local cleavages (résidents verses rapatriés) and national cleavages (political party and/or ethnicity) to further their own political and private pursuits.