Six months after disputed elections returned President Nkurunziza to a constitutionally questionable third term, Burundi has entered a crisis eerily similar to the situation before the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. The UN confirms that at least 200 people have been killed since April, and the threat of violence has chased a further 200,000 refugees abroad. A recent presidential directive ordering citizens to surrender weapons or face a police clampdown has even prompted a prosecutor from the International Criminal Court to warn that the ICC will hold liable anyone “who incites or engages in acts of mass violence including by ordering, requesting, encouraging or contributing in any other manner to the commission of [such] crimes.”
“We must have global vigilance. And never again must we be shy in the face of evidence,” said President Clinton in his apology to Rwandans for not doing enough to prevent the slaughter of 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus. In fact, US policy went well beyond mere inaction. In her landmark history of modern genocide, Samantha Power, the current US Ambassador to the United Nations, notes that US diplomacy “revealed its natural bias towards states and towards negotiations” during the crucial weeks in which evidence of the oncoming massacres became unanswerable. Unforgivably, the best-informed parts of the US government remained determined to “[view] the escalating violence with a diplomatic prejudice that left them … institutionally oriented” towards Kigali, even though privately they knew that preparations for a wholesale massacre were already well underway. Other accounts reveal a comparable paralysis at the UN, largely because diplomats remote from events on the ground were reluctant to consider worst-case scenarios, much less to risk pre-emptive action.
For all its pretensions to “realism”, a great deal of modern foreign policy remains bound to the idealistic assumption that nation states tend to make sensible or rational choices, even though modern history has repeatedly shown otherwise. This disabling sophistication has prevented intervention in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and throughout the Congo War. It is also part of the reason for current failures in Syria. Despite the articulation of the progressive sounding R2P doctrine – a “right to protect” vulnerable populations that would let the UN Security Council trump sovereignty if indicators of a mass atrocity were sufficiently strong – there remains an alarming absence of hope, or practical wisdom, that would allow the UN to coordinate the political will needed to avert a catastrophe in Burundi. The head of the central and west Africa UN human rights office recently told the Telegraph that the UN is actually “more poorly positioned to respond to the warning signs today than we were in 1994.”
To date, African interventions in the crisis offer no cause for hope. Last month the African Union’s Peace and Security Council released a strongly-worded statement, but this had no effect on the violence. Preoccupied with the intricacies of a delicate peace deal in South Sudan the AU is not well placed to take decisive action in Burundi. Its chief mediator in the crisis, President Museveni, is already in campaign mode as he prepares to safeguard his own political future in Uganda. Without concerted support from the US and Europe, there won’t be enough pressure on the Nkurunziza government to prevent further escalation.
Burundi’s 13-year civil war, which ended in 2006, cost 300,000 lives. As with neighbouring Rwanda, it involved the confrontation between rebels who represented a Hutu majority and an army that was controlled by the Tutsi minority. Already, Rwandan president Paul Kagame has accused the Burundi government of perpetrating massacres. Yet, when faced with a critical UN Security Council draft resolution which threatens sanctions if the crisis isn’t defused, Burundi’s Foreign Minister Aime Nyamitwe responded that “Burundi is not in flames.” The president’s head of communications told AFP that “There will be no war or genocide,” insisting instead that the country’s security forces were countering “acts of terrorism, as with al-Shabab in Somalia.”
If the crisis in Burundi does devolve into genocidal chaos, it will have done so not because of a failure of “global vigilance” but because of the international community’s timidity in the face of evidence.
