Burundi

The startling death of Burundian President Pierre Nkurunziza earlier this week raises new questions about the future direction of his country. Nkurunziza’s legacy is not a happy one. After taking office in 2005, and particularly when he insisted on running for a third term in 2015, he isolated his country, violently silenced his critics, and repeatedly used fear and intimidation as governing strategies, touching off violence that led hundreds of thousands to flee the country. While many observers were surprised when he chose not to run for a fourth term this year, most expected that he would continue to wield power from retirement, limiting the autonomy of his hand-picked successor, Evariste Ndayishimiye, who handily won the election in May. Despite the turmoil associated with his tenure in office, Nkurunziza’s death will be a source of alarm for many. Conflict-weary Burundians will not relish the prospect of a power struggle among those seeking to fill the vacuum he left.  His sudden demise, reportedly due to a heart attack, may also prove fodder for conspiratorial thinking that can be poisonously weaponized by those seeking power at any price. The overall lack of transparency in Nkurunziza’s Burundi has heightened this risk.  Take the widespread conjecture around his wife’s health as one example. The first lady was hospitalized in Kenya when her husband died, and many reports suggested that she was suffering from COVID-19 (several suggest that this was the real cause of her husband’s death, as well).  Burundian authorities deny this was the case, but in a country where the official policy has been to suggest they enjoy divine protection from the virus, skepticism abounds. Nkurunziza believed that he faced enemies within his borders and beyond them (relations with neighboring Rwanda are particularly tense), and given the limited credibility of official statements, his surprising death provides space for alarming speculation. But it is also possible that this week’s developments will create new opportunities for a less repressive future.  While powerful military factions will not offer total freedom to any new leadership, the absence of the “supreme guide”  hovering over the shoulder of President-elect Ndayishimiye could allow for a shift in direction. Consensus might be built to ease the country’s isolation as a means of stimulating the economy and easing the desperate poverty of many Burundians.  Political skill will be essential to finding a way forward, but provided he is sworn in as planned in August, Ndayishimiye may find his presidency more consequential than originally planned.

Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s full steam ahead in Burundi with regard to the presidential and parliamentary elections slated for May 20. As recent weeks brought news of the first recorded cases of the coronavirus in Burundi, they have also featured coverage of crowded campaign rallies. President Pierre Nukurunziza’s reluctance to impose policies aimed at stopping the virus from spreading is converging with his enthusiasm for democratic authoritarianism, putting not only Burundi, but Burundi’s neighbors at risk. There is no suspense whatsoever surrounding the upcoming polls. After Nkurunziza’s run for a third term in 2015 was marred by serious violence, the state has been systematically and brutally eliminating all potential challenges to its authority. Civil society groups that haven’t been banned outright have been bullied into submission, and there is virtually no independent media left in the country. The ruling party’s militia, the Imbonerakure, intimidate and harass Burundians with impunity, even shaking them down for contributions toward the cost of the upcoming electoral exercise. The country’s leadership has chosen impoverishment and isolation as part of its campaign for total control, and it is clear to all that Nkurunziza’s hand-picked successor, Evariste Ndayishimiye, will emerge as the winner later this month in a climate that could not possibly be described as free or fair. Burundi’s trajectory has been apparent for some time. But the pandemic now raises the stakes for neighboring states whose attempts to control the virus are threatened by Burundi’s insistence on moving ahead with electoral theater regardless of the public health risks involved. Regional organizations are supposed to be the venue through which neighbors can coordinate and deconflict their agendas, but Burundi continues to expose the weakness of the East African Community. Just as the EAC’s attempts to advance dialogue in Burundi did nothing to stave off the closing of political space, today the organization seems helpless at best as Burundi and neighboring Tanzania refuse to take COVID-19 seriously. In a region as volatile as the Great Lakes, it is not unduly alarmist to fear that the failure of regional institutions to manage threats may prompt some actors to take matters into their own hands, feeding persistent cycles of instability.

Michelle Gavin is a senior fellow for Africa studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. From 2011 to 2014, she served as the U.S. ambassador to Botswana and to the Southern African Development Community. She started at CFR in February 2018. Burundians are at the polls today to vote in a referendum on constitutional amendments that would, among other things, change the country’s rules around term limits. The change would make it possible for the current president, Pierre Nkurunziza, who has served since 2005, to continue to hold that office until 2034. It is the latest example of a powerful Central African trend that rejects norms around regular leadership transitions and instead embraces a governing style in which a single individual—far more than institutions, ideologies, or even party platforms—dominates decision-making in the name of stability. While West African states have actively worked to shore up the principle that leaders should not seek to stay in power indefinitely, and many of Southern Africa’s ruling parties, while retaining political power, allow for real changes in the personalities at the top, the countries at the heart of the continent seem to be moving in a different direction entirely. Paul Kagame has been the de facto ruler of Rwanda since 1994 and formally president since 2000. Yoweri Museveni has been the president of Uganda since 1986. Joseph Kabila became president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2001, and continues in that role despite the fact that his most recent term expired in 2016. Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda, and the DRC are very different places with very different political dynamics, but each serves to reinforce the sense in their neighbors that term limits are of dubious value at best.  As Central Africa moves in this direction, and the rest of the continent in another, it is no coincidence that the region is plagued by instability. The causes of region’s conflicts are interlinked and complex, to be sure. But it is equally true that the specter of conflict is at the heart of these entrenched leaders’ claim to political legitimacy. Each cultivates a narrative in which he is the only thing preventing a return to a more violent, chaotic past. The constant threat of instability has become inseparable from the governing ethos of its leaders and the state institutions that they shape.  The idea that only one man stands between a society’s ruin and its redemption makes for compelling drama, but it is a truly frightening basis on which to establish governing authority. Every decision—any decision—can be justified on the grounds of meeting the existential threat. Accountability and dissent become confused with plots against the state itself. Dialogues about the future become focused exclusively on questions about individual leaders. And worst of all, this approach leads the state, inevitably, off a cliff. Unless there are immortals among us, these states will outlast their leaders. Paradoxically, the men who claim to be bulwarks against chaos are ensuring that they will leave instability in their wake.   

This is a guest post by Cheryl Strauss Einhorn. Cheryl is an adjunct professor at Columbia Business School. Burundi, Gambia, and now South Africa have all recently announced their intentions to withdraw from what they deride as a “biased” International Criminal Court (ICC). The permanent tribunal responsible for investigating crimes against humanity, genocide, and war crimes that was created in 1998. It’s the latest indignity to the court that has been weakened not only by misaligned incentives that enable it to bring cases globally and yet rely mostly upon member states to enforce its actions, but also by the cozy relationship that has emerged between the ICC’s members and its cases. Thirty-four of its 123 members are African states and all thirty-one individuals that the office of the prosecutor has charged with crimes since the ICC began operating in 2002 are African. Since the court doesn’t have a police force, its supranational mission has fallen largely to its African member states to execute, meaning that the ICC needs those countries to carry out arrests even as they need, as sovereign nations, to conduct foreign policy initiatives that may involve the individuals being accused of a crime. That’s proven to be an unrealistic expectation. A year ago President Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan, whom the ICC indicted for charges of crimes against humanity and genocide related to the Darfur conflict dating back to 2003, attended an African Union summit in South Africa, where he could have been arrested–and indeed a South African high court judge forbid him from leaving the country pending a hearing on whether to hand him over to the ICC. But back in 2015, South Africa’s President Zuma visited Sudan to reinforce political, economic, and social relations between the two countries which already have sixteen bilateral agreements in a number of fields including trade, agriculture, defense, policing, arts and culture, social development, and scientific cooperation. Result: Bashir was let go. South Africa is not alone in shirking enforcement duty for the ICC. Bashir has evaded arrest for years; in 2013, ICC-member Nigeria also declined to arrest Bashir when he attended a conference there. But again, Sudan and Nigeria have had a long history of economic, cultural and social ties. Sudan was offering scholarships for Nigerian students to study at its universities back then, but now ties are even closer. In August they announced that they’d work together to diversify their economies away from being so dependent upon oil revenues, partnering to build capacity in the film industry. More than five million Nigerians live in Sudan today. The court’s predicament is further complicated by its inefficiency, only five individuals have been tried in fourteen years. Yet by some estimates, the court’s activities have cost at least $1.5 billion. Thus the ICC doesn’t just suffer from the fact that major countries like the United States, China, and Russia have refused to subject themselves to the ICC’s jurisdiction. There are endemic problems in supranational bodies that must rely upon member nations to behave uneconomically in order for the organization to function. Yes, of course not all decisions should be made based upon economic factors–especially those related to genocide and war crimes–but evidence suggests that the ICC is having a hard time operating in its current form. Incentives drive behavior and when an incentive is behaviorally salient, organizations, like countries, are responsive to incentive-based cues. What may make the African nations change their behavior? As of now, it appears that the answer is nothing, for they’ve decided the value proposition of belonging to the ICC isn’t strong enough and so they’ve decided to drop out and move on.

Tyler Falish is an intern for the Council on Foreign Relations Africa Studies program, and a student in Fordham University’s Graduate Program in International Political Economy & Development. On February 6, four people—including a child—were killed and twelve injured in a coordinated grenade attack in Burundi’s capital, Bujumbura. Republican Forces of Burundi (FOREBU), an armed group opposed to President Pierre Nkurunziza’s third term bid, claimed involvement in separate attacks on February 5. The recent violence continues a trend that began nine months ago, when Nkurunziza first announced his intention to seek a third term. On February 4, the African Union (AU) announced the appointment of five African heads of state to a panel tasked with convincing Nkurunziza to accept a proposed AU peacekeeping mission, called the African Prevention and Protection Mission in Burundi (MAPROBU). Nkurunziza has vehemently expressed his opposition to the proposal—discussion around which did not until recently directly include him—and there’s little reason to believe that the panel will change his mind. Further, there is no timeline yet associated with the panel’s charge. Despite the recent release of compelling evidence that Burundi’s security forces extrajudicially killed dozens of people on December 11, the AU has backpedaled since the December approval to send five thousand troops to Burundi under MAPROBU. Why the change of heart? In the AU’s Constitutive Act, Article 4(h) grants the AU the right to intervene in a member state, given an Assembly decision “in respect of grave circumstances, namely: war crimes, genocide, and crimes against humanity.” The Peace and Security Council (PSC), which, unlike the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), is composed of members elected to three- or five-year terms, invoked Article 4(h) when it initially approved MAPROBU. So one can assume that the AU’s December fact-finding mission found evidence of “grave circumstances.” But the authorization requires an affirmative Assembly decision—as well as the explicit backing of the UNSC—and driven by the Burundi government’s opposition, the AU failed to authorize the proposal at the recently concluded summit in Addis Ababa. This could indicate the PSC has little sense of the AU membership’s collective pulse. Meanwhile, Burundi won reelection to its PSC seat, running unopposed in the East Africa region. After the failed vote, PSC Commissioner Smail Chergui said, “There is will neither to occupy nor to attack,” but one could question the will of member states to participate in MAPROBU at all, especially without Burundi’s permission, as Nkurunziza has stated he would consider MAPROBU an invading force. If executed, the mission would likely be staffed by soldiers from Burundi’s immediate neighbors via the Eastern Africa Standby Force (EASF). Questions remain as to the capacity of the EASF, but Director Ismail Chanfi announced in December that EASF “forces are ready for engagement to maintain the peace process in the region, anytime.” While the AU spins its diplomatic wheels, and the UNSC encourages “inclusive dialogue,” violence and unrest continue in Burundi. A leaked UN report suggests Rwanda is providing military training to Burundian rebels, which, whether true or not, will only strengthen Nkurunziza’s cries against “invasion.” In the “African Year of Human Rights,” the way the AU handles the situation in Burundi— with kid gloves or a firm hand—will stand testament to the strength of the Union and its resolve to pursue “African Solutions for African Problems.”

The ongoing tragedy in eastern Congo is closely related to the history of genocide in Rwanda. Herman J. Cohen, former assistant secretary of state for Africa, former ambassador to Senegal and Gambia and once deputy chief of mission in Congo-Kinshasa, has just published a must-read article (gated): “Rwanda: Fifty Years of Ethnic Conflict on Steroids.” Cohen shows that the 1994 genocide in Rwanda was not a one-off event but part of an ethnic conflict that started in 1959. Its root causes included overpopulation, poverty, and bad colonial policies, especially with respect to sharpening ethnic differences and identities. He identifies three episodes of post-independence genocide in the Great Lakes region: 1972 in Burundi in which the Tutsis murdered 80,000 Hutus; 1994 in Rwanda in which the Hutus murdered some 800,000 Tutsis; and 1996 in eastern Congo (Tingi Tingi) when a Tutsi-dominated Rwandan army murdered 80,000 Hutus. Perpetrators of these massacres have largely acted with impunity. In a sober conclusion, Ambassador Cohen assesses the achievements of the Kagame government in Rwanda but concludes that the country remains inherently unstable because the ruling elites are only about fifteen percent of the population. With continuing ethnic tensions in Rwanda and Burundi, there is possibility of another round of genocide. The UN developed the doctrine of “the Responsibility to Protect” in part as a response to the earlier genocides. It provides a structure for an international response to a future genocide. Yet, as Cohen observes, the international response to the earlier genocides does not engender optimism about the future. There is awareness in the United States of the humanitarian disasters of eastern Congo. Ambassador Cohen’s article puts them in context even if it does nothing to reduce their horror. However, greater familiarity of just what has happened in the Great Lakes region might have the salutary consequence of building popular support for the doctrine of Responsibility to Protect.