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Email this citationCIAO DATE: 03/04
Refugees and Displaced Persons in Burundi — Defusing the Land Time-Bomb
October 2003
Abstract
A final cease-fire agreement and the permanent suspension of hostilities in Burundi, however elusive these objectives might seem today, carry the risk that a great many people who were uprooted will rush home to a country not yet prepared to receive them. It will only be possible to repatriate approximately one million Burundians quickly if thorough advance preparation is made. Too little attention has been paid to the land question this involves, however, by both the transitional government and the international community. If they do not make it an immediate priority, it risks destabilising the transition from the day that a definitive ceasefire is signed.
The main victims of the war in Burundi, refugees and displaced persons, have been waiting for the dividends of peace ever since the Arusha agreement was signed on 28 August 2000. There is a precedent in Burundi's history for what the poorly prepared return of refugees can mean for political stability. Following the election victory of FRODEBU in 1993 some 50,000 who became refugees in 1972 returned spontaneously. Their arrival was handled badly by the newly installed government, which was trapped between the necessity of returning to the refugees what the former regime had stolen from them and the fear of the Tutsis that they would be the losers. It was, in part, the demonstrations of expropriated Tutsi families which produced the deterioration of the political situation that culminated in the coup d'état and the assassination of President Ndadaye on 21 October 1993.
