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State Radio and Communal Conflict ¹
by ALEXIS SINDUHIJE

At the beginning of December, I went to Gihanga, a small area twenty kilometers northwest of Bujumbura. Because the majority of the people who live there were Tutsis like me, I felt safe and thought I would be able to cover the massacres between Hutus and Tutsis that had just broken out there. On the road where the confrontations had taken place, I watched helplessly as a group of four or five Tutsi boys with machetes cut the throats of two small Hutu girls who were six or seven years old. It was as if the boys were cutting down a tree trunk. The blood of the two girls gushed like a waterfall, their cries begging for mercy from killers who had none. It cannot be described. Their lives were extinguished before me.

I have never forgotten the image and I consider myself a criminal because I did nothing to save them. What shocked me even more was that these young Tutsi killers approached me, laughing, just to tell me, "We had to kill them because their parents killed our parents, our brothers, our sisters. But you must not broadcast it on the radio, and you shouldn't write about it either."

I didn't say anything. I was on the verge of tears. I was sorry that I was there, present at the deaths of children whose only sin was to be Hutus on the road with these Tutsi killers. I was sorry that I had had no way to save them. I saw even worse all along the journey that day - dozens of children's bodies - and I realized that it was because the children were unable to flee and no one would protect them. Even the police were with the soldiers, drinking and yelling, laughing. They were almost all drunk, and I was struck by how happy they seemed.

I knew some of these police from college. One of them said to me, "These Hutus are criminals; they have killed thousand of Tutsis since the death of President Ndadaye, and we must do the same." I though they were incredibly stupid: professionals of justice who promoted vengeance. I felt lost and tense. On one hand, the Hutus had massacred a great many members of my extended family. In the two days after the death of the president, they had killed 102 of my relatives in the central part of the country - including my aunts, uncles, nephew, and cousins.

One evening toward the end of October - I'm not really sure of the date anymore - I had begun to realize that the tradition of keeping secrets from each other about our people's misdeeds, and the wholesale protection of collective interests, were the diseases of my society. I also began to realize that they were incompatible with my work as a journalist. I told myself that my father was a victim of this manipulation. He belonged to the colonial generation, he was uneducated, he had lived through the conflicts between Hutus and Tutsis from the very beginning. They began with the Hutus genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda in 1959, which had left its mark on Tutsi imaginations in Burundi. It must be added that the Tutsi genocide of Hutu intellectuals in 1972 left a similar mark on the imaginations of Hutus.

Not being educated, my father didn't know that the Rwandan Hutu intellectuals, encouraged by the Belgians, had put out a false rumor that the Tutsis had killed the king. This rumor led Hutus to believe it was necessary to rise against the Tutsis in revenge. As for myself, I belonged to another generation, and I refused either to be manipulated or to be the manipulator. The Hutu journalists at the station told me that they supported my efforts, but they admitted that they couldn't broadcast any reports on atrocities committed by the Hutus out of fear of Hutu extremists on one side and the military on the other. Professionally, I realized, we were all being made powerless by the structure of the conflict.

Their willingness to remain silent as journalists haunted me. I was very curious about this and asked them why they did so. Their answer was that they understood why the Hutus were killing: It was the only way for them to get back at the Tutsis and to fight against their arrogance. I will never forget what one of them said to me,

You Tutsis are all arrogant, you crush us, you are in the minority, and things are not going to go on this way. If the Hutus kill 100 Tutsis each day, how many Tutsis will be left?

I began to discover that each of my colleagues at that station had been harboring secret hatred toward another. I felt like vomiting when I saw them exchange their hypocritical smiles. How could a poor Tutsi peasant crush, step on, and dominate an evolved, educated Hutu journalist? How could he so threaten the interests of a government official that he would deserve death? How could one justify the deaths of those Hutu children I had seen slaughtered like sheep? Were they planning to exterminate the Tutsis? Why were those little girls dead? All these questions ran through my head, with no answers. I could not understand this hatred or its origin. I especially could not understand why the hatred was so great at the highest levels of society. I did not understand.

I was able to publish my report on Gihanga, which had been censored by the radio, in my newspaper, La Semaine. I described everything I had seen at Gihanga: the massacres of the children, the behavior of the police. I illustrated the attitude of the politicians who propagated rumors to stir up more violence. In the same issue an editorial by Patrice Ntibandetse, my old journalism professor and one of our university's more revered teachers, was even more critical of Burundi's intellectuals for their part in fomenting such hatred.

The cream of Burundian society has just shown, in the most bitter way, its total incapacity to run the country. Our thousands of intellectuals, for whom Burundi has given blood in order to train in humanism, have not gone beyond the stage of the vendetta, the way of our ancestors. Primitives we have been and we still are at the dawn of the twenty-first century. I kill you, you kill me, we kill each other, and then?

Reactions to my own article were as surprising as they were bizarre. My wife told me that everywhere she went, Tutsis told her that I was a traitor. She told me that she had much the same impression because she felt I hadn't been able to control my anger in the article. She asked me to stop doing this kind of reporting because it was going to create useless enemies for me. My brothers and some of my friends said the same thing.

Others told me that they liked the article. Many of them admitted to me in private that they were opposed to the killing, but they were afraid to denounce it publicly. And as violence followed upon violence with greater intensity in parts of the city, La Semaine published witnesses' accounts from every side denouncing the killing, though always under the cover of anonymity, fearful of naming names. I realized then that the people of Burundi had been taken hostage by invisible forces, but also that many were cowards, poor, passive, and terrified.

Just as the army massacred Hutus in the city of Bujumbura, Hutu militia had been massacring their Tutsi neighbors in the areas where Tutsis were in the minority, and the Tutsi soldiers, with the support of the army, were doing the same thing in the areas where the Tutsis were in the majority. The press vied with one another in calls for murder or to justify the resulting massacres, depending on which ethnic group they were defending. Suddenly the conflict had redesigned the society along lines of violence and political survival. Dawn of Democracy, a Hutu newspaper, did not hesitate to justify the massacre of over 50,000 Tutsis in October 1993, just after the death of the president, an act perpetrated by Hutu peasants under the manipulation of Hutu party leaders. In an article that appeared earlier that year in April 1993, Dawn had even foreshadowed the slaughter:

Oppressed for a long time, the Hutu people, like a spring too tightly wound, have expressed their withheld anger against the oppressor, and if it has to be done again, it will be done again.

Articles and analysis published in Dawn presented the Tutsis and the army as criminals to be killed. Meanwhile, the Tutsi papers weren't gentle either. Their own pieces aimed at galvanizing the Tutsis against the Hutu terror. According to newspapers such as the Crossroads of Ideas, the Hutus dreamt only of exterminating the Tutsis. In January 1994, Crossroads wrote

All Tutsis must be very clear-headed about confronting the Hutus, using their methods, because they are not the only ones who know how to use a machete... if not, they will roast us all on the spit.

In some of its publications, Crossroads also expounded its racist ideology towards the Hutus, saying that Hutus had ugly faces and using physiognomy as a means to identify and dehumanize them in the eyes of the Tutsi.

Meanwhile, the most powerful medium - Burundi's state radio station -became the arena in which political parties and extremist factions would compete with each other ideologically through "news" that was no more than communiqués read by journalists. Hutu journalists at the station were reduced to silence, and two of them were assassinated: Makobanya in February 1994, and Alexis Banruatuyaga in September 1994. The ones who were left were those who accepted having to remain silent. Others went into exile in neighboring countries and became a powerful force at a clandestine "hate radio" station based in Congo (the former Zaire), only twenty-five kilometers from Bujumbura. The radio station, called Radio Voice of the People, broadcast only in order to rouse the Hutus against the Tutsis.

I began then to reflect on why most of my fellow journalists did not want to mobilize in order to help change things or to reduce the tensions. My answer was that they had never been close to the majority themselves and that the structure of media in Burundi was a bureaucratic superstructure meant to subdue and reduce innovation. As employees of the state, the journalists had never learned to serve the public. Their only route to success and security in Burundi had been a position in public administration, and the radio was a training ground for working in the government. The journalists maneuvered in this circle, serving their ethnic, regional, or clan authority, hoping to elbow themselves into a nice little spot as director, or as ambassador. But by getting so mixed up in politics, they ended up feeling more like politicians than journalists.

At the time of the Hutu democratic victory, Hutu journalists figured that their time of privilege had come and that Tutsi colleagues were looking at their own sunset. They were engaged in fanatical causes led by political leaders of their ethnicity. I did not want to get involved in this game because I detested the condition of our society, which was brought about by political military authorities and their habitual manipulation and corruption.

Some of my Tutsi colleagues hated me, but they also respected me. They considered me an idealist, and sometimes they circulated that I was Hutu, which was a grave insult to my mother, who was afraid of the Hutus and actually hated them. My Hutu colleagues wanted to use me, explaining that the Hutu cause was a just one. But for me, I understood the game all too well by now: They were all the same, and I was different.

This state of the press, and especially of the radio, made me sick, and ashamed of myself. I was ashamed to go pick up my government paycheck at a time when taxpayers were continuing to die without anyone making the least effort to bring about peace. After much reflection, I decided in June 1994 to leave my job at the national radio and to concentrate exclusively on writing for La Semaine. I felt useless in radio. I had no influence to change the status quo, even though I was convinced that radio, if it would just play its role, was the only medium really capable of diminishing tensions.

The paper paid me almost nothing, less that 100 dollars a month. I had heavy bills because I was renting two houses, one for my mother and my two little sisters and another for me and my small family. Life was hard, but still it was good because I loved what I was doing. Even if the newspaper's readership was small, 3,000 total, my conscience felt at peace. I was serving a little at something and able to work according to my own conscience and professional standards.

"Love Under the Machete and Bullets" was my last article for La Semaine before it closed after receiving repeated death threats. Published in mid-August 1994, the article told the story of a mixed couple from Muyinga, in the northeastern region of Burundi, that was separated by the war. I had traveled to Muyinga in a convoy with the American ambassador at the time, Bob Krugger, and there I had met a woman refugee named Leonie Iconayigize in one of the Tutsi refugee camps visited by the ambassador. I decided to center my reporting for the paper on her story:

I don't know why those Hutus were hunting me down. I married a Hutu, I have brought Hutus into the world, on my back I am carrying a Hutu," she told me. Then she cried, "I have to say this; Saidi, my husband, has to know this. He cannot come see me without risking his life. I cannot run the risk and go out into the Hutu area, but I love him, and he loves me, too, I know he does.

She was crying. Across the story of this woman, the suffering of thousands of Burundians is spread. A people with the same language, same culture, who'd intermarried and mingled as neighbors and co-workers, were now divided because of differences among its elite. Even now, those families are separated and live in solitary anguish.

1. This article was originally published in the March/April edition of Crosslines Magazine.