The mistrust that still marks relations between Rwanda and Burundi today does not date from the recent crises. It goes back to the first decades of independence, when the two countries became players in a game of communicating vessels, exchanging waves of refugees to the rhythm of their political tragedies. Each became, in turn, a land of refuge for the other’s exiles, and suspected the other of harbouring the architects of its own destabilisation.
From 1959, tens of thousands of Rwandan Tutsi fled the violence of the Social Revolution and found refuge in Burundi. Thirteen years later, in 1972, the movement reversed: hundreds of thousands of Burundian Hutu took the road to exile (1), a significant portion of them towards Rwanda, to escape the massacres ravaging their country.
These exoduses lastingly upset the region’s demographic, political and security balances. Refugees were no longer merely the victims of crises: their presence became a major stake in relations between Kigali and Bujumbura.
These waves of exile displaced far more than populations. They carried narratives of persecution, solidarities forged in hardship, but also fears and resentments passed down from one generation to the next. Some added to them the hope — or the political project — of a return home.
Over the decades, these intertwined memories shaped the way the two states perceived each other, interpreted their neighbour’s crises and reacted to population movements. To understand the current tensions between Kigali and Gitega, one must return to this matrix, where hospitality, exile, fear, memory and political rivalries are interwoven.
This first episode is devoted to the initial movement: that of the Rwandan Tutsi towards Burundi, from 1959 to the birth of the Rwandan Patriotic Front. The second will turn to the reverse movement, that of the Burundian Hutu forced to flee after the massacres of 1972.
Flight to a land of refuge… but not a new homeland
It is February 1964. International news is dominated by the Cold War. In the heart of the African Great Lakes, the exodus of the Rwandan Tutsi and the massacres accompanying it pass almost unnoticed.
On 4 March 1964, Le Monde published a long eyewitness account of the massacres that had just bloodied Rwanda, under a title of revealing caution: “Concerning the Ruanda massacres” (2). The content, by contrast, left no room for ambiguity.
The author was neither an activist nor an opponent of the Rwandan regime: Pierre Vuillemin was a French teacher seconded by UNESCO to Butare. A direct witness to the violence of December 1963, he used the piece to announce his resignation. He refused, he wrote, to “remain in the service of a government responsible for or complicit in a genocide”, and denounced “the indifference and passivity of the great majority of Europeans”, an “objective complicity”.
In the prefecture of Gikongoro, he wrote, thousands of people were massacred in a matter of days, women and children included. For him, these killings were not a matter of local excesses but of a systematic policy.
His closing sentence:
“Quite clearly, these events are not an accident; they are the manifestation of a carefully cultivated racial hatred.”
The word “genocide” was written, in 1964, thirty years before the one that would give it its definitive weight.