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In the Great Lakes region, crises rarely remain contained within national borders. Wars, rebellions, exile, alliances and rivalries flow from one country to another like communicating vessels. The serious diplomatic crisis now pitting Rwanda against Burundi is no exception. It is the culmination of a long process, one that must be set within a broader regional history if its underlying dynamics are to be understood.
According to historians, Rwanda and Burundi — neither twin states nor ever having formed a single political entity, apart from the period of Belgian administration under the mandate, and later the trusteeship, over Ruanda-Urundi (1916–1962) — belong to the same cultural area. Their monarchies developed within a space where exchange, rivalry and mutual influence were constant.
The legacies of this long history continue to leave their mark on relations between the two countries.¹
This long history is the backdrop to the series. My analysis focuses on the period from 2005 to 2026. References to the past are drawn upon only where they shed light on contemporary events.
Why begin in 2005? That was the year the CNDD-FDD came to power in Burundi. In Rwanda, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) had already been governing the country for more than a decade. For the first time, both Rwanda and Burundi were governed by parties that had emerged from former armed movements. That moment opened a new political phase, whose effects would gradually make themselves felt in relations between Kigali and Bujumbura.
Although the RPF and the CNDD-FDD both came to power after several years of war, their origins, their trajectories and their political cultures are profoundly different. The RPF was born of the struggle waged by former Tutsi refugees to assert their right of return to Rwanda. The CNDD-FDD grew out of the civil war set off by the assassination, in October 1993, of President Melchior Ndadaye, Burundi's first democratically elected head of state. As this series will show, relations between Kigali and Bujumbura were at first relatively cordial, before gradually deteriorating as political, security and regional divergences grew deeper.
This choice is also a matter of experience. By 2005, I had been working as a journalist for more than ten years. Since then, I have been able to observe some of these developments, to meet many of their principal actors and to follow events that long remained far from international attention. My aim is not to recount my memories, but to put that experience at the service of a documented re-examination of the facts.
This series draws on field observations, documents and testimony, as well as on extensive reading and cross-checking of sources. It sets out to retrace, step by step, the evolution of relations between the RPF and the CNDD-FDD, in order to understand how two movements born of different historical contexts, having become the two ruling parties in Rwanda and Burundi, have gradually brought relations between the two countries to one of the most serious diplomatic crises in their recent history.
Published weekly from Friday 24 July, exclusively for subscribers to Les Carnets d'Antoine Kaburahe.
