Burundi still bruised by the massacres of 1972, fifty years later

She is now 60 years old. But Laetitia Ngendakumana still cries like the 10-year-old girl she was in 1972, when her father disappeared in the inter-community massacres that engulfed Burundi, recently qualified as genocide by a government commission.

As for many others, between April 29 and the end of June 1972, fifty years ago, the world of this Hutu family collapsed with the arrest by the Tutsi authorities of the patriarch, a senior executive in a bank of Bujumbura, the largest city in the country. “We never found out where we took Dad. What I know is [qu’ensuite] we looted everything we had”says Laetitia crushing her hands, in the house surrounded by banana trees where she now lives near Gitega, the political capital.

Neither her marriage to a teacher from this region, nor the birth of their fourteen children – twelve survived – nor the end of the massacres and the relative stabilization in this troubled country of the Great Lakes erased her pain.

For a long time, the year 1972, dubbed in homes theikiza (the scourge in the Kirundi national language), has remained a taboo in the public sphere. When in 2019, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) set up by the authorities announced that it was reopening mass graves to count and try to identify the victims, Laetitia immediately contacted those responsible.

From 100,000 to 300,000 dead

Identifying five-decade-old human remains is a miracle, but the farmer clung to one hope: dentures. “My father had an accident [de voiture] and lost his teeth. He wore gold prostheses. I asked them to let me know if they found them.”she continues. “They called me. » Cruel irony: the remains of her father were found a few kilometers from her home, on another wooded hill near Gitega.

The events of 1972 began on April 29 with massacres perpetrated by Hutu extremists against Tutsis, particularly in the south of the country. The repression quickly turns into systematic massacres of the Hutu elite – executives, teachers, but also college students – causing 100,000 to 300,000 deaths according to estimates. The Hutu represent 85% of the population, against 14% for the Tutsi.

The killings affected all of Burundi, but Gitega was the epicenter: there was a military camp there where the victims arrested across the country transited, before being killed. In this region, the TRC dug nine mass graves, exhuming the remains of some 7,000 victims. Piles of skulls, bones and bags of tattered clothing now stored in the small dark room of a public building awaiting a memorial.

To identify the 1972 graves in a country ravaged by numerous massacres between Hutu and Tutsi and then by a civil war (1993-2006), the CVR relied on the memories or the macabre discoveries of the inhabitants. “When we say 7,000 victims, it is only in relation to the graves that we have already found, confirmed, exhumed”underlines the president of the CVR, Pierre-Claver Ndayicariye, for whom many graves remain unknown.

“The state has killed”

After three years of investigations, the TRC published in December 2021 a progress report qualifying these massacres as genocide and crimes against humanity. “In 1972, the state killed its people”insists Pierre-Claver Ndayicariye. “It is a genocide because the State planned, organized, carried out this genocide”he continues in a solemn tone, insisting on the responsibility of the then Tutsi president, Michel Micombero.

But the qualification of genocide is not unanimous in Burundi, where the subject is very sensitive and where some denounce an instrumentalization by the regime, now Hutu, of the CVR, composed almost exclusively of executives of the party in power. During its investigations, the TRC was accused of bias for focusing its research on sites where Hutu were buried, and ignoring those where Tutsi victims were found.

“There is still a problem of political agenda in this story”says historian Evariste Ngayimpenda, deploring the will of “ethnic legitimation” successive Burundian regimes. “From the time when the Tutsi were in power (…), avoidance of the Hutu peril was a constant theme. Today, it’s the opposite, it’s the avoidance of the Tutsi danger, which is also a constant theme..

According to the rector of the University of Lake Tanganyika, in Bujumbura, the work of the CVR has also “sin by methodological deficit” – he questions in particular the dating of the graves – and by the lack of recourse to international expertise, in particular from the UN.

Near Gitega, Laetitia and her husband, Emmanuel Berakumenyo, hope that this 50^and anniversary, for which the State has not announced official commemorations, an opportunity to heal a painful past. “These are conflicts that may be able to end little by little, but the administration must lend a hand”believes the former teacher, survivor of the massacres.