SUMMARY
The Government of Burundi’s one-sided violence against civilians was rooted in long-standing ethnic competition for power between the Hutu majority and the Tutsi minority, a dynamic that has shaped Burundian politics since its independence in 1962. Despite being a demographic minority, the Tutsi held dominance over political institutions and the military. While early post-independence tensions were often regional rather than ethnic, the 1960s solidified a rigid Hutu-Tutsi divide. In the following decades, Hutu uprisings were met with brutal military repression by the Tutsi-dominated armed forces. The situation escalated in 1993 when Hutu moderate Melchior Ndadaye won Burundi’s first democratic elections. The year shows the second highest levels of government one-sided violence. Elements of the Tutsi-dominated army, ostensibly fearing its own marginalization, assassinated Ndadaye, launching over a decade of violence. According to analysts, the violence that ensued was motivated by the aim to gain or recapture political power and mainly orchestrated along ethnic lines. The widespread conviction that the other group would wipe them out if they could, served as a strong mobilizing force, manipulated by elites in their political strategies. Developments in the surrounding region, such as the 1994 Rwandan genocide, were used to corroborate the validity of such fears and the necessity of continued ethnic-based struggle.
In the year that has recorded most fatalities, 1996, the army massacred thousands of unarmed Hutu civilians following a military coup of 25 July 1996 in which Major Pierre Buyoya came to power. Burundi’s armed forces made use of disproportionate and indiscriminate violence against civilians, throughout the country’s regions. Acts of one-sided violence became a tool of intrastate conflict, used as a means of punishing people for supporting the rebel movements, or to intimidate them from joining the movements or lending them their support. Where there had been attacks by Hutu rebels, the army often responded by committing reprisal killings, frequently targeting Hutu civilians, under the guise of a mission to locate the perpetrators.
Year 2000 saw positive political developments with the Arusha peace agreement providing for power-sharing between Hutu and Tutsi in both government and the armed forces, the agreement correlated with a drop in the level of one-sided violence by the armed forces. But it was soon reversed as the army continued to kill civilians in the same areas as fighting against CNDD-FDD and Palipehutu-FNL remained. In 2003, Buyoya handed over power to the VP, Hutu leader Domitien Ndayizézé, who governed until the 2005 elections. and on 26 August 2005 Pierre Nkurunziza, a Hutu, became President of Burundi following CNDD-FDD victories in Burundi elections. However one-sided violence continued and mainly targeted the opposition. In 2015, Pierre Nkurunziza decided to run for office for a third term, something the opposition saw as unconstitutional. As an effect the one-sided violence increased again, this time Imbonerakure the youth militia of the ruling CNDD-FDD were accused of the killings of the opposition, sometimes in collaboration with local police.
The Government of Burundi has generally denied targeting civilians directly, often claiming that any civilian deaths were either incidental or the result of rebels operating within civilian populations. Army representatives have argued that civilians who remained in rebel-held areas could be considered collaborators. However, acts of one-sided violence during the time-period first took place amidst an uneasy collaboration between a Hutu-led government and the Tutsi-dominated army, wherefore the government had little reason to deny army involvement. After the Tutsi-dominated military regimes resumed power in 1996, the government mostly denied having conducted attacks against civilians. At the time, the army claimed that while it did not deliberately target civilians they were sometimes caught in the middle, particularly due to the fact that rebels had been highly integrated into the population. The army was also cited as stating that those civilians choosing not to escape from the rebels should themselves be treated as rebels.
The government has employed tactics such as massacres, executions, forced disappearances, and mass displacement. Civilians have been shot to death, or killed by knife or machete, the close-range indicating soldiers’ frequent awareness that the victim in question, in fact, was a civilian. In the mid-1990s the government forcibly relocated as many as 300 000 Hutu civilians to camps, described by then-mediator Nelson Mandela as ‘concentration camps’. Observers have described the policy as an anti-insurgency strategy, aimed at limiting civilian support for the rebel movements. The one-sided violence de-escalated for a few years after the democratic elections of 2005. From 2015, targeted killings increased again as the police and the Imbonerakure militia killed opposition members, protesters of the third term of President Pierre Nkurunziza and civilians living in ‘opposition districts of Bujumbura’. Throughout, the violence has remained indiscriminate and disproportionate.
Though primarily domestic, the Government of Burundi has conducted attacks against civilians beyond its borders. In 1997, it carried out a cross-border raid in Tanzania targeting civilians during a pursuit of rebel elements. In 1998, civilians in DR Congo (Zaire) were killed by Burundian forces under accusations of collaborating with elements of the CNDD-FDD. In 2022 and 2023 the government again targeted Congolese civilians in Sud Kivu during operations against RED-Tabara. Additionally , In 2018 Burundian troops deployed under the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) in Somalia, killed civilians in retaliation for an IED attack.
The Government of Burundi first became active as a one-sided actor in UCDP data on 26 November 1991, when more than 20 people were reportedly executed at Kaburantwa bridge in Bukinanyana district.
