Nelson Mandela may have retired from active politics in his native South Africa, but his immense international prestige gives him a reach far beyond his homeland. That reach is in evidence again; he has brokered the formation of a multiethnic government in Burundi which has been scarred and traumatized by seven years of brutal civil war.
The ethnic hatred between Tutsi and Hutu tribes has disfigured not only Burundi but also neighboring Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The deal that Mandela has put in place allows for a government in which power is shared between the Tutsi and the Hutu communities.
The present Burundian President Pierre Buyoya, who is a Tutsi, will remain in office for the first 18 months before handing over to a Hutu. A new Cabinet has also been appointed and endorsed by Burundi’s Parliament in which 14 out of the 26 portfolios will go to Hutus and 12 to Tutsis.
On the face of it, this is the ideal solution. Unfortunately, history is not on the side of compromise in Burundi. Once a Tutsi-ruled monarchy of some antiquity, the Tutsis were ousted by their former Hutu slaves, who then mounted a genocidal campaign against their old masters in which hundreds of thousands of innocents died. The Hutu government, so steeped in blood, was in its turn defeated and overthrown by Tutsi rebels and so the position has remained until this Mandela accord.
Hutu rebels still remain in part of the country and they have vowed to reject the new government. They can be expected to do everything in their power to intimidate any Hutus from supporting the new arrangement. During the great genocide, they thought nothing of murdering their own kind on the merest suspicion of sympathy for the plight of hunted Tutsis.
There are, therefore, many who believe that the new shared government in Burundi’s capital Bujumbura is doomed. That may include even Mandela. But he, and the Nigerians, who have gone out of their way to support the former South African president’s efforts in Burundi, know that there is no other way. Violence will never solve the differences between the Tutsis and the Hutus. It will merely lay the foundation for further horrors. This power sharing deal may collapse. But it had to be tried. And if it fails, then, all men of good will must work again, every bit as hard as Mandela, to put in place a new compromise that embraces both Burundi’s ethnic communities.
One day, the ideals of shared government and peace will prevail in Burundi. One day the men of violence will see that their way is no way at all. One day the majority in both communities will realize that negotiations and cooperation are the only solution. Until that time, the forces of reason must never give up. If today’s compromises are cast down in yet another bloodbath, then they must return anew to their task and start all over again the long and arduous process of re-identifying common ground between the two communities.
Men of the immense moral stature of Nelson Mandela may speed the business along, but in the end, it will be the ordinary, decent folk who will prevail upon their fellow countrymen and persuade them that peace is the only chance that Burundi and its people will ever have of prosperity and happiness.
