Global Health

In Burundi, the Arusha Agreement for Peace and Reconciliation of 2000 was supposed to mark the end of the cycle of ‘ethnic’ violence that had affected the country for more than 50 years. The agreement aimed to promote justice and reconciliation by means of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission and a Special Tribunal. Nevertheless, 14 years after being announced, these bodies are still not in operation. Burundian institutions declare the need to talk about the past, but real initiatives in this direction are taken only with hesitation. With the lack of clear orientation, people adopt different approaches towards the past. Some affirm the need to shed light on the past, some prefer to forget, while others agree to talk about the past but only under certain conditions. In this article, we will describe the different memory strategies adopted by some young people from the Northern Quarters of Bujumbura, which were the areas most affected by the war of 1993. We will identify the most significant factors influencing these young people’s approach towards the past, and we will make some observations about their concept of reconciliation and justice. We will see that the suggestion to forgive and to have justice at the same time changes the traditional concept of justice, which is a punitive one. Finally, we will analyse the link between the process proposed by the young people and the spirit of the transitional justice officially proposed by the institutions.

In Burundi, the announcement of President’s Nkurunziza’s run for a third term in April 2015 caused violent protests that led to hundreds of deaths. With the aim of both condemning the demonstrations and mobilizing party supporters, ethnic references were now and then employed by political entrepreneurs. Social media was one of the most important tools used by them to spread their messages. Hence, a virtual political arena developed where replies could be made and confrontations could be held without fear of censorship or persecution.
This chapter focuses on the process of ethnicization of memory on social media. It analyses the way in which the death of President Ntaryamira (on 6 April 1994) was remembered on Twitter during the last four years, before and after the start of the 2015 crisis. On this social platform, commemorations have increasingly been used to accuse or defend one party or another, either in political or ethnic terms. This triggered a polarization between groups that increasingly characterized themselves in ethnic terms. As a result, a commemorative event that was not described in ethnic terms before the 2015 crisis gradually became part of the exclusive cultural and commemorative patrimony of one ethnic group.

After the outbreak of the 2015 political crisis in Burundi, many political opponents, activists and journalists fled the country and continued their engagement from abroad. As a result, an important part of Burundi’s political debate went online. For the diaspora, social media not only represented a fundamental channel to access information. When political authorities spread their messages on social platforms, the diaspora often reacted by addressing very direct accusations to them. In this virtual political arena, arguments were often proposed in a way that recalled the memory of the past and appealed to the ethnic belonging. Such approach not only concerned political issues but affected memory as well. In a previous study (Paviotti 2018), I showed that on Twitter, the figure of President Ntaryamira, which did not have a strong ethnic connotation before 2015, underwent a process of ethnicization that was particularly effective after the outbreak of the crisis. Thanks to different communication strategies, distinct communities emerged around Ntaryamira that progressively adopted ethnic and political traits. This paper aims to expand my previous study by focusing on interactions within and between such communities. On the one hand, the responsiveness to the messages proposed from political entrepreneurs will be analysed through a focus on likes, replies and retweets. The most responsive accounts will be identified, their (ethnic, political, or other) attributes will be observed, and the type of discourses they promoted will be determined. Possible fake accounts and bots will be pointed out in this phase. On the other hand, the type and frequency of the interactions among such communities will be examined. Specifically, it will be observed if the communication remained within the same group, or if interactions with the Out-group(s) took place. The aim is to analyse the ‘implementation’ of the process of ethnicization (Holst 2011) and to better delineate the characteristic of the communities that emerged around Ntaryamira. This will permit a better understanding of the process of ethnicization of memory on Twitter, and it will show the role of this social platform as a channel for a top-down, ethno-political propaganda and/or as a space where confrontations could take place between different groups.

Après avoir obtenu sa Maîtrise en Anthropologie Culturelle et Ethnologie à l'Université de Bologne (Italie), elle a travaillé comme consultante pour différentes ONGs à l'est de la RDC et au Burundi. En 2017, elle a commencé son projet de recherche doctorale sur les « Perceptions de Soi et des Autres dans le Burundi contemporain », visant à analyser le rôle de l'appartenance ethnique dans les identifications réciproques des gens dans leur vie de tous les jours. À côté de la recherche ethnographique « traditionnelle » au Burundi, elle mène des recherches sur la formation de communautés virtuelles sur les médias sociaux et sur les interactions entre ces communautés.

Violence based on identity constructs reinforces the experience of ethnic boundaries as felt distance between in-groups and out-groups. But what makes such an experience of rigid ethnic boundaries fade or disappear, if anything? We examined this in Burundi, a country characterised by repeated episodes of violence between Hutu and Tutsi since independence. We analysed the waxing and waning of ethnic boundaries through the (life) stories of 202 individuals collected through an iterative research process in two rural villages that were seriously touched by (ethnic) violence. Rigid boundaries between ethnic in-and out-group appeared to fade through non-violent interactions; when categorisations other than ethnic emerged; and when awareness of interstitiality, being in-between salient groups, contested the relevance and meaning of the ethnic boundary as such. These insights invite us to bring in multiple temporalities and identities when aiming to understand legacies of violence in conflict-affected societies such as Burundi. This would allow us to avoid treating groups as substantial entities, which reinforces boundaries between in-groups and out-groups.

ABSTRACTViolence based on identity constructs reinforces the experience of ethnic boundaries as felt distance between in-groups and out-groups. But what makes such an experience of rigid ethnic boundaries fade or disappear, if anything? We examined this in Burundi, a country characterised by repeated episodes of violence between Hutu and Tutsi since independence. We analysed the waxing and waning of ethnic boundaries through the (life) stories of 202 individuals collected through an iterative research process in two rural villages that were seriously touched by (ethnic) violence. Rigid boundaries between ethnic in- and out-group appeared to fade through non-violent interactions; when categorisations other than ethnic emerged; and when awareness of interstitiality, being in-between salient groups, contested the relevance and meaning of the ethnic boundary as such. These insights invite us to bring in multiple temporalities and identities when aiming to understand legacies of violence...