This article was downloaded by: [Florida State University]On: 13 November 2014, At: 02:53Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number:1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street,London W1T 3JH, UK

Social Identities: Journalfor the Study of Race,Nation and CulturePublication details, including instructions forauthors and subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/csid20

Rwanda/Burundi: 'Uni-ethnic' Dominance andthe Cycle of Armed EthnicFormationsJ. 'Bayo AdekanyePublished online: 25 Aug 2010.

To cite this article: J. 'Bayo Adekanye (1996) Rwanda/Burundi: 'Uni-ethnic' Dominance and the Cycle of Armed Ethnic Formations, SocialIdentities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture, 2:1, 37-72, DOI:10.1080/13504639652385

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13504639652385

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of allthe information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on ourplatform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensorsmake no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy,completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Anyopinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinionsand views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed byTaylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be reliedupon and should be independently verified with primary sources ofinformation. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses,

actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages,and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directlyor indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the useof the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private studypurposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution,reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in anyform to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of accessand use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Flor

ida

Stat

e U

nive

rsity

] at

02:

53 1

3 N

ovem

ber

2014

Social Identities, Volum e 2, N umber 1, 1996 37

Rw anda/Burundi: `U ni-ethnic’ D ominance and the

Cycle of Armed Ethnic Formations

J. `BAYO ADEKAN YE

International Peace Research Institute, O slo

ABSTRACT : The paper underlines the essentially m ilitary organizational dimensions to the

cycles of v iolent ethnic conflicts that have been plaguing Rw anda and Burund i. The

argum ent is that the two arm ed form ations now com peting for territorial control and

dom inance in both states, nam ely the Tutsi-controlled arm y at hom e and the Hutu

`refugee-warriors’ from without, as indeed those before them (m eaning the H utu-

controlled army at hom e and the Tutsi `refugee-warriors’ from w ithout in the case of

Rwanda between 1959 and 1994), have their tap-roots in the `uni-ethnic` structure of

m ilitary dom inance inherited from colonialism . The logic of that structure’s operations

could not have produced consequences other than the very tragic ones which all the

w orld now associates w ith these two cases. It is subm itted that a new state m ilitary

form ation com posed of both H utu and Tutsi m em bers in adequate num bers and

proportions at com m and level as well as rank and file (that is, extend ing current

arrangements for pow er-sharing at the political level to the m ilitary organizational

sphere) is a necessary condition for breaking out of the vicious violence.

Introduction

This paper analyses the cycles of armed ethnic formations, including the

phenomena of ethnic armies holding sway at home and of rival refugee-warriors

operating from without, that have long plagued Rwanda and Burundi as

comparative cases .1

I consider this problem of analysis an awfully important,

though as yet unexplored, way of getting at the crux of the seem ingly

`intractable conflicts` that have been raging here,2

and thereby contributing to the

design ing of appropriate action strategies for their resolution. My main objective

is to underline the essentially military organizational dimensions of the conflicts.

The analysis begins with a central argument which it quickly proceeds to

substantiate, leaving whatever modifications are thought necessary for much

later consideration. The argument is that the two armed ethnic formations now

competing for territorial control and dominance in both Burundi and Rwanda,

namely the Tutsi-controlled army at home and the Hutu `refugee-warriors` from

without, as indeed those before them (meaning the Hutu-controlled army at

home and the Tutsi `refugee-warriors` from without in the case of Rwanda

between 1959 and 1994), have their tap-roots in the structure of military

organization inherited from colonial rule; and that the logic of that structure’ s

1350± 4630/96/010037± 35 © 1996 Journals Oxford Ltd

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Flor

ida

Stat

e U

nive

rsity

] at

02:

53 1

3 N

ovem

ber

2014

38 J. `Bayo Adekany e

operations could not have produced consequences other than the very tragic

ones which all the world now associates with these two cases. It is a structure

that was modelled on what has elsew here been classified as `the uni-ethnic

military dominant` type.3

The propositions that this model embodies, and some

of the structural-cum-predispositional implications to which it conduces, are

re-stated in the second major section of the paper.

This is not to suggest that the concept of `uni-ethnic` military dominance is

a settled one.4

Besides, there are difficulties about the concept’s application to

the specific cases under study that cry out for immediate qualifications and

caveats before I proceed further. The difficulties are not just definitional-cum-

methodological, but also theoretical, and even empirical; and raise questions that

touch at the very heart of the two case studies. What does one mean by

differentiating between the Hutu and Tutsi as `ethnic` groups? To what extent

are the conflicts involving them `ethnic` (and is there in fact such a distinct thing

as `ethnic conflict` anywhere)? Or is it just the `face` of another conflict? How

justified am I in characterizing the state military formations in Rwanda (during

the three distinct periods, pre-1959, between 1959 and 1994, and after 1994) and

in Burundi (from colonial times to the present) as all based on the `uni-ethnic

dominant` model? By `uni-ethnic` are these military formations to be understood

as being necessarily freed of other ethno-regional divisions and conflicts?

Part of the problem such questions assume considerable salience here is that

some of the important clusters of symbols, overt signs, and signals Ð what

Barth (1969) calls `the diacritical features` Ð like language, culture, and

life-styles, which people look for and exhibit in order to show their identity, are

clearly absent from the Hutu/Tutsi comparative cases . If by `ethnic identity` one

presupposes that such diacritical referents must first obtain, it is `singularly

inappropriate to describe Hutu and Tutsi as being ethnically different from each

other `given the fact that they share the same language (Kirundi), the same type

of social organization, often the same life-styles , and have lived peacefully with

each other for centuries while sharing the same collective commitment to

monarchical symbols`.5

Obviously, the sources of what has become the

differentiation between `us` and `them` and the tendency for devaluation of

`them` in the discourse on identity betw een the Hutu and Tutsi have to be

sought elsew here. In the first major section of the paper I underline the role that

colonialism played in the fostering of ethnicity here. Colonialism did this by not

just creating the categories `Hutu` and Tutsi`, and endowing them with new

ethnic identities, including the introduction of identity cards bearing the mention

of `ethnic` membership, but also (and perhaps this is the most critical

consideration here) by planting the seeds about two radically different and

exclusive `myths of origins`.6

Once created, these categories or groups called `Hutu` and `Tutsi` came to

assume a new reality of their own. The definition and redefinition of `ethnic

selves` were to be reinforced by all the other historical variables of group

differentiation, particularly the class cleavage superim posed by colonialism, and

the distinction proceeding from occupational specializations between the `Hutu

as farmers` and `Tutsi as herders`, as well as what Lemarchand (1993, p. 158) has

called `the interlocking of reciprocal acts of violence`.7

The latter refers to the

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Flor

ida

Stat

e U

nive

rsity

] at

02:

53 1

3 N

ovem

ber

2014

Rwanda/Burundi: `Uni-ethnic’ D om inance and Arm ed Ethnic Form ations 39

many violent conflicts, genocidal murders , and reprisal wars engaged in by the

two sides since 1959, the pervasive psychological sense of insecurities bred by

these, and the role of both in supplying the additional building block for

in-group solidarity and out-group hostility. There are other factors, still, that

have come to exacerbate the Hutu/Tutsi conflict especially in most recent times,

and which relate to the impact of democratization and the whole frustrating

socio-economic condition, including the pressures of population on land comb-

ined with the burden of debts and adjustment; aspects of these will be

elaborated in Section 5 of the paper. Incidentally, what all the foregoing

introductory points in respect of the two cases simply illustrate is that ethnic

identity is never a static or `primordial` given, but rather an historical

phenomenon, the product of social forces, and therefore everywhere subject to

reconstruction and even manipulation especially by the political elites.

I have just alluded to another consideration for understanding the nature of

conflicts in Burundi and Rw anda: the question of control of state power and the

role that competing elites8

play in such conflicts. It is a consideration that helps

to underline the essentially political nature of many of these conflicts, including

those wearing a supposedly `ethnic` label. The question of control of state power

looms large here as indeed in the rest of Africa, because control of the apparatus

of state power entails the control of and access to political and economic

resources and their unfettered distribution. This necessarily makes the state an

extension of particular sectional groups or interests; it is also one major reason

why the state is not seen as capable of acting as an impartial arbiter in the

disputes and conflicts raging in the wider society. To all this of course must be

added the `zero-sum` character of politics, no doubt sharpened here by the

largely bi-polar nature of the conflict group configuration: for a group to be `in`

governm ent is perceived as a gain for members, having regard to the control

over and access to public resources that this gives; whereas for the `out` group

this means a loss, complete denial of any share of these. It is a structure of

politics no doubt open to cynical manipulation of old prejudices by the elites on

both sides; and in which the psychological factors of fear of domination,

suspicion about each other’ s moves, and uncertainty about security of life itself

tend to add their own force to the momentum of things. It also accounts for the

conflicts between the hitherto dominant Tutsi minority elites and the dominated

Hutu majority having all along assumed the dimensions of bloody combats or

even total war, unrestrained by any rules or norms, and aiming at the total

annihilation of opponents on both sides.

Pursuing these essentially political dimensions of Hutu/Tutsi conflict could

almost tempt the analyst into either dismissing the `ethnic` character of the

conflict as `the ideology of the elites `, or redefining all ethnic conflicts as but `the

continuation of politics by some other, albeit mostly emotion-laden, means`. But

either position would be over-stating the point. To emphasize those essentially

political dimensions of the phenomenon does not necessarily reduce the

`ethnicness ’ of the Hutu/Tutsi conflict. Are the elites (often also called the

intelligentsia) not in fact recognized as playing similar roles everyw here? In any

case, what matters is that not only do Hutu and Tutsi elites perceive and define

their members as being ethnically differentiated from one another: they also

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Flor

ida

Stat

e U

nive

rsity

] at

02:

53 1

3 N

ovem

ber

2014

40 J. `Bayo Adekany e

believe membership in one group or the other affects individual life-chances or

opportunities , including access to basic human security provisions such as jobs,

education, income, food, health, social security , and above all personal safety.

The implication is clear: when the Hutu and Tutsi elites themselves say `we are

Hutu and they are Tutsi`, or `we are Tutsi and they are Hutu`, and members of

one not only self-define themselves but are defined by the other in those two

exclusive categoric terms, they are affirming a point about the definition of

`ethnicity` that has long been stressed by scholars and researchers engaged in

this field : namely, that ultimately the question such as `who are Tutsi or Hutu,

and just how different is each from the other?` boils down to a matter both of

self-definition by members and of definition by others .9

That is the sense in which must be understood my use of terms like `Hutu

republic`, `Hutu-dominated government and army`, `Hutu ex-government and

refugee army and militias`, `Tutsi-controlled state power`, `Tutsi-dominated

army`, `Tutsi-led patriotic force`, `uni-ethnic military dominance`, etc., that recur

in the paper. One uses these terms even though mindful that ethnicity is but

only one among a number of social identities that Burundians and Rwandans

possibly have, the other major identities being related to such things as social

class, occupation, religion , gender, and age, and all of these occasionally

criss -crossing with one another; it so happens, however, that most of these other

identities at work here tend to coincide rather than overlap with the ethnic

divide. It does not mean, of course, that the categories that one is dealing with

here are solidarity ones, in the sense of being completely freed of their own

internal contradictions and conflicts. Nothing can be farther from the truth. Not

only are both the Hutu and Tutsi of Rwanda and Burundi plagued by internal

differences, call them sub-ethnic, regional and clan differences can sometimes

generate acute tensions of their own.10

But the central thesis of my paper is, in

fact, that the military organizational structure that I characterize here as the

`uni-ethnic dominant` is very much latent w ith considerable destabilizing

potentials that much of the cycle of armed ethnic formations characterizing

political life here, along with its associatedly vicious violence, is a direct

consequence of that structure. With these necessary introductory qualifications

and caveats, I can now move on to expound, and attempt to substantiate, the

central argument of the paper. I begin with a short analysis of the colonial roots

of the problem.

1. Colonial Legacy

Both Burundi and Rwanda have had their post-independence political develop-

ments acutely affected by the legacy not only of their pre-colonial past but also,

perhaps more importantly, by the policies of the German and later the Belgian

authorities who had ruled the territories in the colonial period.11

For example,

the Tutsi of Rwanda, who though a minority had managed to conquer and

impose their rule on the Hutu majority , have long shared with the latter

subjected group many elements of common culture, including kinship, social

structure, and language. While exercising a largely tyrannical overlordship, the

Tutsi rule in pre-colonial Rw anda had also permitted some measure of H utu

autonomy. Like the analogous Fulani’ s relations with the Hausa in Northern

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Flor

ida

Stat

e U

nive

rsity

] at

02:

53 1

3 N

ovem

ber

2014

Rwanda/Burundi: `Uni-ethnic’ D om inance and Arm ed Ethnic Form ations 41

Nigeria, the Tutsi’ s ruling hierarchy had long learnt that being socialized into

the culture and language of the subjected Hutu majority was an expedient and

much more efficient way of exercising control; in fact, as with the Hausa-Fulani

case just mentioned, both the Tutsi and Hutu of Rwanda were on the way to

becoming if not fully fused into one, at least a partially hyphenated national

group at the point of colonial contact. Nor was the structure of authority even

in pre-colonial Rwanda the completely hierarchical one that many of today’ s

analysts are wont to believe it to have been.12

What the imposition of German

and later Belgian colonial rule did was to reverse that process of amalgamation

and convert the pre-existing system of kinship into what Zolberg et al. (1989,

p. 45) characterize as `a neo-feudal state, founded on a rigid dichotomy between

`Tutsi lords’ and `Hutu serfs ’ , and legitimized by an imaginary distinction

between a superior race of immigrant `Hamites’ of Egyptian origin and the

`primitive indigenous Negroes`, so-called.

The effects of colonial role in the restratification of society were to be even

more pronounced in neighbouring Burundi. There the relations between the

Tutsi and Hutu in the pre-colonial period had been much less hierarchical still:

not only were the ruling Tutsi themselves divided into at least two caste-like

groups, but some H utu lineages had been classified to be of princely blood and

therefore entitled to hold chiefly positions. The restratification of Burundian

society under colonial rule did away with many of the existing cross-ethnic

linkages and networks, and ended up introducing in Burundi, as in Rwanda, a

big cleavage between the Tutsi as a class of rulers and the Hutu as a class that

was ruled.

The restratification was rationalized in both cases by what came to be known

as the `Hamitic hypothesis` (Sanders, 1969). Although long-since discredited, and

partly because of being a basically racist ideology, that `hypothesis` had held the

`Tutsi` to be more `civilized`, and therefore `deserving of greater power,

privilege , and status` than the `Hutu` w ithin the pseudo-racial hierarchy created

by colonial policy. The result of all this is the emergence of the sharp

coincidence of ethnicity and class that all of us have come to consider to be the

distinctive characteristic of Burundi and Rwanda today: the `sub-Nilotic` Tutsi,

mostly a pastoral group, though a minority , established as the ruling class, and

monopolizing much of the effectiveness of state power, particularly the military,

versus the `sub-Bantu` Hutu, mostly agricultural, though a majority , as a

dominated class, and denied access to or a share of state power, including

military participation.

But what particularly interests me in this paper are the essentially military

dimensions of that policy, which had ranked the military prowess of peoples

here, as elsew here on the continent, in effect, according to a descending order

of pigmentocratic categories from `the Negroid`, `the Nilotic tribes`, to the `pure

Negro`. Those dimensions of the policy had meant that the Tutsi, with their `tall,

lanky, and loose-limbed` members were preferred to others as a better military

material by the colonialists; not unlike the stereotypes that had led other

European colonial powers such as the British , French, and Portuguese, partic-

ularly the first two, to prefer as infantrymen the so-called `hill-top` peoples to

low-landers , hinterland to coastal areas, rural folks to urban centres, small-sized

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Flor

ida

Stat

e U

nive

rsity

] at

02:

53 1

3 N

ovem

ber

2014

42 J. `Bayo Adekany e

ethnics to demographically large ones. It was part of that whole colonial policy

of recruiting according to `the Gurkha syndrome`, or the so-called `warrior

tribes` theory, or better still what has been called the dam nosa hereditas, meaning

the fatal legacy, of `ethnic ranking and martial races` (Adekanye, 1979a, 1995b;

Enloe, 1980; Kirk-Greene, 1980; Echenberg, 1990). What the latter meant was that

here, as elsew here, the definition of military dependability as a basis for colonial

recruitment was determ ined as much by those earlier racial stereotypes as by the

considerations of political expediency and divide and rule. In the Tutsi of both

Burundi and Rwanda, being at once demographically small and also fitting `the

Nilotic tribes` stereotype, the German/Belgian colonialists thought they had

found a group with perfect combination of the two criteria of military

dependability . They therefore had no hesitation in entrusting the Tutsi minority

with the monopoly of these states’ military function.13

Those are the

colonial-historical materials going into the classification of the structure of

military formations inherited by both Rw anda and Burundi as modelled on `the

uni-ethnic military dominant` type.

2. Logic of U ni-ethnic M ilitary Dom inance

But in what ways could the structure of uni-ethnic military and political

dominance of the Tutsi minority over the Hutu majority deliberately fostered by

colonialism have produced the vicious cycle of ethnic military formations that

has been plaguing Burundi/Rwanda since independence, as postulated at the

beginning of the paper?

To answer this question, I should begin by analysing what the logic of

uni-ethnic military dominance means and its implications for intergroup

relations. To return to previous formulations on this, then, `uni-ethnic military

dominance` is one of three alternative strategies for coping with the effects of

divergent ethnic interests and differences upon military organization and

behaviour.14

The essence of this particular approach is the pre-emption by one

group out of a plurality of groups of the monopoly of military functions. A

system of institutionalized inequality based on group domination, this military

approach relies almost solely on power and its exclusive exercise for enforcing

control. The domination may have resulted from a war of conquest, especially

in a colonial or semi-colonial setting , or from the type of imperial legacy referred

to in the previous section. But it may also be the product as well as the creation

in an independent state of a system of division of labour, where division follows

ethnic lines (with the group of persons entrusted with military monopoly being

ethnically different, for example, from those engaged in economic production,

who in turn may be separate from the class that exercises bureaucratic-cum-

judicial functions); in the latter circumstances, functional specialization becomes

ethnic segregation. But whatever the source of origins uni-ethnic military

dominance everywhere assumes a system of hegemonic control and subjugation.

Although based almost solely on power to uphold it, the system of uni-ethnic

military dominance tends to develop all sorts of bio-cultural arguments, often

spurious in nature, which attribute military superiority to the dominant group,

while justifying as `natural` or `inevitable` the existing division of skills and

functions betw een it and other groups. Actually , these arguments are in the

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Flor

ida

Stat

e U

nive

rsity

] at

02:

53 1

3 N

ovem

ber

2014

Rwanda/Burundi: `Uni-ethnic’ D om inance and Arm ed Ethnic Form ations 43

nature of ideological rationalizations aimed at perpetuating the group’s

monopoly of the military function. Meanw hile, where the uni-dominant

militarily privileged group are not only a numerical minority but also the

governing elite, the resultant military-political system has the makings of a caste

(meaning superimposition, on ethnicity, of a class) society.

Those interesting characterizations of typical uni-ethnic military dominance

are to be found in the theory’ s original formulation. But, perhaps, even more

interesting are the logical consequences of the model’ s adoption for the

civil-military process of a given state, which the theory also analyses. As I have

just implied, a uni-ethnically dominated army is one whose inner structure is

dissociated from the general ethno-political make-up of the society. N ow, how

does one prevent `all other groups` not militarily represented from (feeling they

are) being militarily dominated by `one` group which monopolizes the military

function? Apparently, this is inevitable, since as already stated , a uni-ethnic

military system is by definition a system of political domination. Initially ,

though, it is by no means certain that the non-represen ted necessarily want to

be represented. For a number of reasons, a non-represen ted group may have

developed an aversion for anything military. The military career may be

considered less lucrative than a career in other fields. A non-represen ted group

may consider refinements in arts and culture, advances in education and

technical know-how, and commercial and economic improvements, for example,

as more crucial to its survival and advancement vis-à-vis other groups, and may

accordingly concentrate on these matters in total neglect of the military function.

But such neglect can continue only under one or two conditions, as long as (a)

the military career remains non-lucrative, or (b) the control of military power by

other(s) is not perceived as a threat to the group’s interests and endeavours in

other fields and therefore to its very survival. Let neither condition (especially

the second) hold, and a hitherto non-interested group of necessity becomes

interested in acquiring a military share. The latter observation is particularly true

of most Third World countries with underdeveloped economies and where

employment opportunities are rather limited.

Hence, another set of genera lizations or hypotheses is postulated by the

theoretical model of uni-ethnic military dominance. One of these touches on the

central role that military factors play in badly divided multi-ethnically

conflictual systems generally , and the other on the legitimacy problems and

inheren t instabilities plaguing uni-ethnic dominant systems in particular. To

re-state them one after the other, it is in the nature of politics in multi-ethnic,

segmented society torn by conflicts for all groups to come to prize military

power over other elements making for relative power, and for the militarily

non-represented to come to demand represen tation. Also, because one group has

pre-empted that which is supposed to be a public `privilege` in the sense of

belonging by right to everyone Ð and the privilege of military function at that,

crucial as this is perceived to be to the issues of political domination or revolt,

social mobility, and even private accumulation Ð those groups which are

militarily discriminated against may not only come to consider the existing army

organization, and therefore the state, as `illegitimate`. But they may also begin

to recruit, train, and organize their own `unofficial` armies, for purposes of

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Flor

ida

Stat

e U

nive

rsity

] at

02:

53 1

3 N

ovem

ber

2014

44 J. `Bayo Adekany e

`self-help` or `self-defence` in the face of perceived military threat from the

militarily dominant group.

From the latter was established yet another important theoretical genera l-

ization central to the model of uni-ethnic military dominance. It was stated as

follows:

Where an army institution comes to be view ed by all as critical to the

achievement of certain goals, though this institution is constitutionally

defined as `a legitimate organ of the state as a whole`, pressures will

develop for those groups that are denied military represen tation not only

to challenge the institution’ s legitimacy, but to be disposed to the use of

illegitimate means (by for example recruiting their own unofficial armies),

redefining these as `legitimate`.15

In short, that model of military organization even in its original formulation

sees the society which adopts it being faced with constant struggles between two

tendencies, the uni-ethnic military structures or regimes battling to maintain

their dominance in the face of rising opposition and the armed ethnic formations

or para-military bodies `unofficially` organized from among unrepresen ted

groups not just challenging the former institutions’ legitimacy but in fact seeking

to displace them. It is a model that underlines the inherent instability of

uni-ethnic military dominant systems in general.

Much of my definition of the problem of analysis thus far has focused on the

internal processes of group identifications and instabilities. But there is another

facet of instability inherent to structures of uni-ethnic military dominance that

was missing from the model’s original formulation, but which the consideration

of empirical facts of the cases under study compels me to include in its

reformulation here. It touches on the external dimensions of the problem.16

And

pursuit of the latter allow s me to add this new proposition to the list originally

postulated. Regimes of uni-ethnic military dominance particularly in societies

with a ranked system of ethnic configuration have the tendency of not only

making militant opponents out of other groups at home, but also driving some

of these either underground or completely out of the country to become

ethnically `displaced-` or `refugee-warriors` abroad. This opens up for the

opposing domestic groups possibility of increased external links in their

struggles against such regim es, and for the regimes themselves another source

of conflict escalation to worry about.

What the reformulated model points towards is the thesis on inevitability of

instability inheren t to all structures of uni-ethnic military dominance in badly

divided societies. Most of those propositions and hypotheses on the nature and

dynamics of uni-ethnic military dominance had been formulated as part of a

general theory of military organization in multi-ethnically segm ented societies

in 1976. It is remarkable that the theory has come to be supported rather than

refuted by developments that have since taken place in the domain. And in the

specific cases being analysed here, the theory just summarized provides insights

that remain relevant for understanding some of the major developments in

Rwanda and Burundi today. Certainly, those theoretical generalizations help to

explain why the two countries do not have armed forces that enjoy any

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Flor

ida

Stat

e U

nive

rsity

] at

02:

53 1

3 N

ovem

ber

2014

Rwanda/Burundi: `Uni-ethnic’ D om inance and Arm ed Ethnic Form ations 45

monopoly of the legitimate use of physical coercion, but each offers a plethora

of armed ethnic formations dotting their civil-military scenes. These range from

the regular, through para-military or militia, to the refugee-warrior (see Figure 1

below): all ethnically recruited and organized, owing no loyalties to any

common authority or command, but separately controlled by the two ethno-class

groups, the Tutsi and Hutu in each of the cases, and competing for political

control of territory and governm ent in their respective states. The next two

sections of the paper supply some details of these armed ethnic formations

thrown up by the nature and operations of the system to date.

Figure 1:

Rwanda/Burundi: P lethora of Arm ed Ethnic Formations

Rwanda Burundi

Regular · Tutsi-dominated army, pre-

1959

· Hutu-dominated army,

1959± 94

· Tutsi-dominated army (ex-

guerrilla force), 1994 onwards

· Tutsi-dominated army, since

colonial times

Para-

Military

· Hutu militia s (since 1959),

includ ing the notorious

Interham we

· Tutsi militias (since the 1980s),

among them the Inkotanyi

· Hutu militia s (since

independence), the Intagohekas

being by 1990 the best known of

these

· Tutsi militias (since the 1980s)

· Private ethnic retinues (from

1990)

Refugee-

Warrior

· Tutsi-dominated refugee

guerrillas, later becoming RPF

(1959± 94)

· Hutu-led ex-army and refugee

guerrillas (since July 1994)

· Hutu-dominated refugee

guerrilla forces raised at

successive escapes from

genocide (1969, 1972, 1988, 1993,

1995)

3. Ethnic A rmies, W ithin

Empirically , what has by now become for both countries a vicious pattern of

actions and reactions, taken either in resistance to or assertion of uni-ethnic

dominance, was set by the Revolution in Rwanda in 1959. The bloody event had

seen the Rw andan Hutu majority rising in large numbers to overthrow the Tutsi

minority rule and take over control of political and military affairs of the

country shortly before independence in 1962. The first Hutu republic was born.

In the process , hundreds of thousands of members of Rwanda’s former ruling

Tutsi group were forced to flee and take refugee in neighbouring Burundi,

Uganda, Zaire (Belgian Congo-Leopoldville then), and Tanzania (then British

Tanganyika). It was the beginn ing of that settler community of Tutsi refugees,

particularly those based in Uganda, from whom was to be raised the future

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Flor

ida

Stat

e U

nive

rsity

] at

02:

53 1

3 N

ovem

ber

2014

46 J. `Bayo Adekany e

Rwandan Patriotic Front now back to power in Rwanda. I shall in the next

section of the paper have cause to say a little bit more about this Tutsi-led

armed guerrilla force that came to topple the Hutu-controlled government and

army of Rwanda in July 1994.

During those thirty-two years that the Rwanda Hutu elites were in power,

they had run a `majoritarian` Ð that is an equally exclusivist Ð structure of

governm ent, effectively starting with the presidency of Gregoire Kayibanda,

1962± 73. He was immediately followed by Juvenal Habyarimana who ruled for

twenty years until he was killed along with his Burundian Hutu counterpart.

The regim e went by the unmistakable, self-proclaimed designation of PARME-

HUTU (being the acronym for an All-Hutu party called Parti du Mouvem ent

d’Em ancipation H utu) led by Kayibanda. The nature of the regim e suggests that

the Rw andan H utu elites saw the central objective of their rule as aimed at

reversing past discriminatory practices by simply inverting the system of rigid

ethnic stratification. Even though a formal quota system was supposed to have

been in place earmarking 85 per cent of all public vacancies, including

appointment to senior posts in the civil service and admission to schools to the

Hutu as against 15 per cent allocated to the Tutsi (Zolberg et al., 1989, p. 48),

there was no mistaking the character of the new Hutu rule in Rwanda. Thus, the

Hutu rulers ended up replacing one form of uni-ethnic and `supremacist` project

(that is the Tutsi) with another (in this case the Hutu), pure and simple. That the

Hutu were a majority, constituting some 85 per cent of the population, and the

Tutsi a bare minority represen ting 15 per cent, is not a sufficient ground for

characterizing the nature of that rule differently. After all, plus vel m inus m utat

speciem . Perhaps, nowhere was inversion of the rigid ly ranked system as an

aftershock of the 1959 revolution brought out more vividly than in the

reconstitution of the country’ s ethno-military structure.

The Hutu regim e simply had established for the Rwandan state new armed

forces, a new police and security outfit, a new presidential guard and other

para-military bodies, as well as a system of militias befitting (or so it was

initially rationalized) the country’ s new republican status, and all of them Hutu-

dominated, officered, and controlled . The process involved the replacement of

Tutsi by newly recruited Hutu; and, in no time, these so-called militias of the

Hutu republic became the notorious Hutu Interham we, often functioning with the

assistance of the Presidential Guard (PG) elements (see Lemarchand, 1994a,

pp. 599± 601). The increasingly brutal nature of these new forces also became

obvious as the regime grew more authoritarian in its dealings with all Rwandan

citizens, Tutsi and Hutu alike, provoking many on both sides into joining the

growing ranks of opposition movements . By the late 1980s cracks had also

emerged in the Hutu ranks; it had become evident that the Habyarimana regime

was veering military recruitment and promotion from the south-central region

and more and more towards the north, particularly the Bushiru region, Habyar-

imana’s homeland. The increasingly unstable political and military threats to the

regime had forced him to rely for presidential security more upon his sub-ethnic

group, immediate clan, and even kinsmen. It was the extremist elements w ithin

these defence and security forces who were said to have been responsible for the

series of massacres of the Tutsi minority organized between October 1990 and

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Flor

ida

Stat

e U

nive

rsity

] at

02:

53 1

3 N

ovem

ber

2014

Rwanda/Burundi: `Uni-ethnic’ D om inance and Arm ed Ethnic Form ations 47

July 1994, although the massacres included some opposition Hutu elements too.

Culmination of these genocidal slaughters perpetrated by the armed Hutu forces

and militias took place in the last hundred days of the regim e’ s hold on power

when as large a number as between 500,000 and 800,000 people were murdered.

Meanw hile, with the defeat and replacement of Rwanda’s Hutu-controlled

army and regime by the insurgent guerrilla force of ex-Rwandan Tutsi exiles in

July 1994 there occurred an important episode worth noting from the view -point

of the thesis expounded here. The event marks the completion of the first full

circle (that is, a revolution in another sense of the word), beginning from Tutsi

through Hutu and now back to Tutsi military dominant forms, to which such

oscillations in uni-ethnic military organizational structures inevitably lead. In the

zero-sum discourse of politics here: the once politically dominant but now

defeated Forces armées rw andaises, Rwandan Armed Forces (RAF), `out` of power;

the hitherto exiled but new ly victorious Front patriotique rwandais, Rwandan

Patriotic Front (RPF), now `in` power. Or, to put the same point even better still,

what was until 1994 the Army of Rwandan Hutu Republic ends up as an

ex-army, now undergoing transmutation into a refugee guerrilla force; while a

once guerrilla force of refugees, the Inkotanyi, becomes the ex-RPF, in the process

of regularization as the Army of a regained Tutsi-controlled Rwanda. Needless

to say, the new Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) regim e, which is the

insurgent guerrilla force concerned and currently undergoing the process of

professionalization and regularization, remains potentially subject to the same

`iron law` of change;17

unless, of course, the new regim e is able to seize the

opportunity by moving the Rw andan army and state away from the uni-ethnic

dominant mode of organization towards a more broadly-based one.

Unlike the Rwandan army, the Burundian army has remained to this day the

largely uni-ethnic Tutsi-dominated force that was inherited from the colonial

past, and perhaps even more so, in spite and even because of agitations by the

Burundian Hutu majority for a more represen tative system of government and

military participation. The latter members were emboldened to become increas-

ingly assertive if not impatient in their demands, strengthened by the 1959 event

in neighbouring Rwanda where their ethnic cousins had seized state power. But

that revolution had provoked exactly the opposite and even more authoritarian

reaction on the part of Burundi’ s ruling Tutsi elites who used it to tighten their

oppressive hold on their Hutu majority counterpart.

Successive revolts by the Hutu majority elites against continued subjection

to Tutsi rule (viz. 1965, 1972, 1988, 1991, 1993, and now 1995) have tended to be

visited by brutal and mostly anti-Hutu army-backed pogroms and

counter-pogroms, which in turn have resulted in huge waves of mostly Hutu

refugees flooding across the borders looking for safe sanctuaries in neighbouring

countries ; there the refugees wait, regroup, and prepare for another opportunity

or time in their fight for `liberation` from Tutsi oppress ive rule. So the cycle has

been going on. There is evidence, today, that the Burundian Tutsi-dominated

army, meaning therefore state, no longer enjoys an unchallenged monopoly of

instruments of coercion with which it had long been credited; although it is

doubted whether, even under the best and the most legitimate of political

orders, any state or army ever enjoys such a total monopoly anywhere.18

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Flor

ida

Stat

e U

nive

rsity

] at

02:

53 1

3 N

ovem

ber

2014

48 J. `Bayo Adekany e

Since the defeat and replacement of the Hutu regim e and army by the RPF

forces in Rw anda, Burundi has been described as `teetering on a knife’s edge`.19

Those events coupled with past brutalities suffered at the hands of the

Burundian army and other security forces, and especially the experiences

following the October 1993 eruptions, have created the felt need for the H utu to

be even more militarily prepared than ever in order not to be caught napping

as in previous times. The growing militant elements among them have

increasingly emphasized this; namely, that a ruling but unarmed majority such

as FRODEBU (read Hutu) risks being at the perpetual mercy of the armed wing

of the Tutsi minority (particularly the army). The thinking has an essentially

Machiavellian basis to it, but is admixed with the doctrine of necessity and

radical ingredients of the `just war` tradition. It is a kind of thinking on the part

of militant opponents that makes any talk of or action in the direction of

`accommodation` and `compromise` sound/seem `traitorous` to the Hutu cause.

The result has been the rise of various organizations of Hutu militias of

which the best known are called the Intagohekas, `Those who never sleep`. The

latter have been described as the extremist militias of the Forces pour la D efense

de la D em ocratie (FDD), Forces for the Defence of Democracy, whose leaders are

said to include prominent figures, among them the ex-Interior Minister Leonard

Nyangoma now living in exile in Zaire.20

The Intagohekas are demanding either

the full recruitment of the Hutu into the Burundian army or, in the absence of

the latter, the total militarization of all the able-bodied Hutu youth outside the

apparatus of the state and its coercive organs. Partly in response to the latter, the

Burundian Tutsi on their side have also started organizing their own militia

forces; one such force the Sans Eches can be found active in the big towns,

particularly in the capital of Bujumbura. At the same time, some of the

Tutsi-dominated UPRONA leaders, including at least two of the country’ s past

presidents, Jean-Baptiste Bagaza and Pierre Buyoya, are believed to have

recruited their own privately armed militias. Admittedly, many of these other

forces, as with some of those under Hutu control, in a sense reflect other

competing sub-ethnic, regional, clan, and community interests or power centres ;

as such, armed ethnic retinues would be a better term for describing these other

privately recruited forces. Meanw hile, the huge and country-w ide diffusion of

light-arms, weapons, and military uniforms currently reported means that there

is no shortage in the availability of the wherewithal for waging these ethnic

insurgency and counter-insurgency wars. Indeed, Burundi today has become

what has been aptly called a `militant’s mayhem’ .

4. Refugee W arriors, W ithout

The bulk of my analysis thus far has focused on the variety of armed ethnic

formations internally thrown up by the structures of uni-ethnic dominance, their

recruitment base, nature, and level of organization. Particularly highligh ted have

been the uni-ethnic military institutions controlled by Rwanda’s and Burundi’ s

governm ents, both the Tutsi and Hutu, particularly the Tutsi, and the opposition

that these have come to provoke from others w ithin both countries leading to

the setting up of rival `unofficial` armies, para-militaries, and militias used in

challenging the ruling groups’ political legitim acy and control. I now proceed

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Flor

ida

Stat

e U

nive

rsity

] at

02:

53 1

3 N

ovem

ber

2014

Rwanda/Burundi: `Uni-ethnic’ D om inance and Arm ed Ethnic Form ations 49

to look at the external dimensions of the military-organizational equation, by

analysing the other kinds of military formations provoked into opposition by

uni-ethnic dominance, namely, the system of ethnic guerrilla formations that I

have called `the refugee warriors.`

The latter term, the use of which I consider most apt here, is adopted from

a book, Escape from Violence: Conflict and Refugee Crisis in the D eveloping World .

The authors, Zolberg, et al., who first coined the phrase, define characteristics of

a typical `refugee-warrior community` to include the existence of a refugee

situation plus such other elements as `armed forces and a distinct political

leadersh ip and social structure`. In other words, a crucial element in the

definition of a `refugee-warrior community` is a highly conscious group with a

set of political objectives, particularly members’ objective to fight their way back

to reclaim the homeland. The common ex-diaspora conditions facing refugees

also make it difficult to distinguish between the `civilian` and `warrior`

component of the refugee population, but rather to see the former as `a

necessary adjunct for` the latter. The authors’ descriptions of the role that the

`civilian population` plays in legitimizing the activities of a `warrior` component

are worth being recalled here:

The civilian population ... provides a recruitment pool that enables the

rebel army to reproduce itself. As the community becomes established, it

tends to grow by producing opportunities and even incentives to others

to become politically active. Individuals in exile may find that the most

socially meaningful and economically rewarding activity is join the

militants . For many children growing up in camp and knowing nothing

but a dependent, degrading, and fundamentally insecure existence, joining

the battle is the only relevant future. When the camps also are close to or

part of the front ... war becomes the dominant reality for the entire exiled

population; the armed militants appear as protectors of the community,

thus forging more closely the links between the refugees and the warriors.

(Zolberg, et al., 1989, pp. 154, 275± 77)

Add the internal military-ethnic dimension, and you will have thought the

foregoing descriptions of `refugee-w arriors` are almost based on the Rwandan

and Burundian cases.

After the horrors of Rwanda’s most recent genocidal slaughter in the hands

of the departing Hutu-controlled military and security forces Ð a majority of

whose victims were from the rival Tutsi ethnic group Ð a total of about 2.2

million H utu are believed to have fled Rwanda after the fall of their

governm ent. Among this latest wave of Rwandan refugees are an estimated

30,000 Hutu ex-governm ent soldiers and 10,000 militias of the former Rwandan

Hutu regime now camped in the north-eastern Zairian town of Goma. The head

of this 40,000 strong Hutu refugee army and militiamen is Major-General

Augustin Bizimungu, a Hutu, who was the chief of staff of Rwanda’s ousted

governm ent army. I have no evidence whether he was personally involved or

not in organizing the genocidal slaughters of April± July 1994, of which many

officers and men of his force had been accused, and upon which the

international criminal tribunal on genocide currently sitting in Tanzania will

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Flor

ida

Stat

e U

nive

rsity

] at

02:

53 1

3 N

ovem

ber

2014

50 J. `Bayo Adekany e

perhaps subsequently shed light. But what has been said of him is that,

according to a recent Reuters report, `Bizimungu was credited with master-

minding the ... exodus to Burundi, Tanzania and Zaire, and analysts say he

commands a large following among the refugees, mainly Hutus, who believe he

saved them from being massacred by the RPF army`.21

But why, it may be asked,

do these H utu ex-combatants and militias now part of a large warrior-refugee

community in Zaire, and camped in both Goma and Bukavu, not want to go

back, if they were not involved in those horrendous genocidal attacks against

the Rwandan Tutsi? That many of them are afraid of reprisals or revenge

killings in the hands of the new Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) government

forces or agents is no doubt true, but only part of the answer. The other part of

the answ er derives from the very logic of military-political developments that

I have been tracing. I venture to submit that for these latest refugee warriors

from Rwanda, Goma is a convenient base for training and making preparations

for a possible resumption of the civil war,22

but more appropriately for staging

their own `violent homecoming` at a later date.23

Memories may be short, but it would not be the first time that ethnic refugee

guerrillas would be training and preparing for, if not found actually involved

in, armed attacks against their home-country . Unfortunately, according to the

theory postulated above, it is part of the very logic of things inherent to the

Rwandan/Burundian set-up; that is, in the exclusivist structure of political and

military organization being run by both the Rw andan and Burundian regim es,

and particularly the Rwandan, at least until now.

For example, no sooner had the Rwandan Tutsi lost power to their H utu

counterparts in the wake of the 1959 revolution and been forced to flee into exile

than the rump of their leadersh ip compris ing Tutsi ex-governm ent army officers

and soldiers plus a hurried ly raised band of guerrillas began operations to

recapture the reins of power in Rwanda. A group of scholars (Zolberg, et. al.,

1989, p. 46) describes as follows those early armed operations by exiled Tutsi

against the Hutu-controlled Rwandan governm ent:

The Tutsi leadersh ip in the diaspora was intent on regaining power. A

guerrilla force was formed among the refugees in Burundi, where the

Tutsi retained the upper hand. They limited themselves to minor border

incursions until 1963, when a few hundred of the inyenzi (cockroaches)

staged a larger operation directed at the capital.

Nor were these to be the last military attacks against the then Hutu-ruled

Rwandan state by Tutsi refugees operating from the relatively secure sanctuaries

in neighbouring Uganda and Zaire, particularly the former. It is perhaps no

exaggeration to say that given the circumstances in which it had come to power

(via bloody revolution), the Rwandan Hutu-controlled regime must have felt less

than secure and had in fact lived under constant threat of invasion and loss of

power throughout its tenure in office.

The first organized and most serious attack by armed Tutsi refugees against

the Hutu-controlled Rwandan state took place on 1 October 1990. The reader

will find this very much covered by the London-based Africa Confidential in one

of the issues published shortly after the event and under the title, `Rwanda/

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Flor

ida

Stat

e U

nive

rsity

] at

02:

53 1

3 N

ovem

ber

2014

Rwanda/Burundi: `Uni-ethnic’ D om inance and Arm ed Ethnic Form ations 51

Uganda: a Violent H omecoming’ . The latter title is important in part because of

its appositeness. But that piece is important for another reason. It gives bits of

relevant information not only about the composition of that invading force in

particular, and the nature of the Ugandan-based Tutsi-warrior community in

general from which that October 1990 force was recruited, but also about the

relationship between the Rw andan Tutsi refugees and the Ugandan state and

army under President Yoweri Museveni. Such information had been considered

necessary for determ ining `how much did President Museveni know, and when

did he know it?` as the paper had phrased it. For there was a general interes t

even at the time in the question about the existence and operations, within

Uganda, of the ex-Rwanda Tutsi-led liberation force or the Inkotanyi which was

said to have launched that attack, and what the involvement of Uganda’s own

high-ranking army high command had been in those operations. I am informed

that at the time of this particular invasion many of President Yoweri Museveni’s

leading army officers had been ethnic Rwandan Tutsi, and that in fact the

National Resistance Army (NRA), which brought Museveni to power, had been

largely controlled by ethnic Rwandans who were first- or second-generation

immigrants to Uganda. Several top officers of the NRA were originally from

Rwanda. To be sure, the leader of that invading force of Rwandan Tutsi exiles,

Major-General Fred Rw igyema, was himself originally from Rwanda, an ethnic

Tutsi, and at the time of the invasion a top Ugandan army genera l.

If in 1990 the question of the Ugandan government and army involvement

in the invasion of Rwanda by Rw andan Tutsi-led refugees fighting their way

back home had been an academic exercise or rather subject to debate, by 1993

it had ceased to be so. The Tutsi-led force which commenced what was to be

their last-stage attack under the new banner of Rw andan Popular Front (RPF),

and was to succeed in driving the thirty year old Hutu-based regime from the

seat of power in Kigali in July 1994, comprised the sons and daughters drawn

from the families of the same 250,000-member Tutsi refugees based in Uganda.

In addition to being organized from Ugandan territory, and led by Tutsi emigres

occupying top positions in the Ugandan army hierarchy (the overall commander

of the operations, Major General Paul Kagame, was one of these), the RPF

operations were publicly supported by Ugandan President Museveni, as well as

armed, equipped, supplied, and financed either directly by or indirectly through

the instrumentality of his government.24

This time there was no dispute about

the Ugandan connections with the returning Tutsi refugee-warriors , nor were

any attempts made to disguise them. Evidently, what the new Hutu refugees ,

camped outside Rwanda since July 1994 and already planning and training to

stage their own `violent homecoming`, are intent on doing is using their safe

sanctuaries of host countries such as Zaire in pursuit of a similar objective.

Burundi’ s successive Tutsi-dominated regimes had been experiencing their

own problems of insurgent attacks aris ing from acute intercommunal violence

at home, the activities of armed Hutu refugees operating from outside, and the

ever-recurrent spectre of the Rwandan scenario being replicated there.

Admittedly, as previously remarked , the situation is far from being identical to

the Rw andan. But it is also true that, historically , Burundi has a record of more

violent ethno-political conflicts, more massive and repeated frenzies of anti-Hutu

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Flor

ida

Stat

e U

nive

rsity

] at

02:

53 1

3 N

ovem

ber

2014

52 J. `Bayo Adekany e

genocidal strikes, and a more recurrent and unabashedly sectional involvement

by the state security forces. Such conditions of massive and repeated ethnic

upris ings, genocidal and counter-genocidal slaughters, and brutal repress ions

have led to Burundi also producing greater and more repeated waves of

refugees fleeing to neighbouring countries. One expects as a matter of course,

then, that there would be as many opportunities here for throwing up armies

of warrior refugees opposed to the Tutsi-based Burundian regime as there had

been large-scale violent outbreaks and ethnic refugees, which is what has

actually been happening.

However, although also almost uni-ethnically structured and composed in

this case mostly of the Hutu, Burundian refugee-warrior groups have been far

from a unified movement; they have tended to be fragmented rather by

differences arising not only from the geographically dispersed nature of their

sanctuaries or bases of operations (eg. Kigoma in Tanzania to the south, and

Kama in Zaire to the north-east), but also from political party (cum-ideological)

affiliations and leanings back at home, clientilist and diffuse leadersh ip netw orks

and structures, as well as `clan`, regional and other intra-ethnic cleavages and

struggles. It is to be noted that some of the factors I have just mentioned had

prevented the Burundian conflict group elites from succeeding in mobilizing the

society along a full-blown H utu-Tutsi axis. But armed refugee formations and

attacks, led by Hutu opposition elements, also have long been organized in

Burundi; and with these the Burundian regime has also long had to contend.

For example, the H utu insurrections of 1972, which provided the Micombero

regime the opportunity for its cold-blooded reprisals as mentioned in the last

section, had been organized by a force of 10,000 Hutu rebels and said (Zolberg,

et al., 1989, p. 47) to have been initially `exhorted to action by their exiled

leaders`; the Hutu rebels comprised `local activists` but, as we are informed, also

`included H utu refugees operating from bases inside Tanzania’ . The period from

the mid-1970s through the early 1980s was marked by sporadic incursions into

Burundi by armed Hutu refugees assisted by some Rwandan Hutu volunteers.

As I show later, the coming of Buyoya to power in 1987 marked a political

opening to the Burundian Hutu elites, and the initiation of efforts aimed at

achieving some accommodation among the major conflict group leaders . But the

Hutu could not be certain, because the beginning of that same Buyoya

`reformist` era also saw the sharpening of ethnic polarities, and the organized

assassinations of their first two Presidents in a row. To be sure, for the

Burundian Hutu refugee-guerrillas undergoing training in their various camps,

the reports about reactions to the Buyoya regime from his own ultimate power

base did not assure that the Tutsi establishment (particularly the military) was

willing and ready to share its entrenched power and privilege with others. The

Hutu refugee-warriors, therefore, did not as yet see any justification to

demobilize, d isarm and return home. In August 1989, there was an armed Hutu

guerrilla attack against the Burundian government of Buyoya; although, as with

the sporadic skirmishes that had been taking place since the late 1970s, there

was no attempt made by organizers of this particular attack on Mabanda to

coordinate it with similar actions by other armed Hutu refugees operating from

the Zairian territory. The August 1989 attack was said to have been organized

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Flor

ida

Stat

e U

nive

rsity

] at

02:

53 1

3 N

ovem

ber

2014

Rwanda/Burundi: `Uni-ethnic’ D om inance and Arm ed Ethnic Form ations 53

by U bumw e militants , an ex-PALIHEHUTU refugee group committed to armed

struggle as the only politically justifiable solution to the Burundian problem, and

apparently radicalized in their views by their experiences in the diaspora.

Volunteers for the U bum w e cause were drawn mostly from among the 200,000

Burundian Hutu refugees who have been living in Tanzania since the anti-Hutu

genocidal killings of 1972.25

By the beginning of the 1990s the Burundian Hutu refugees based at the

western Tanzanian town of Kigoma had formed an underground movement

known as the Front pour la liberation nationale (FROLINA), National Liberation

Front, committed to armed struggles against the Tutsi-dominated Burundian

state. It is possib le that the latter organization had a hand in the series of

insurgent attacks which began in November 1991, and was directed at military

and civilian targets in the Burundian state capital Bujumbura as well as the

Bubanza and Cibitoke provinces to the northw est, and said to have been led

mostly by returning refugees. What we know is that the conditions of state of

siege created by the threats of insurgent attacks organised by the

ex-PALIPEHUTU (Parti pour la liberation du peuple hutu, Hutu People’ s Liberation

Party) elements from underground, and in common cause with armed Hutu

exiles operating from the outside, began to be increasingly used to justify all

manner of human rights abuses by Burundi’ s army and other security forces

(Amnesty International, 1992). But, unfortunately, those abuses turned out to be

issues of relatively minor proportions compared with acts of genocidal murders

and other brutalities for which the Burundian forces have long been noted and

as much of the analysis of this paper makes clear. Armed incursions into

Burundi by Hutu refugees intensified in the two years following the October

1993 events, when army junior officers had attempted to abort the electoral

victory of the Hutu dominant party the FRODEBU, and its mandate to rule,

triggering off spontaneous Hutu resistance and its associated ethnic slaughters

and counter-ethnic slaughters, as well as another wave of Hutu refugees. Since

the end of March 1995, there has been yet another wave of Hutu refugees from

Burundi, raising the spectacle of further intensification of the armed struggle by

Burundian Hutu refugees against the home-country. Indeed, there is evidence

about intensification of their clashes with Burundian army and security forces,

particularly in the northwestern provinces of the country.26

5. Impact of Democratization

We have been examining the major structural-cum-predispositional elements in

my theoretical formulation on uni-ethnic military dominance advanced for

explaining the violent cycle of armed ethnic formations plaguing political life in

the two comparative cases under study. The elements underlined above, which

happen also to be among the major factors at the root of the H utu-Tutsi conflict,

include the colonial legacy, particularly the legacy left behind from German/

Belgian rule by the so-called `ethnic ranking and martial races` policies and

practices. Also underlined are factors related to the configuration of society,

including competing myths of origins , economic life-styles, and class distinct-

ions, the question of control of the apparatus of state power and the role played

by the competing elites, and finally the whole psychology of domination and

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Flor

ida

Stat

e U

nive

rsity

] at

02:

53 1

3 N

ovem

ber

2014

54 J. `Bayo Adekany e

resistance and all the social pathologies that go with this. Those are the major

elements in the theoretical model on uni-ethnic military dominance applied to

the analysis of conflicts in Burundi and Rwanda. However, while the

propositions making up the model are important and remain basically valid as

I have just demonstrated, the variables that it postulates at best only point to the

existence of a conflict potential, but cannot explain the actual occurrence of a given

conflict. Structural-cum-predispositional variables need other factors or forces

to dynamize them and in order for an actual conflict to result. This is where the

role of `accelerators`, or `precipitants`, or better still of `exacerbating factors`

comes in. It is now time to factor these other considerations into my analysis.

Of the many kind s of accelerating conditions or precipitants responsible for

the increasingly explosive nature of ethnic conflicts in Rw anda and Burundi,

three suggest themselves as the most important: first, those relating to the

current socio-economic conditions of debts and adjustment; second, the ris ing

demographic pressures on land; and third, the impact of electoral competition

and democratization. The first of this set of factors, while no doubt crucial, is the

most difficult to integrate with the kind of subject analysed here. Fortunately,

this has been sufficiently pursued in two related papers that look at both the

military and ethno-regional dimensions of Africa’ s debt and adjustment

problems, with some case materials on Burundi and Rwanda;27

as such, it can

safely be left out of my analysis here. The second set of accelerating factors of

conflict concerns the fact that Rwanda and Burundi are the two most densely

populated states on the continent and where the pressures on land are felt the

most; that these demographic pressures combined with the falling earnings from

agricultural production, including coffee exports, the current burden of foreign

debts, and the socio-economic tensions of structural adjustment have further

exacerbated what for both countries was already developing into a classic case

of `Malthusian nightmare of famine, war, and pestilence`.28

Obviously, the issues

of population and land are related to and can be treated as part of the earlier set

just noted; which was actually done in the references cited earlier. The third set

of precipitants of conflicts dealing with impact of democratization is the most

germane to my analysis here, and bears need for considerable elaboration.

Rene Lemarchand was the first, most informed observer of Burundian and

Rwandan political affairs to call attention to the close linkage between the

pressures for democratization and explosions of violent ethnic conflicts in the

two states beginning from the late 1950s. In fact, this can be considered as the

central theme of most of his writings in the domain.29

I have earlier hinted how

the first efforts at a major mobilization to take place here had been under the

pressures of electoral competition for power among the elites beginning at the

terminal phase of Belgian colonial rule. But it was with the recent wave of

democratization starting from the late 1980s that the exacerbating effects of

electoral competition and democratization upon Hutu/Tutsi conflict became

more evident. For one thing, democratization by its very definition portends for

the existing `ethno-class` structure of rule the possibility of the ruling Tutsi elites

being replaced by the hitherto underprivileged but increasingly assertive Hutu

majority , under the sheer force of demographic ethnic numbers.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Flor

ida

Stat

e U

nive

rsity

] at

02:

53 1

3 N

ovem

ber

2014

Rwanda/Burundi: `Uni-ethnic’ D om inance and Arm ed Ethnic Form ations 55

Ordinarily , no group or class that stands to profit from a given system of rule

is ever willing and ready to give up power and privilege freely . And for

authoritarian political orders threatened by such a loss of power, the military is

invariably the means seized upon to attempt to prevent the change; while the

opposition movements are left with the choice of either going into direct

confrontation with the military, or attempting to `win some of the military

members over` to the democratic cause. This is in the nature of civil-military

relations in all rapidly democratizing countries everyw here. In the particular

Burundian and Rw andan cases , however, there are the additional problems

arising from the acuteness of the `government` versus `opposition` syndrome, the

coincidence of the latter with the Tutsi/Hutu cleavage, and the undisguisedly

partial role with which the military has long been identified `as the custodian

of Tutsi ethnocracy`.30

These serve further to intensify the conflicts. Still another

reason why the impact of democratization has proved so acutely destabilizing

here is that the process coincides with the demands for ethnic equality, justice,

and access to opportunity, on the one hand, and the defence of ethnic inequality

and privilege, on the other. Finally, there is the largely liberal, majoritarian, and

`winner-takes-all` variant of democracy long assumed by the two sides as

end-product of the democratization process, which has had its destabilizing

effects too. All this makes the expected political change consequent upon

democratization, although brought about through the ballot-box, as much

revolutionary in its overall effect on a country like Burundi as the violent event

of 1959 was to Rwanda. But the two cases also illustrate just how difficult it is

to introduce reforms for democratic change in ethnically polarized, authoritarian

political settings, without the very `process of democratization` either taking on,

or being perceived by both sides as necessarily involving, `a l’ethnisation du

pouvoir`, the ethnicization of power.

Meanw hile, those same pressures of electoral competition and

democratization, which have seen politicians from among the Hutu majority

actually taking over the reins of power as well as threaten the continued Tutsi

minority rule, have also resulted in the structure of military-state relations being

completely unhinged. The geo-ethnic make-up of the group which still w ields

military monopoly has been dissociated from and no longer articulates with

those of the group whose members now claim the electoral mandate to rule. If

I were asked to summarize in a crisp sentence the interconnection between

democratization and the military organizational problem here, this would be it.

I am talking of an acute and dangerous contradiction in the balance of political

and military representation arising from the opposition of democratization,

along with all its ideals and values, against the core underlying assumption of

`the warrior races` theory, namely that some social groups are better suited for

particular functions and roles and must be restricted to these. The revolution of

1959 in Rwanda had somehow helped the Hutu regime there to avoid the

destabilizing dangers of this gross disjuncture between the new democratic

mandate and the legacy of military privilege, at least for the next thirty-tw o

years or so. But in Burundi where the army has remained overwhelmingly

Tutsi-dominated and controlled , and the Hutu majority party (FRODEBU)

emerged as the governing party, the gap between the ethnic locus of ultimate

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Flor

ida

Stat

e U

nive

rsity

] at

02:

53 1

3 N

ovem

ber

2014

56 J. `Bayo Adekany e

power and of constitutional authority has long persisted. But what this has also

meant is that any army/government conflict here necessarily becomes an

extension of the Tutsi-Hutu cleavage in wider society; and, vice versa, that

Tutsi/Hutu discords tend to have their resonance in army/governm ent disagree-

ments.31

Unfortunately, the conflicts about here have not been of the variety of

mere discords and disagreem ents but the explosive kind.

Significantly, most of the violent conflicts recorded in Burundi to date,

including army coups or counter-coups, killings, pogroms and counter-pogroms,

and/or insurrections resis ting the latter, have taken place just when political

power appears to be slipping from the hands of the ruling Tutsi minority to the

Hutu majority. Periods immediately before or just after the outcome of national

elections have proved particularly crucial for triggering off such violent ethnic

conflicts. To give some brief illustrations of the point just made, thus, a high

court in Bujumbura was used by the Burundian government then under the

monarchy to set aside the results of the parliamentary elections of May 1965,

which then permitted the army-supported action taken by the Mwam i to replace

the Hutu prime minister with a Tutsi ganwa , despite the overwhelming number

of seats in the national assembly (some 23 out of 31, or 74.2 per cent) scored by

the Hutu party (Zolberg et. al., 1989, p. 47) This provoked the first major ethnic

upris ings of the Burundian Hutu, backed by the very few officers the Hutu had

at the time in the army, and aimed at overthrow ing the monarchy and setting

up their own `Hutu republic`.

Actually, as already suggested , the spectre of another Rw anda-type scenario

being re-enacted in Burundi had been haunting the latter’ s own ruling Tutsi

class since 1959; and the Burundian Hutu uprisings of 1965 brought home how

real the threat actually was. The insurrection almost succeeded, with the M wam i

being actually forced to vacate his throne and flee abroad. But the forces of

counter-revolution soon regained the initiative, and by November 1966 Captain

Michel Micombero, a Tutsi from the Hima group, had seized power in an army

coup, replaced the monarchy, and became the first military president of

Burundi. Micombero’ s rule, lasting to October 1976, saw trends towards the

consolidation of Tutsi supremacy, and the purging of the Burundian state

machinery, particularly the army and gendarmerie of the last Hutu remnants.

The Micombero regime also presided over one of the worst massacres in modern

African history. Following an abortive coup attempt in 1972 as many as 100,000

to 200,000 Hutu, including the cream of its educated elites, were killed .

The political opening to the Hutu initiated by Major Pierre Buyoya on

coming to power in the coup of 1987, though himself a Tutsi, came to provoke

many army coup and counter-coup attempts and plots led by Tutsi military

ultras opposed to any concessions to the Hutu. One such an attempt was that

of March 1989.

In June 1993, national elections were held that saw the incumbent President

and his party, the U nion pour le progres national, Union for National Progress

(UPRONA), overwhelmingly defeated by a H utu presidential opponent and

leader of the Front dem ocratique du Burundi (FRODEBU), Democratic Front of

Burundi, Melchior N dadaye. Almost immediately, groups of Tutsi army officers

and men began to plot against the incoming president (two such attempts were

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Flor

ida

Stat

e U

nive

rsity

] at

02:

53 1

3 N

ovem

ber

2014

Rwanda/Burundi: `Uni-ethnic’ D om inance and Arm ed Ethnic Form ations 57

made on June 16± 17 and July 2± 3), and directed at aborting Ndadaye’s mandate

to govern. Ndadaye was duly sworn into office on 10 July 1993 as the first

popularly elected President of the Burundian state. Barely three months later,

on 21 October 1993 to be precise, a Tutsi-led army putsch was organized which

succeeded in physically elim inating President Ndadaye, along with the Presid ent

of the National Assembly, and several members of the government cabinet,

almost all of them Hutu. It was the most violent reaction to democratic political

change yet manifested yet by the Tutsi military ethnocracy (Reyntijens, 1993,

1995).

The late Ndadaye was succeeded as president by another FRODEBU leader,

also a Hutu, Cyprien Ntaryamira. But President Ntaryamira was himself also to

be assassinated a few months later on 6 April 1994 in the same plane crash that

killed the Rwandan Hutu President, Juvenal Habyarimana, although the Burun-

dian establishment (including army officials) tried to explain to Burundian

citizens, particularly the Hutu, that that plane crash was related to Rw anda’s

conflict, and not Burundi’ s.

Burundian Hutu have been reported since late March 1995 to be on the move

again, fleeing from another bout of anti-Hutu violence said to have been

instigated, at least in part, by the country’s Tutsi-controlled army and

gendarmerie. At the beginning of April 1995 the United Nations H igh

Commissioner for Refugees (UN HCR) field officials estimated as many as 55,000

Burundian Hutu refugees had been forced by those latest events to flee northern

Burundi for Tanzania.32

By the end of April 1995, Rwanda also was back in the

news again; sold iers of the ex-RPF army were reported to have attacked Hutu

refugees at Camp Kabeho, located in south-western Rwanda, killing an

estimated 2,000 to 4,000, including women and children. These latest events

suggest the tasks of reconciliation and peacebuilding have scarcely begun in

Burundi and Rwanda, while also bring ing to the fore once again the cycle of

problems posed for intergroup relations here by state armies that are largely

uni-ethnic in their composition and structure and blatantly sectional in their

political disposition.

6. Breaking O ut of Vicious Cycle

But how does one break out of this vicious cycle of violence and

counter-violence? Of brutal regimes of ethnic armies holding sway at home but

being challenged by rival military formations contesting for the control of

governm ent and territory? Of state governments and armies under constant

threats of attack from insurgent forces of warrior-refugees operating to

overthrow and replace such governments and armies by fighting their way back

home from without? In short, of the crux of Tutsi-Hutu conflict that has become

a definition of the Rwanda/Burundian tragedy?

The problem that I have been examining here has no doubt been different in

its structural manifestations and levels of intensity, but its nature would not be

completely new to political theory. Faced in very much earlier times with the

analogous oscillations in unstable rule both within and between the two

best-known tyrannies, namely the tyrannies of the minority and the majority ,

competing for exclusivist political control of governm ent, although under

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Flor

ida

Stat

e U

nive

rsity

] at

02:

53 1

3 N

ovem

ber

2014

58 J. `Bayo Adekany e

different climes and circumstances, the founding fathers of the discipline would

have recommended as solution a `balanced` political and military arrangement

under what, in Aristotelian construction, could have been called a `mixed` H utu-

Tutsi constitution. In fact, that is what the talk today of `power-sharing` betw een

the Tutsi and H utu is all about. But what practical measures have been taken

aimed at bringing about such an accommodation between the two contending

forces in the two states? What does `power-sharing` mean in the specifically

military organizational terms? And what are the prospects of achieving the

much-desired transition to peace and democratic governance? These are the

issues taken up in this last section of the paper.

Of the two countries, Burundi has had more experience with power-sharing

as a strategy of ethnic conflict management under democratic transition. In fact,

some de facto power-sharing arrangement has alw ays been in existence here, and

goes back to the very configuration of the Burundian set-up as a slightly

different society from Rwanda; and, in the years immediately following

independence, 1963± 65, the monarchy had `sought to ensure a proper balancing

of ethnic interes ts in government`, and a representation in cabinet `comprising

almost every proportion of Hutu and Tutsi` (Reyntijens, 1995, p. 7). But it was

after 3 September 1987 that much more conscious steps began to be taken

towards instituting power-sharing as a governmental arrangement, though

under circumstances that one would least have expected to produce such a

result. The steps were initiated under an army regime, which had just shot its

way into power through a coup d’etat, was confronted again with one of those

Hutu insurrections, and had found itself presid ing over another orgy of

genocidal slaughter of tens of thousands of unarmed civilians, forcing three to

four times the same number to flee to neighbouring Rwanda. But those events

also coincided with the latest wave of democratization sweeping across the

continent. By October 1988, Burundi’ s new ruler, a Tutsi, Major Pierre Buyoya,

had set up a `National Commission to Study the Question of N ational Unity`

compris ing 12 H utu and 12 Tutsi, as part of the new government policy of

reconciliation and exploring ways of achieving reconciliation and accommod-

ation with the Burundian Hutu. By April 1989, the National Commission had

published its report which immediately initiated the launching of a public

debate that was to lead to the drafting of what became known as the `Charter

of National Unity` (Reyntijens , 1995, p. 9).

That process marked the first major entry of the Hutu into the government

of Burundi, with increasing numbers being appointed to positions within the

apparatus of the state, including cabinet ministerial posts and provincial

governorships, until now monopolized by the Tutsi. Under Buyoya access to

secondary and higher education was also liberalized, which for the first time

was now to be organized on the basis of competitive national examinations, and

which resulted in a considerable increase in the numbers of deserving Hutu

candidates being selected for admission to the country ’ s post-primary and

tertiary institutions. The civil service was another state organ whose echelons

had until now been dominated by the Tutsi but which was to be thrown open

to Hutu recruitment. Above all, the Democratic Front of Burundi (FRODEBU),

as the Hutu majority party, which had long been proscribed and forced to go

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Flor

ida

Stat

e U

nive

rsity

] at

02:

53 1

3 N

ovem

ber

2014

Rwanda/Burundi: `Uni-ethnic’ D om inance and Arm ed Ethnic Form ations 59

into exile, was now permitted to operate legally under a new multiparty

constitution introduced in 1992 by the Buyoya presidency as a way of also

opening political competition to all. And when in the national elections of June

1993 the incumbent President Buyoya and his Union for National Progress

(UPRONA) party lost to the FRODEBU presidential candidate Ndadaye, the

former was magnanimous enough to concede his defeat and hand over the reins

of power to the first nationally elected Hutu President of Burundi (Reyntijens ,

1993, 1995).

For all his progressive policy of moderation and reconciliation, however,

Buyoya had to be circumspect in his dealing with the army. For one thing,

hard-liners from the minority Tutsi population, particularly the armed wing, had

been giving abundant signals they would not tolerate any extension of the

political reforms to the army, and to opening the latter up to greater H utu

participation. For another, even a Buyoya regime, `reformist` though it might

appear, dared not alienate its ultimate constituency and the bastion of Tutsi

power, the army. Thus, to illustrate, Africa Confidential had reported in October

1990 how the first H utu cadets admitted to the country’ s military academy

ICSAM under the regime were literally forced to withdraw from the institution

without President Buyoya being able to do anything about this:

The few H utus last year admitted as cadets to the Institute superieur des

cadres m ilitaires, were bullied by their fellow-cadets so seriously that most

subsequently abandoned their military careers. The fact that no action was

taken against the commandant of the staff college and that the President

has denied the existence of any problem regarding the integration of

Hutus into the officer corps are signs of official embarrassment. In effect,

Buyoya has little further room to manoeuvre unless he is really prepared

to take on the heart of the current establishment.33

Where Buyoya’s problem was merely that the Tutsi-dominated Burundian

army had allow ed him no further room to manoeuvre, even though himself a

Tutsi, that of the next three Hutu presidents holding office after him Ð

Ndadaye, assassinated in an army putsch in October 1993, followed by Ntarya-

mira, himself killed along with his Rw andan counterpart in April 1994, and now

Ntibantunganya Ð is that they have simply become captives of Tutsi military

ethnocracy. I examine in a minute what power-sharing is supposed to mean in

the essentially military organizational sphere; and how and why no political

arrangement in the direction of the former is complete or even real without

involving an extension into the latter.

When Ndadaye was sworn into office he continued with the experim ent in

power-sharing that Buyoya had initiated. Rather than adopting a `winner-

takes-all` approach to the results of elections that had brought him and his party

to power, Ndadaye reserved only 60 per cent of ministerial posts for the

FRODEBU, while conceding 40 per cent to UPRONA. Obviously, those

proportional shares bore no relation to the two parties ’ electoral strengths or

ethnic demographics. But for FRODEBU to have insisted on taking 80± 85 per

cent of all political and administrative appointments , leaving the remaining

15± 20 per cent to the UPRONA and its allies (although these latter sets of

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Flor

ida

Stat

e U

nive

rsity

] at

02:

53 1

3 N

ovem

ber

2014

60 J. `Bayo Adekany e

proportional shares more accurately reflected the relative electoral strengths of

the parties and the Hutu/Tutsi breakdown of Burundi’ s total composition),

would have been close to establishing an all-Hutu `majoritarian` government.

President Ndadaye was overly conscious about not giving such an impress ion

to the dislodged Tutsi elites. Thus, he also appointed as the Prime Minster a

Tutsi, and from the UPRONA party, a politician by name Sylvie Kinigi, thereby

keeping his electoral promise that the presidency and prime ministership would

not be held by persons belonging to the same ethnic group. Also, as part of

Ndadaye’ s `reassuring` gestures, two army officers were appointed to the cabinet

and assigned to hold the ministry of defence and state secretariat for internal

security (Reyntijens, 1993, pp. 578± 79).

But of course, as we saw, not even such moderate efforts towards accommod-

ation by a politically dominant Hutu government could be reassuring enough

to the die-hards within the Tutsi military ethnocracy. After the assassination of

Presidents Ndadaye and Cyprien Ntaryamira, as well as the massive Hutu

insurrections triggered by the latter, another attempt at a government of national

reconciliation in Burundi was begun with the brokering of the September 1994

Accord. A FRODEBU leader, Sylvestre Ntibantunganya, a Hutu, emerged as the

new President and under a new power-sharing arrangement that also provided

for the Prime Minister to be supplied from the Tutsi-dominated opposition

party, the UPRONA. N ew ethno-political quotas were fixed, distributing all

cabinet posts, provincial governorships, and ambassadorships on the basis of 55

per cent to the predominantly Hutu FRODEBU party and 45 per cent to

UPRON A, as documented in one of the recent works by Reyntijens (1995,

p. 11± 13).

As events have since demonstrated, without the backing of a sufficiently

disposed state army organization, even this latest concession to Tutsi political

opponents by the Hutu ruling majority has difficulty in achieving the

much-needed break-through. But developments in post-1994 Rwanda also bring

out this point. There, efforts appear to be in the making to pick up the tatters

of the power-sharing idea contained in the moribund Arusha Accord of 1993

that had been entered into with the late President Habyarimana’s

Hutu-dominated government, as another Hutu leader Pasteur Bizimungu was

picked as the country’s new president. But the ex-RPF army leaves no one in

doubt as to who really is in charge. The ex-refugee guerrillas have been in

power barely one year now, but they are already manifesting growing signs of

being as much indisposed to sharing military power with their Hutu counter-

parts.34

From all the foregoing the inescapable conclusion is that the two, uni-ethnic

Tutsi-dominated armies currently operating in Burundi and Rwanda have been

the least touched by the various reform measures embarked upon by their

governm ents. Yet, from the view -point of my analysis here, the army is of all the

organs of state power the greatest in need of restructuring, if attempts at moving

these badly divided societies from the cycle of armed ethnic conflicts are to yield

concrete results. Without touching the army, whatever institutional framework

is designed in the name of power-sharing cannot be real enough; neither can it

be trusted to help create the enabling environment for forging the growth of

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Flor

ida

Stat

e U

nive

rsity

] at

02:

53 1

3 N

ovem

ber

2014

Rwanda/Burundi: `Uni-ethnic’ D om inance and Arm ed Ethnic Form ations 61

mutual understanding and coexistence betw een the two warring groups. Ethnic

armies of uni-ethnic dominant variants have wreaked such human havoc here

that I believe the time has come for Burundi and Rwanda to move away from

that mode of military/political organization. This would also facilitate the

disarming of ethnic guerrillas, which task is no doubt reciprocally linked to both

the demands for power-sharing and transition to sustainable peace and demo-

cratic governance. Unquestionably, the regimes in power in the two states would

like to disarm and demobilize the plethora of ethnic militias and guerrilla forces

that dot their civil-military landscape. Yet the governments cannot achieve such

an objective until and unless they have achieved a measure of agreement and

accommodation on power-sharing with such militias and guerrilla forces most

of which are drawn from militarily unrepresen ted Hutu groups. This means that

transition from war to peace, from conflict to the post-conflict phase, and from

authoritarian rule to democratic governance necessarily has a significant military

reorganizational dimension that cannot be disregarded.

Now, ideally , the thing to do would have been to disarm and disband what

by now are clearly `ethnic armies` represen ting the two segments of society, and

create completely new national armies literally ex-nih ilo for Burundi and

Rwanda. But this is not practicable: I do not see how those currently enjoying

a military advantage particularly at the domestic front (meaning the Tutsi

establishment) would be willing to agree to any such complete disbanding of the

force under their command. In fact, the die-hards among them in both states are

already saying that the army is `national` enough and needs no reforming as

part of the current power-sharing efforts; while, for that very reason, the

`national army` idea (if by the latter one implies an army organization which is

`supra-ethnic`) is most unlikely to find favour with or appeal to the Hutu,

especially the militants among them, who may well regard such a proposal as

a thinly disguised project for continued uni-ethnic Tutsi military dominance.

Perhaps what is more practical to attempt, at least at this conjuncture of things,

is a military reorganization formula that aims at integrating and/or retraining

some of the ex-Hutu army officers and men with the existing force, while

rehabilitating and absorbing other redundant ex-combatants on both sides into

society through effective and well-funded programmes. But whether the military

reorganizational problem is approached as one of creating a completely new

national army or as involving the integration and retraining of the two

competing armed ethnic formations, and both to be coupled with a programme

of demobilization and rehabilitation of the remaining ex-combatants into the

society, the new military formation that we envisage for post-conflict Burundi

and Rwanda cannot but be premised on ensuring an ethnically mixed, meaning

a consciously `pluralized`, force structure and command.

There are two major problems confronting the implementation of the military

reorganization plan that I have just sketched. First, how does any governm ent

here, least of all one nominally headed by a Hutu majority as in Burundi, hope

to succeed in militarily integrating ex-insurgent Hutu combatants with the

existing Tutsi-controlled armies, without provoking at the minimum the fears

of promotion blockages, anxieties about job securities , and therefore the

continuing dangers of coupist strikes on the part of members of the latter? This

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Flor

ida

Stat

e U

nive

rsity

] at

02:

53 1

3 N

ovem

ber

2014

62 J. `Bayo Adekany e

is a very real problem. But it is one that will call for major assistance by the

international community to help counteract. The international community is also

to be relied upon for providing funding for the programmes of disarming ethnic

ex-combatants, demobilization, and rehabilitation into society.

The second problem concerns the very nature of the force structure being

proposed. Of course, an ethnically pluralized army would have a weakening

effect on the command structure, esprit de corps, combat readiness, and

propensity for concentration of force, and thereby reduce the proposed

organization’s capacity to perform effectively. But then, perhaps, it is precisely

because of these very weaknesses manifested when such an alternative force

structure is used for internal security purposes that this organizational type is

considered at least for now the most appropriate for badly divided societies like

Rwanda and Burundi. For part of the problem here in the past has been that

governm ent armies have shown themselves all too eager and prone to intervene

politically and act sectionally as repressive forces, murdering and killing

members of opposition (meaning other ethnic) groups in the process, in part

because there have been no countervailing safeguards in their organizational

set-up to prevent them. A state military formation composed of both Hutu and

Tutsi members in adequate numbers and proportions at command level as well

as rank and file w ill provide such safeguards. It w ill have built into the structure

the necessary balance of ethnic forces for checking the kind of blatantly sectional

interventions in the political process , and odiously efficient execution of

genocidal campaigns, for which uni-ethnic government armies whether under

Tutsi or Hutu control have been unjustly famous in the past. This will also have

tackled much of the instabilities plaguing military organizations here, though

not necessarily other instabilities and violent conflicts derived from other

sources.

How effective, then, are the power-sharing arrangements that I have been

discussing as a solution to the rising Hutu-Tutsi conflicts? Although important,

the power-sharing arrangements (including the military) that I have been

discussing cannot provide absolute guarantee. This is in part because these

arrangements address only a few of the major factors responsible for the conflict

concerned. Decidedly left out of my analysis, as can be recalled, are factors of

the socio-economic kind, particularly those related to the conditions of debt

burden and structural adjustment, not to add those about demographic

pressures, and all the social tensions associated with these. That superimposition

of the effects of these other deteriorating socio-economic conditions upon

existing structures of conflicts can only produce even more heightened conflicts

between groups is something that can be demonstrated with materials from the

Rwandan and Burundian cases.35

Unfortunately, there is nothing in the

power-sharing scheme discussed above, whether as a theoretical construct or

institutional arrangement, for dealing with these other considerations; and as

Lemarchand (1993, p. 168) has warned , `no power-sharing arrangement can

survive the strains and stresses generated by such profound socio-economic

inequalities`.

Related to the latter is the observation that, obviously, power-sharing as a

strategy for managing the conflicts in Burundi and Rwanda is mostly directed

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Flor

ida

Stat

e U

nive

rsity

] at

02:

53 1

3 N

ovem

ber

2014

Rwanda/Burundi: `Uni-ethnic’ D om inance and Arm ed Ethnic Form ations 63

here as elsew here at effecting inter-elite agreement and accommodation. In

doing this, the strategy simply acknowledges the crucial role that the elites have

been playing in the generation and conduct of such conflicts, provided of course

we do not assume that once the interests of these elites are guaranteed and

secured what we now know as the H utu-Tutsi conflict will have `withered

away`. The important point to bear in mind is that while no resolution of deep-

rooted conflicts is guaranteed by inter-elite accommodation, action in the

direction of the former cannot proceed without the latter. Thus, the institutional

arrangement of power-sharing (including that in the military domain), along

with the gradual internalization of the values and norms associated with it, does

no more than provide the minim um climate of security and stability under

which a given regim e may then, and without having to worry about the existing

structural and predispositional factors defining the old Hutu/Tutsi cleavage,

hopefully, begin to address those other exacerbating sources of the conflicts

stemming from the current socio-economic conditions. In other words, power-

sharing is not the solution, but a precondition for finding a long and lasting

solution to the violent conflicts that have plagued these two states; it could not

have been anything else. I am afraid that I have to end this analysis as it was

indeed begun, with caveats and qualifications. Because there remain very

important unexplained residuals in the explanatory theory with which I started,

the foregoing analysis of the paper cannot pretend to be anything but tentative.

C onclusion

To recapitulate the main points in my analysis, the paper has been concerned

in general with the plethora of armed ethnic forces that dot the civil-military

landscape of the comparative cases of Rwanda and Burundi, and in particular

with the vicious oscillation between the brutal regimes of ethnic armies holding

sway from within and the rival insurgent force of warrior-refugees operating to

overthrow and replace the former from without, and what all this has meant for

the peace and stability of the two states. It is in short about the military

organizational dimensions to the cycle of ethnic violence there. The central

objective of the paper has been to trace the source of the problem to the

structure of `uni-ethnic` military dominance inherited from colonial rule.

That the structure is inherently unstable is evident from the unceasingly

violent struggles engaged in to have a system of Tutsi minority rule replaced by

a Hutu republic and perhaps back to the Tutsi rule. But such struggles have also

seen the control and legitimacy of the structure challenged militarily on two

fronts. From within, there are the `unofficial` armies, para-military bodies,

militias , and other `self-defence` forces specifically organized to challenge the

legitimacy of uni-ethnic armies or compete with the latter for a share of the

states’ claims to monopoly of coercive machinery; such parallel military

formations are organized by groups who are officially denied military represent-

ation and have a felt need to seek and provide for their own security outside of

the ambit of the state. From without, there are also the threats of attacks and

invasions from the insurgent guerrilla forces of refugees that the

Rwandan/Burundian regim es of uni-ethnic dominance and their armies have

provoked and been perpetually forced to face.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Flor

ida

Stat

e U

nive

rsity

] at

02:

53 1

3 N

ovem

ber

2014

64 J. `Bayo Adekany e

The propositions postulated above regard ing the nature of uni-ethnic military

dominant systems, being by definition systems of domination, contain

ingredients of the explanation. Those propositions also help one to understand

the logic of military/political developments there; that is, why, for example, the

emergent ruling but unarmed Hutu majorities in Burundi (especially after 1989)

and Rwanda (just before 1959 and after July 1994) should feel unsafe being

protected by their armed minority Tutsi counterparts; and why the former

would be disposed to consider as `illegitimate` those uni-ethnic Tutsi-dominated

military institutions of both states, and rather recruit, train, and organize their

own `unofficial armies` for purposes of `self-defence`, at first secretly but

subsequently legitimizing these as a `just military` project.

Our central thesis on inevitability of instability of uni-ethnic military

dominance thus assumes the character almost of `an iron law`. The experiences

of the two comparative cases studied here demonstrate just how unstable

structures of uni-ethnic dominance, whether of the minoritarian or the

majoritarian variants, have become in the rapidly democratizing environment

of the post-Cold War world. A `pluralized` military/political organization under

a genuinely `mixed` (that is, power-sharing) Hutu-Tutsi government is the only

way forward for Rw anda/Burundi, and out of the cycle of violent instabilities

that has plagued these two fatuously twinned states over the past thirty years.

J. ’Bayo Adekany e is Research Fellow, and Program m e Leader of the Ethnic and

N ationalist Conflicts Programm e, International Peace Research Institute, O slo (PRIO),

O slo, Fuglehauggata 11, 0260 Oslo, N orway; tel: 47 22 55 71 50; fax: 47 22 55 84 22;

e-mail:<bayo@ prio.no> H e was previously Professor and H ead , D epartment of Political

Science, U niversity of Ibadan, N igeria.

N otes

1. The point has often been made about the situations of Burundi and Rwanda

not being identical with one another. It is important to bear this in mind

here; and, in fact, one of the challenges confronting my analysis is to bring

out what the differences are and just how these have impacted upon

developments in each of the cases. But in doing this it is equally important

that one does not lose sight of similarities between the two cases,

similarities that sometimes seem to outweigh whatever the differences. I

have particularly in mind the facts of (a) shared history, including the

legacy of common colonial rule; (b) common geographical boundaries ; (c)

nearly identical and similarly structured ethnic group configuration, with

each of the countries composed of about 85% Hutu, 14% Tutsi, and 1% Twa;

(d) similar socio-economic conditions ; (e) the inextricably linked fates of

their constituent populations; and (f) what one may call a shared `genocidal`

political culture. The implication of the foregoing is that Rw anda and

Burundi cannot be understood independently of each other; and, in fact,

historically , events in one are known to have almost immediate

`demonstration` effects on developments within the other. Given all this, the

analyst is justified in regarding Burundi and Rwanda as truly comparable in

the most literal sense of the term.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Flor

ida

Stat

e U

nive

rsity

] at

02:

53 1

3 N

ovem

ber

2014

Rwanda/Burundi: `Uni-ethnic’ D om inance and Arm ed Ethnic Form ations 65

2. The term `intractable conflicts` is used here in the sense suggested by Louis

Kriesberg, et al. (1989, p. 122): `Conflicts are not born tractable or intractable.

Conflicts emerge and escalate; they wax and wane. A conflict develops,

becomes increasingly intractable, and sometimes transformed and

negotiable.`

3. This was part of a theory on military organization in multi-ethnic states first

postulated by me some two decades ago. An abbreviated version of the

theory was published in 1979, while the inventory of major propositions

making up the theory was laid out a year earlier. The first empirical study

to be published on `uni-ethnic military dominance` appeared that same year

and was applied to Uganda (see Adekanye, 1976a, 1978a, 1978b and 1979b).

Compare Enloe (1980a, 1980b). Aspects of these military organizational

dimensions of ethnicity can be found also pursued in part four of Horo-

witz’ s (1985) master work.

4. Although the Ugandan case (1962± 71) was classified as approximating the

`uni-ethnic` military dominance model (Adekanye, 1978b), or what Mazrui

(1975) had described as `a kind of Manifest Destiny of the Nilotes` in action,

subsequent developments show ed that the so-called `Nilotic military

monopoly` was more mythical than actual. Even before the disintegrative

forces let loose by the nature of Idi Amin’s rule, there had been evidence of

cracks in the ranks of those wielding that monopoly. For example, officers

and men of northern origins but from the much smaller minority-ethnic

areas (principally in the West Nile province), who had been constrained to

make common cause, identify, and `super-tribalize` with the Langi and

Acholi, had begun to go their separate ways and assert (or re-assert?) their

(real?) identities when they felt politically strong enough to stand alone by

the time of the January 1971 coup. What the Amin rule, particularly its

recruitment strategy based as it was on shifting congeries of preferred

groups beginning with `the Acholi/Langi`, `ex-Sudanese colony of Nubians`,

`Lugbara and Madi` and subsequently his own `Kakw a`, not to add the

murderous nature of that rule, had succeeded in doing was to accelerate the

process of military disorganization.

5. As Rene Lemarchand (1993, p. 159) rightly observes in respect of the

Burundian case. The same is true of Rwanda where the two conflict groups

share one language, Kinyarwanda, in addition to other things.

6. The role played by `myths of common origins` in ethnic identity

construction and reconstruction in comparative perspective can be found

analysed in most of the standard works within the field. Of these, I have

found Tonkin et al. (1989) particularly useful, because of its emphasis of the

pseudo-scientific nature of such ethnographic accounts.

7. This theme has been fully developed in one of Lemarchand’s (1994b) most

recent publications on the subject.

8. By `elites` here I imply not just the leadership of the two conflict groups but

also those of their members occupying the top hierarchies of government,

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Flor

ida

Stat

e U

nive

rsity

] at

02:

53 1

3 N

ovem

ber

2014

66 J. `Bayo Adekany e

the army and other security forces, the civil service, colleges and

universities, state-owned enterprises and businesses, organized labour, and

churches, and all competing with one another for influence within and

across these institutions of state power.

9. Wallerstein (1960, p. 131) was one of the first to underline this dynamic

element in the definition of ethnicity: `membership in an ethnic group`, he

had written, `is a matter of social definition, an inter-play of the self-

definition of members and the definition of other groups`.

10. Thus, the years from 1966 to 1976 have been described by Lemarchand

(1993, p. 163) as a period in Burundian history when `coup-making became

essentially an intra-Tutsi affair, reflecting ethno-regional tensions and

disagreem ents among the different factions of the army`, although at the

same time `setting in motion a circulation of elites within the armed forces`.

In the same vein, Lemarchand elsew here (1994a, pp. 599± 602) documents

how Habyarimana’s Hutu-dominated Rwandan regime, especially during

its last four years in office from 1990 to 1994, came to be acutely plagued by

similar ethno-regional tensions .

11. The basic texts here include Maquet (1961), Lemarchand (1970), and

Newbury (1988).

12. The pre-colonial Rwandan social structure has been described as pyramidal

in shape and occupied by three authority chieftains, the Land Chief

(traditionally always a Hutu), Arm y Chief (a Mutwa), and Cattle Chief (a

Tutsi) symbolized by the three hills that form a geographical ring around

the country. At the top of that pyramid, it is said, had sat the Land Chief.

One of the effects of colonialism was to replace this relatively decentralized

authority system with a hierarchicalized structure, fusing the Cattle (Tutsi)

and Army Chief (Mutwa) roles into one, abolishing the authority of the

Land Chief and therefore the measure of Hutu autonomy going along with

it, and have the latter’ s position as well as that vacated by the Cattle Tutsi

replaced by the Colonial Governm ent and the Priest (Catholic Church)

respectively. I owe this insight to Rev. Benjamin K. Nwangi, Diakonia

Mission, Nairobi, Kenya, in a private communication to this author on 27

October 1994.

13. There is as yet no published work in the English language detailing the

ethnic make-up of the army organizations inherited by Rwanda and

Burundi from colonial rule. The bits and pieces of information about the

Tutsi-dominant nature of these organizations are those from basic texts on

the two countries earlier identified in N ote 11. To these must be added hints

from sources on comparative colonial recruitment practices such as analysed

by Adekanye (1979a, 1995b), Enloe (1980a), Kirk-Greene (1980), and

Echenberg (1990). Some useful discussions on the specific contribution of

colonialism to the political and military ranking of the Bahutu and Batutsi

as ethnic groups can be found in chapter two of Lema (1993).

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Flor

ida

Stat

e U

nive

rsity

] at

02:

53 1

3 N

ovem

ber

2014

Rwanda/Burundi: `Uni-ethnic’ D om inance and Arm ed Ethnic Form ations 67

14. The other two identifiable alternatives, ideally, are either to recruit and

organize on an ethnic-proportional basis by assigning formal quotas to

groups according to their relative demographic and political strengths

whether actual or perceived; or to recruit and organize on a national basis,

by targeting some supposedly non-ethnic social categories (e.g., workers,

peasants, unemployed, women, the youth, etc.). For case-studies of these

other two military-ethnic formations, see Adekanye (1976b, 1980, 1983, and

1989).

15. This proposition is adapted from Blalock, Jr (1976, p. 215).

16. It is more correct to say that because the theory in its original formulation

had been mostly concerned with multi-ethnic societies that are `segmented`,

meaning territorially demarcated and largely unranked, the external

dimensions of the problem pursued could only have dealt with the issues

of secession, irredenta, and ex-diaspora ethnics straddling given state

boundaries . Obviously, those dimensions of ethnic strife are rare in ranked

systems such as Rwanda and Burundi. There is a sense in which it can be

argued that the cycles of `refugee-warriors` often thrown up by ethnically

ranked systems are but the structural equivalent of the wars of secession,

partition, and irredenta fought in multi-ethnically segmented political

settings. But those violent cycles of `refugee-warriors` in which the Hutu

and Tutsi groups find themselves caught as part of the conflicts between

them are also a way of saying that because of absence of geographical

homogeneity in the distribution of ethnic aggregates, armed secessions and

partitions as a method of resolving those conflicts are inherently

inapplicable.

17. Our analysis here concurs with Lemarchand ’s (1994a, p. 583) observation

regarding the rise to power of the RPF `refugee-w arriors` in Rwanda: `By a

prank of history the restoration of minority rule under their auspices brings

Rwanda back to where it stood before the 1959± 62 revolution Ð on the

brink of yet another cycle of ethnic violence,` emphasis supplied. What

Lemarchand calls the `prank of history` is similar to the `iron law` of change

in uni-ethnic military dominance that I have postulated here.

18. As we have long been reminded by Eckstein et al. (1964) and Kelley, et al.

(1971).

19. A frica Confidential (London), 35 (16), 12 August, 1994, pp. 1 ± 3.

20. A frica Confidential (London), 36 (4), 17 February, 1995, pp. 5± 6.

21. Reuters , quoted Human Rights Network, `Rwanda’s ousted army genera l

seeks peace`, 28 February 1995.

22. Which, understandably, would be the way the new RPF government would

describe the situation. But it has also become the interpretation of a number

of the foreign aid workers and human rights activists either currently based

at or intermittently reporting from Goma, see for example Judith Matloff,

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Flor

ida

Stat

e U

nive

rsity

] at

02:

53 1

3 N

ovem

ber

2014

68 J. `Bayo Adekany e

`Why Nearly Two Hutus Prefer to Stay Outside Rwanda,` Human Rights

Network/Africa, 31 March 1995.

23. To adapt the apt phrase used by Africa Confidential (London), 31 (20), 12

October 1990, pp. 1 ± 2, for characterizing one of the earlier invasions by

Rwandan Tutsi-led refugees against the then Hutu-controlled Rwandan

governm ent.

24. For materials bearing on this and the involvement by other related foreign

interests in the last Rwandan war, including most especially the issue of

arms supplies to the combatants, see Goose and Smyth (1994); Human

Rights Watch (1994); Omaar and de Waal (1995). Also, see Note 26 below.

25. On the latter, see Lemarchand (1973, 1994b).

26. And these may have contributed to some of the latest attacks and

murderous actions by Tutsi-led troops against all `suspected` Intagohekas,

ex-palipehutu , or FROLINA elements or supporters in northern Burundi,

prompting another wave of civilian Hutu refugees crossing into Tanzania.

27. See Adekanye (1994 and 1995a). A more focused analysis dealing

specifically with the Rwandan case is provided by Michel Chossuddovsky

(1994).

28. Concerning the contribution of these `core issues of population and land` to

the scale and savagery of the massacres that have become Rwanda/Burundi

especially in most recent years, one correspondent, Anver Versi (1994, p. 13),

has written thus:

An invisible yet deep cause is the fact that both Rwanda and Burundi

are totally unsupportable populations. The hillsides are a maze of

small plots. The traditional land-tenure system encourages parcelling

out of scarce land into even tinier fragments . This has led to the

exhaustion of land, pushing yet more people onto already

overcrowded pieces. The fall in the price of the countries’ main export

crop, coffee, has meant that more has to be produced to maintain

income levels. More coffee means less food. The pressure on the prime

source of survival, land, has provoked the M althusian nightmare of

fam ine, war, and pestilence [emphasis added].

29. Lemarchand’s writings in the domain are legion, but for the most

immediately relevant ones, see Lemarchand (1970, 1993, 1994a, and 1994b).

30. To borrow the useful term employed by Lemarchand (1993, p. 169).

31. Witness how a mere cabinet controversy betw een UPRONA and FRODEBU

over demands for Anatole Kanyenkiko’ s resignation or continuing

appointment as prime minister in early February 1995 came to assume acute

inter-political tensions , and visible at least at three levels , namely in the

relations between the two coalition parties, the Hutu and Tutsi communities ,

governm ent and army. The controversy almost threatened to plunge the

country into civil war until FRODEBU as senior partner in the coalition

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Flor

ida

Stat

e U

nive

rsity

] at

02:

53 1

3 N

ovem

ber

2014

Rwanda/Burundi: `Uni-ethnic’ D om inance and Arm ed Ethnic Form ations 69

governm ent bowed to the wishes of the UPRONA party by getting

Kanyenkiko replaced by another Tutsi political leader as prime minister .

Kanyenkiko was accused of giving in too much to the Hutu-dominated

FRODEBU party in respect of the power-sharing arrangement and the

distribution of political and administrative posts going with it.

32. Burundi’ s senior army officials how ever deny that their troops are

responsible for these latest violent clashes resulting in Hutu refugees fleeing

the north-western provinces of the country into Tanzania, and charge

Burundian Hutu extremist militias combined with their ex-Rwandan

counterparts rather to have instigated these events, see Note 26 above.

33. A frica Confidential (London), `Burundi: Buyoya’s Rubicon`, 31 (20), 12

October 1990, p. 3.

34. Nor are the recent actions taken by the Tutsi-controlled Rwandan Patriotic

Army (RPA) against the Kibeho Camp the kind likely to create a climate of

reconciliation with the Hutu majority . See The Econom ist (London), `Rwanda:

From Awful to Worse`, 29 April 1995, pp. 54, 57.

35. `The Cases of Burundi and Rwanda`, it has been argued (Adekanye, 1995a,

p. 362), `bring out, in their grimmest form yet, what happens when

increasingly frustrating socio-economic conditions (including those

associated with debt and adjustment) coincide with pressures for

democratization on the one hand and pre-existing lines of ethnic inequality

on the other.`

R eferences

Adekanye, J.`B. (1976a) `Military Organization in Multi-Ethnically Segmented

Societies: a Theoretical Study, with Reference to Three Sub-Saharan African

Cases`, PhD Dissertation, Brandeis University , Waltham, Mass, USA.

± (1976b) `Army in a Multi-Ethnic Society: the Case of Nkrumah’ s Ghana,

1957± 1966`, Arm ed Forces and Society , 2 (2): 251± 72.

± (1978a) `Towards Explaining Civil-Military Instability in Contemporary Sub-

Saharan Africa: a Comparative Political Model`, Current Research on Peace and

V iolence, 8 (3± 4): 191± 206.

± (1978b) `Ethnicity, the Military, and Domination: the Case of Obote’ s

Uganda, 1962± 1971`, Plural Societies, 9 (1): 85± 110.

± (1979a) `Ethnicity and Army Recruitment in Colonial Plural Society`, Ethnic

and Racial Studies, 2 (2): 151± 65.

± (1979b) `Military Organization in Multi-Ethnically Segmented Societies`, in

C.B. Marrett and C. Leggon (eds) Research in Race and Ethnic Relations: a

Research Annual, Greenw ich, Conn: JAI Press .

± (1980) `Political Ethnicity and Military Disintegration: the Comparative

Cases of Contemporary Cyprus (1960± 1974) and Lebanon (1943± 1975)`,

Q uarterly Journal of the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, 13 (2):

254± 70.

± (1983) `The `Federal Character’ Provisions of the 1979 Constitution and the

Composition of the Nigerian Armed Forces`, Plural Societies, 14 (1± 2): 66± 78.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Flor

ida

Stat

e U

nive

rsity

] at

02:

53 1

3 N

ovem

ber

2014

70 J. `Bayo Adekany e

± (1989) `The Quota Recruitment Policy, its Sources and Impact upon the

Nigerian Military`, in P.P. Ekeh, and E. Osaghae (eds) Federal Character and

N igerian Federalism, Ibadan: H einemann.

± (1994) `Military Dimensions of Africa’ s Debt and Adjustment Problems`, in

Idegruppen om N ord/S ù r (North/South Coalition), Inform asjonshefte (Inform-

ation Bulletin), 2, Oslo: PRIO.

± (1995a) `Structural Adjustment, Democratization, and Rising Ethnic Tensions

in Africa`, D evelopment and Change, 26 (2): 355± 74.

± (1995b) ``The Gurkha Syndrome’ in Military-Ethnic Studies Revisited`, paper

presented at the Joint International Conference of the Ethnic Studies

Network (ESN) and the International Association for Conflict Management

(ICAM), Lo-Skolen, Denmark, June 11± 14.

A frica Confidential (1990a) `Rwanda/Uganda: a Violent Homecoming`, 31 (2)

(London, 12 October): 1 ± 2.

± (1990b) `Burundi: Buyoya’s Rubicon`, 31 (20) (London, 12 October): 2± 3.

± (1994) `Burundi: On a Knife’s Edge`, 35 (16) (London, 12 August): 1± 3.

± (1995) `Burundi: Militants’ Mayhem`, 36 (4) (London, February 17): 5± 6.

Amnesty International (1992) Burundi: Sectarian Security Forces Violate H um an

Rights with Impunity, London: Amnesty International Secretariat.

Barth, F. (ed.)(1969) Ethnic G roups and Boundaries, Oslo: Norwegian University

Press.

Blalock, H .M. (1976) Toward a Theory of M inority-Group Relations, New York: John

Wiley.

Chossuddovsky, M. (1994) `IMF-World Bank Policies and Rwanda Holocaust`,

Third W orld Resurgence, 52: 27± 31.

Dreisziger, N.F. (ed.) (1990) Ethnic Arm ies: Polyethnic Arm ed Forces from the Time

of the Habsburgs to the Age of the Superpowers, Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid

Laurier University Press.

Echenberg (1990) `Race, Ethnicity, and Social Class in the French Colonial Army:

the Black African Tirailleurs, 1857± 1958`, in N .F. Dreisziger (ed.) Ethnic

A rmies: Polyethnic Arm ed Forces from the Time of the H absburgs to the Age of the

Superpowers, Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier Univers ity Press.

Eckstein , H. (ed.)(1964) Internal W ar: Problem s and Approach, New York: Free

Press.

Enloe, C.H. (1980a) `The Gurkha Syndrome: State Utilization of `Martial Races’ `,

in Ethnic Soldiers: State Security in D ivided Societies, Athens: University of

Georgia Press .

± (1980b) Police, M ilitary , and Ethnicity: Foundations of State Pow er, New

Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books.

Goose, S.D. and F. Smyth (1994) `Arming Genocide in Rwanda’, Foreign A ffairs,

73 (5): 86± 96.

Horowitz, D.L. (1985) Ethnic Groups in Conflict, London and Berkeley: University

of California Press.

Human Rights Watch (1994) `Arming Rwanda: the Arms Trade and Human

Rights Abuses in the Rwandan War`, H um an Rights Watch Arm s Project, 6 (1).

Kelley, G.A. and C.E. Brown (eds) (1970) Struggles in the State: Sources and

Patterns of World Revolution, N ew York: John Wiley.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Flor

ida

Stat

e U

nive

rsity

] at

02:

53 1

3 N

ovem

ber

2014

Rwanda/Burundi: `Uni-ethnic’ D om inance and Arm ed Ethnic Form ations 71

Kirk-Greene, A.H.M. (1980) ``Damnosa Hereditas’ : Ethnic Ranking and the

Martial Races Imperative in Africa`, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 3 (4): 393± 414.

Kriesberg, L., T.A. N orthrup and S.J. Thorson (eds) (1989) Intractable Conflicts and

their Transform ation, Syracuse: Syracuse Univers ity Press .

Lema, A. (1993) A frica Divided: the Creation of `Ethnic G roups’, Lund Dissertations

in Sociology, Lund, Sweden: Lund University Press.

Lemarchand, R. (1970) Rw anda and Burundi, London: Pall Mall.

± (1973) Selective Genocide in Burundi, London: Minority Rights Groups.

± (1993) `Burundi in Comparative Perspective: Dimensions of Ethnic Strife`,

in J. McGarry and B. O’Leary (eds) The Politics of Ethnic Conflict Regulation,

London and New York: Routledge.

± (1994a) `Managing Transition Anarchies: Rw anda, Burundi, and South

Africa`, Journal of Modern A frican Studies, 32 (4): 581± 604.

± (1994b) Burundi: Ethnocide as D iscourse and Practice, New York and

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Maquet, J.J. (1961) The Prem ise of Inequality in Rw anda, London: Oxford

University Press.

Mazrui, A.A. (1975) Soldiers and Kinsmen: The M aking of a M ilitary Ethnocracy,

Beverly Hills and London: Sage Publications.

McGarry , J. and B. O’Leary (eds) (1993) The Politics of Ethnic Conflict Regulation,

London and New York: Routledge.

Newbury, M.C. (1988) The Cohesion of Oppression: Clientship and Ethnicity in

Rwanda (1860 ± 1960), New York: Columbia University Press.

Omaar, R. and A. de Waal (1995) `Genocide in Rw anda`, Covert Action, 52: 7 ± 10,

12± 14.

Reyntijens , F. (1993) `The Proof of the Pudding is in the Eating: the June 1993

Elections in Burundi`, Journal of M odern African Studies, 31 (4): 563± 83.

± (1995) BU RUN D I: Breaking the Cycle of Violence, London: Minority Rights

Group.

Sanders , E. (1969) `The Hamitic Hypothesis: its Origins and Functions in

Perspective`, Journal of African History, 10: 524± 26.

Tonkin, E., M. McDonald and M. Chapman (eds) (1989) History and Ethnicity ,

ASA Monograph 27, London: Routledge.

Versi, A. (1994) `Rwanda/Burundi: Anatomy of the Cris is ’ , N ew African, June

(320).

Wallerstein , I. (1960) `Ethnicity and National Integration in West Africa`, Cahiers

d’etudes africaines, 3: 129± 38.

Zolberg, A.R., A. Suhrke and S. Aguayo (1989) Escape from Violence: Conflict and

the Refugee Crisis in the D eveloping World, Oxford and New York: Oxford

University Press.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Flor

ida

Stat

e U

nive

rsity

] at

02:

53 1

3 N

ovem

ber

2014

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Flor

ida

Stat

e U

nive

rsity

] at

02:

53 1

3 N

ovem

ber

2014