In 1972, Burundi underwent a catastrophe of violence. In response to a bloody yet localized Hutu revolt in the south, the Tutsi-dominated state embarked on a vast series of reprisals across the country. Described as a ‘selective genocide’ (Lemarchand and Martin Reference Lemarchand and Martin1974), perhaps 10 per cent of the adult male Hutu population, along with many women and children, were killed by the state (Chrétien and Dupaquier Reference Chrétien and Dupaquier2007: 282). The conventional estimates range from 100,000 to 300,000 dead.
The concept of the ‘selective genocide’ is potentially oxymoronic. The restraint apparently implied by selection may invalidate the exterminative character of the crime of genocide in certain legal definitions. Alternatively, it may be simply redundant, the 1948 UN specification of genocide as the destruction of a group ‘in whole or in part’ amply covering Burundi's experience in 1972.Footnote 1 But despite these apparent contradictions, the phrase is nevertheless apposite. It denotes the systematic elimination of Hutu as a group with any independent political or economic presence or potential, achieved through the physical elimination of vast numbers of people selected both for their ethnicity and for other markers of exceptionality chosen by their murderers.
It is important to recognize that ‘selective genocide’ was not just an external perception.Footnote 2 Selection was ingrained into the procedure and behaviour of the state at this time. It was the principal means by which the population experienced and remember the slaughter. Barriers were raised to sift the population for chosen targets, and lists of names of people to be arrested, abducted and murdered were handed out to the state's agents. Prominent political leaders, including Tutsi who opposed the ruling clique, were liquidated; Hutu across the country who were able to, or learning to, read were arrested; and any who had achieved a marginal level of exceptionality in economic success or other social achievement were taken, under the same terms of categorized violence, by the army and the state that it dominated. Yet the events of the year 1972, from revolt to repression, are known in Kirundi as Ikiza, the ‘catastrophe’; the word is used elsewhere of natural disasters such as famine or plague that devastate indiscriminately, affecting the entire population (Chrétien and Dupaquier Reference Chrétien and Dupaquier2007: 9). The slaughter was genocidal in scale while being selective in method and process. This paradox is the fundamental problem through which the violence of the 1972 genocide must be understood.
How does violence that is genocidal in character and extent become realized in methods that are overtly and consciously selective? How do the selective means of violence contribute to the experience of such repressive destruction? A focus on the issue of selection requires us to approach violence not as a singular fact, an event, but as a process contingent on the means by which it is realized. Violence depends on the implements used to achieve it, and is inextricable from them (cf. Arendt Reference Arendt1970: 53). The tool employed reflects the attitude and experience of those wielding, witnessing or suffering it. In a process of destruction on the scale of genocide, the implements by which it is achieved must exceed the bullet, rifle butt and machete that physically extinguish life, and extend to broader technologies and techniques that permit or propel such colossal violence. Selection is therefore recognized here as the metonymic implement of Burundi's foundational tragedy, a dominant logic and defining process of state violence in 1972 that encompasses the means by which the state was captured, and the population trapped, divided, exterminated and reformed.
Given the general scarcity of reliable descriptions, let alone studies, of Ikiza,Footnote 3 this discussion must begin with a broad survey of the disaster. From such grounding, we may proceed to consider the implements of selective violence, the bureaucratic methods of control, surveillance and extraction. A focus on the implements may not reveal the cause of violence, but it promises to tell us much about the world that emerged from it. The study concludes with a critical assessment of this vital and problematic subject, as revealed through the much-observed behaviour of the victims and their neighbours during the crisis.
REBELLION AND REPRESSION
An atmosphere of fear and suspicion was deeply ingrained in the political class of Burundi by 1972. Following a decade of instability since independence from Belgium in 1962, the country was riven by rivalries and antagonisms.Footnote 4 A military coup had established a republic in 1966, and as the years passed it increasingly appeared to be dominated by Tutsi. Coup attempts, rumours and accusations abounded. In the midst of intricate, half-hidden struggles, an informal group of Tutsi politicians and army officers from the southern province of Bururi were particularly noted for their aggressive ambition, aspiring to the leadership of a Tutsi hegemony. Known as the ‘Groupe de Bururi’, they engaged in bitter political intrigue that was largely directed against rival Tutsi elites from different geographical and social backgrounds.Footnote 5
One of the key accusations the Groupe raised against their enemies was that they were colluding with the exiled king, Ntare V, to enact a counter-revolution and restore the monarchy. The king provoked a new crisis at the end of March 1972, when he suddenly returned to the country in peculiar circumstances and was immediately arrested, spuriously charged with leading a white mercenary army to overthrow the republic. With the government in turmoil over what to do with Ntare, several accounts suggest that it may have been warned of a credible threat of uprising in Bururi province (Lemarchand Reference Lemarchand1996: 91; Chrétien and Dupaquier Reference Chrétien and Dupaquier2007: 122–7; Bigirimana and Manirakiza Reference Bigirimana and Manirakiza2012). In the north of the country, the army began conducting exercises that modelled responses to a popular rebellion, in which citizens were urged to ‘act as intelligence agents’ for the state.Footnote 6
On 29 April, President Michel Micombero suddenly dissolved his government. The following day the uprising began, with Hutu militants striking across Bururi and systematically slaughtering Tutsi officials, along with many civilians.Footnote 7 They were reported to appear drugged and to be shouting ‘Maï Mulele’, the war cry of Pierre Mulele's 1964 rebellion in Congo (Chrétien and Dupaquier Reference Chrétien and Dupaquier2007: 84). Amid reports of simultaneous attacks in Bujumbura and, somewhat dubiously, in the central city of Gitega, where the ex-king was imprisoned, Ntare V was executed. Micombero declared martial law and assigned military governors to ‘support’ their civilian counterparts in every province.
The Groupe de Bururi appeared to take the opportunity to expand their power. One of their principal figures, the minister both of justice and of the interior, Albert Shibura, narrowly escaped the slaughter in Bururi by shooting his way through a rebel roadblock (Bigirimana and Manirakiza Reference Bigirimana and Manirakiza2012).Footnote 8 Another, Foreign Minister Arthémon Simbananiye, seemed to assume de facto control alongside Micombero at the dissolution of the government. A figure of lasting hatred, he became identified as ‘the damned soul of the president’ (Aupens Reference Aupens1972: 10) in the ensuing cataclysm.Footnote 9
The army swept into Bururi in a bloody ‘re-conquest’ of the south. At the same time, prominent Hutu individuals in Bujumbura and Gitega were arrested and disappeared, in what became the start of a quasi-judiciary purge of Hutu from government, the army and the schools. In some areas, Tutsi who were troublesome to the interests of the Groupe were similarly taken (Chrétien and Dupaquier Reference Chrétien and Dupaquier2007: 158–9). After a week of fighting in the south and eliminations in the cities, on 8 May Micombero announced on the radio that the rebels had been defeated, but simultaneously urged the population on to ‘new victories’. In the ensuing days and weeks, the ‘repression’ spread out across the country. Individuals in the hills were summoned or arrested just as the urban elite had been, and were killed in the lorries, prisons or courtrooms to which they were taken by the score. At the end of the month, Micombero declared that the repression was nearly complete, and a new government was formed in mid-July under Prime Minister Albin Nyamoya. Arthémon Simbananiye remained as foreign minister alongside several supposed ‘moderates’ who might ease a return to normality and reconstruction (Manirakiza Reference Manirakiza1992: 141–4; Chrétien and Dupaquier Reference Chrétien and Dupaquier2007: 282–8). Nevertheless, the killings and purges continued in the rural milieu for several months. For years to come, the country continued to live in terror, punctuated by the occasional outbreak of state violence, until Micombero himself was overthrown in a peaceful palace coup in 1976.
The state ‘repression’ in 1972 thus varied widely in style and intensity across the country. The army's invasion of the southern province of Bururi contrasted with elite purges in the cities, and patchy rural destruction elsewhere. This discussion focuses on the most remarkable case within the latter category, in the central northern province of Ngozi. Along with Bururi, Gitega and Bujumbura, Ngozi experienced some of the most extensive bloodshed at the time. The province was characterized by a dense population, a low proportion of Tutsi,Footnote 10 a busy town hosting an elite school and an army barracks, and proximity to the ‘Hutu’ republic in Rwanda. At the outbreak of violence, Military Governor Commandant Bizoza Joseph assumed control of the region, ‘a man of simplistic and blundering determination, but not without efficacy’, noted as one of the most ‘zealous, reckless or wicked’ of all the military governors of the crisis (Chrétien and Dupaquier Reference Chrétien and Dupaquier2007: 238, 292). Originally from Bururi, he is remembered in Ngozi today for his viperously hostile attitude to the territory entrusted to him. Believing that there were no Tutsi in his province, he is said to have declared: ‘If there was no coffee in Ngozi, we would just bomb it’ (Hakizimana et al. Reference Hakizimana, Nkurunziza and Mbazumutima2012). In the hills of the borderland, the killings and purges most often associated with the context of the urban elite were conducted with full force.
The experience of Ngozi was representative of a pattern of rural violence that stood in marked contrast to the initial destruction in Bururi province, a pattern that demands exploration in the face of the better-known exception. In the mythico-history of refugees in Tanzania, largely driven out before the brutal re-conquest of the south, tales were told of unspeakable, open brutality (Malkki Reference Malkki1995). But in the north, scattered witness accounts of physical violence – when soldiers beat prisoners with rifle butts, for exampleFootnote 11 – are dwarfed by the continuously repeated trope of calm arrest and disappearance. ‘That was the last time I saw him,’ says almost every survivor in the north at some point in their memories, recalling loved ones and acquaintances last seen alive and unharmed as they were taken away in trucks. But if the consummation of violence was committed by the soldiers and police behind the closed doors of lorries, courts and prisons, the initiation of it occurred far closer to home within the community.
While far distant from the extent of the Rwandan genocide of 1994, Burundi in 1972 also had its ‘popular’ aspect. Central to the process of violence was the ambiguous position of a large section of the nation's youth. It was the community youth, members of the Jeunesse révolutionnaire Rwagasore (JRR), the youth league of the state Unité et progrès national (Uprona) party, who largely carried out many of the arrests (cf. Howe Reference Howe1972; Lemarchand Reference Lemarchand1996: 96–9; Chrétien and Dupaquier Reference Chrétien and Dupaquier2007: 297–303). The JRR's proud efficiency, intense nationalism and military obedience allowed it to be swiftly captured by the leaders of the repression, and the Jeunesse became the face by which the state was known in the hills. The youth were the indarangavye, those who stayed alert through the night, and their slogan, ‘Vigilance’, became the watchword of oppression.
The JRR, however, also represented one of the crucial ambiguities of ‘perpetrator’ and ‘victim’ in the course of the violence. The role of youth organizations as the ‘catalysts of genocide’ (Kuper Reference Kuper1981: 119) is a widely recognized phenomenon, but the JRR of 1972 was far from being a monolithic genocidal force. Among its leadership there were possible signs of dissenting voices, as attempts to speak against the crimes and manipulation of the youth were lost in high-level feuds and intimidation.Footnote 12 But, most fundamentally, the JRR demonstrated the political complexity of ethnicity in Burundi at this time. While the state as a whole had tended towards Tutsi hegemony since 1966, the rank and file of the JRR in the hills still numbered many Hutu youth, perhaps even a Hutu majority (Chrétien and Dupaquier Reference Chrétien and Dupaquier2007: 253; Nsanze Reference Nsanze2003: 223; Mbazumutima Reference Mbazumutima2012).
Despite the palpable fears that Burundi would follow Rwanda on the path to Hutu supremacy, a mass, corporate identity of a Hutu community was not a strong phenomenon before 1972. It appeared fitfully. Crises in 1965 and 1969 indicated the polarization of the political class, and each had its echo in localized, ‘popular’ ethnic violence (Lemarchand Reference Lemarchand1970: 416–22; Mariro Reference Mariro2005; Chrétien and Dupaquier Reference Chrétien and Dupaquier2007: 39–50). The 1972 Bururi uprising above all demonstrated the existence of violent, Hutu-supremacist politics among the rural population. But these deeply significant and disastrous events must not be generalized without caution. In Ngozi Province, despite continuous suspicion of political infiltration from Rwanda, extreme political tension had not distilled into ethnic polarization on a substantial scale. It is difficult to provide succinct evidence of the absence of a corporate identity, and so this must simply stand as an initial premise: the lack of a communal consciousness among rural Hutu would more clearly be demonstrated in its transformation through the processes of violence. In the tense, yet largely peaceful, early years of the republic, Hutu served in the JRR with enthusiasm and pride. The growing hegemony of the Bururi-based Tutsi officers and the ethnic politics of some of their elite Hutu and Tutsi enemies were not matched by a political ethnic consciousness among the general population. When the state came with lists of victims, it took time before the community recognized that the first criterion for selection was ethnicity, and that the state constituted the Hutu as a singular community under threat of genocide.
MEANS OF SELECTION AND CONTROL
The barrier: obedience and complicity
When news of the violence in the south spread to the rest of the country, the Bururi uprising was met with consternation, and the threat of rebellion elicited a patriotic duty of national defence. The government demanded ‘vigilance’ – the popular political slogan of the JRR – from all agents of the administration and from the population at large. ‘It is useless to remind you that the vigilance must be rigorous,’ declared a Commissaire d'arrondissement in Ngozi Province as he transmitted the orders for a general mobilization.Footnote 13
You ought to choose confirmed militants, in order to avoid possible abuses. The chefs de zone, the communal councillors, the bashingantahe [communal elders or notables; singular: mushingantahe], even those responsible for ten homes ought to participate actively in the vigilance. You must detect and denounce in time anyone who may attempt, in actions or in words, to disturb public order.
The repression began with the exertion of a generalized, dehumanized threat. Invoking the Congolese slogan chanted by the Bururi rebels, soldiers spread fear of ubukoko bwa Mulele (‘Mulelist beasts’), and, as a result, ‘people ended up identifying the rebels as a new species [espèce, ubukoko] of animal’ (Nsanze Reference Nsanze2003: 224). The threat of invasion from an animalized enemy proved a powerful motivator of solidarity in violence, as it would decades later in Rwanda (cf. Straus Reference Straus2008: 155–60). From 1 May, immediately after the initial uprising and the murder of Ntare V, the community youth were called out to man barricades, establishing a tight net of roadblocks and inspections across the country. The youth answered the call to protect their nation and their community, and became agents of the state.
Soon enough, however, it became clear that the barrier was not merely a method of security, but an implement of violence in a conflict that was far different from the initial emergency of national defence. The youth manning the barricades in the north found themselves confronted with a worrying stream of people escaping from the south. ‘It didn't start around here,’ explains Ndayizeye Pascal, who recalled the arrival of the southerners at the barriers of Mparamirundi, above the main border post of Kanyaru-haut. ‘It started in Bujumbura. The people who had been at school, who were educated, they were fleeing, going to Rwanda. When they reached Mparamirundi as they were fleeing, the community around them asked, “Where are you going?” They answered: “We are fleeing being killed by Micombero.”’Footnote 14 But still they were taken, handed over to the communal administrator Senkwavu Stanislas, and from there to the provincial authorities in Ngozi. The northern communes first experienced the state violence of 1972 as a barrier against the flight of their compatriots, and the local JRR was there to stop them.
In the account of Ndikumana, a JRR leader in the borderland scarcely twenty years old at the time, the manning of the barricades was explained with defensive candour:
The leader asked all the population to be vigilant, to prevent others from fleeing to Rwanda. But they didn't know, even though they were asking them to be vigilant they obeyed the law, they went and were standing at the [barriers], preventing those who were trying to flee to Rwanda, preventing them from crossing the [Kanyaru] river, but they didn't know that they were blocking their brothers. They didn't know what they were doing.Footnote 15
Barriers and roadblocks were thus the central tool of the instant repression, a method of deploying and managing violence that held the key to the control of the nation. As a tool of order as much as a means of violence, the barriers were functions of state logic. The JRR foot soldiers were meant to be deployed in every commune under the leadership of a mushingantahe, overseen by communal administrators, and carefully, bureaucratically managed. Central government required lists of names of the members of each band, their rota on the barriers, and their leadership to be submitted up the hierarchy. Passing cars were to be stopped, inspected and recorded on a form provided, detailing the car's registration number and the driver's name, nationality, route and laissez-passer details.Footnote 16 The barrier permitted the state to filter the population, sorting through it and imposing its authority on the bodies of those who sought to pass, whether or not they were taken away to be executed. Rather than being simply a means of deploying thugs, the barrier was a method of violence that exerted an image of absolute control and inescapable authority.
There is absurdity in this overt exertion of bureaucratic control. Many JRR cadres were illiterate, unable to read the pieces of paper that represented their higher authority. Dupaquier records a powerfully illustrative account of his own experience when stopped by JRR members near Bujumbura, only to see them reading his documentation upside down; the accompanying cases of beer further undermined the performance of regularity (Chrétien and Dupaquier Reference Chrétien and Dupaquier2007: 251; cf. Ntibantunganya Reference Ntibantunganya1999: 112). In practice, the bureaucratic façade of the barrier could quickly degenerate into parody. Yet its literate pretensions functioned as blunt reflections of an attitude of regulation and specification, signal traits of a recent colonial past, that would dominate both the pursuit and experience of violence. Even in its practical vacuity, such a theatre of control was a necessary aspect of the repression, and was targeted at its agents as much as its victims. A symbolic and expressive power of literate authority stood as a tool of coercion for the JRR members themselves. They could self-consciously defer their responsibility and free will in the face of such symbols of order and higher authority, while the symbols themselves could act as a node of attraction for youth who aspired to the self-evident power of the literate state.
The state character of the controlled violence was therefore fundamental to the methods employed, and the processes of selection were substantially constructive of this character rather than simply being a consequence of it. In previous years the JRR could stand on the ambiguous edge of state and society, as both a popular organization indulging in sporting, cultural and social activities to entertain and absorb the youth, and an arm of the single-party state. Its creed of ‘vigilance’ entailed the surveillance of deviance and orthodoxy both among the community and among state representatives; at times their actions exerted power over the people, at times they protected them from the abuse of officials.Footnote 17 Their recruitment to the barriers in 1972 ended this ambiguity. Endowed with the paraphernalia of bureaucratic regulations, carrying out the enforcement and arrests of the state-declared emergency, the youth confirmed their status within the state. Mass control belonged to the state, and through the barrier the selective process of individual isolation and removal was applied to identify the deviant enemy within society. The method denoted the meaning of restrained, repressive violence.
The exceptionality of the genocidal scale of destruction in 1972 was dramatic, but its tools were anything but exceptional. Barricades had been, and are still, basic apparatus of state control. They were the familiar face of the state's practice of quotidian power, inspecting tax payments and identity documents in times of peace. The JRR often carried out road checks in less urgent times. But the barriers were also familiar as the first step in both the initiation and the repression of violence. Even the Hutu rebellion in Bururi had erected barriers in the street to process violence against Tutsi victims (Chrétien and Dupaquier Reference Chrétien and Dupaquier2007: 86–7; Bigirimana and Manirakiza Reference Bigirimana and Manirakiza2012). The roadblock had a notable history across ten years of political disturbance, as nationalist rebels at the end of Belgian rule had thrown up roadblocks in the north in 1961 to prevent their political rivals from travelling to colonial centres, and to sort through the population and test them for political loyalty to Uprona, the party of independence; those who failed the test were beaten to correct their political sentiment, a largely non-lethal violence they described as uguhanura, ‘advice’ (Russell Reference Russell2013: 87–147; cf. Deslaurier Reference Deslaurier2002: 1021–31).Footnote 18 These anti-colonial rebels had adopted the monitoring strategies of the colonial administration, and when Belgian forces came to restore colonial order they too responded with their own systematic road checks, weeding out rebels from the general population.
But while the barrier was a familiar trope of power and order – and occasionally of violence – it was in combination with another, subtler, motif of selection that it became most disturbing. Rather than just randomly attacking people at roadblocks, the nationalist rebels in 1961 were accused by their enemies of working their way down pre-prepared lists of prominent targets to be assaulted at home or in the street, an allegation that caused more alarm when some of these targets were killed in the uguhanura assaults. More than the roadblock, it was this list that emerged as a recurrent public image of fear. In the Rwandan civil war of 1959–62, there were suggestions of ‘popular meetings’ compiling lists of appropriate targets (Hubert Reference Hubert1965: 17), and the same rumour re-emerged during Burundi's first ethnic crisis of 1965 (Lemarchand Reference Lemarchand1970: 417). Throughout the 1960s, anonymous political tracts gained notoriety and power by specifying the names of demonized local authorities who could expect bloody reprisals in forecast revolutions.Footnote 19 Whispers of fear and accusations of conspiracy revolved around the idea of the urukaratasi rwo gupfa, the death list assembled by one's enemies.Footnote 20 When, in 1972, the state turned to the methods and motifs of selection on an extraordinary scale of destruction, it did so on the basis of years of cultural and communal consciousness of the categorizing, terrorizing potential of such lists. The quotidian barricade became simply an initial conduit for a far more insidious and powerful implement of selection and political terror.
The list: cataloguing and categorizing
Beyond the barricades, the powerful yet empty theatre of literacy at the point of control was backed by a state system that continued to rely on its existing technology of rule and record. Far from the anonymity with which the genocide is largely remembered outside the country, the process of violence was one defined by the names of its victims. Through names and lists, the fundamentally bureaucratic method of selective violence was realized to its fullest extent.
The list was at first implied by the process of individual specification and removal that remains the abiding memory of Ikiza. ‘The way they killed them was strange,’ recalled an elderly man near the border. ‘They selected people; they would go to meet certain people where they stayed, bring them to the commune … That was the last time they were seen.’Footnote 21 Indeed, the violence began in the hills as it had in the cities, when long-festering tensions were cauterized through individual eliminations. Local ‘elites’ consisted of minor figures such as an ex-politician named Ntahorwamiye Joseph, tainted by a one-time association with Hutu politics,Footnote 22 or a pastor named Nyakamwe Ezikiya, whose links to churches in Rwanda had always been thought suspicious;Footnote 23 a knock on the door and they were taken away. Old enemies already in prison were swiftly liquidated.Footnote 24
Yet the process of personal selection soon expanded beyond such notable victims. The monthly administrative meetings of communal and provincial authorities began to include the processing of intelligence on a wide range of individuals. The administrators’ councils had always been dominated by la situation politique, and now, alongside banal discussions of agricultural yields, their minutes featured lists of people who fell under suspicion of rebellion. An intercepted letter from a student in France, wishing his family courage through the imidugararo (the ‘terrors’ or ‘rebellions’), was considered proof of treasonous politics.Footnote 25 Elsewhere, those found grieving in public for their arrested loved ones were themselves marked as suspicious.Footnote 26 The administrative surveillance even reached inside the state. One official telegraphist was named for having once appeared in the company of a prisoner who had later escaped from Ngozi prison.Footnote 27 Shortly afterwards, the Commissaire of Ngozi who recorded this incrimination was himself killed under orders from Military Governor Bizoza, one of six Tutsi officials in Ngozi Province who became the object of the commandant's hatred (Chrétien and Dupaquier Reference Chrétien and Dupaquier2007: 158).Footnote 28 Soon enough, even the civilian governor, Antoine Gahiro, was in such personal danger from Bizoza that he fled the country (Chrétien and Dupaquier Reference Chrétien and Dupaquier2007: 258). The process of selection, far from communicating a restrained application of violence, built up its own terrorizing momentum.
These individual eliminations were the precursor to a much larger scale of elimination, through the classification of broad swathes of society. Uppermost in this system of categorization, both in terms of popular memory and in the surviving state documentation of the purges, were the educated. ‘Whoever had ideas, whoever had been to school,’ mused one man, whose son fled to South Africa and has never returned.Footnote 29 ‘Everywhere, everywhere … they took those who had studied. Doctors, teachers, even the batware [chiefs or leaders], they even killed them … Benshi, benshi, benshi,’ he sighed, as family and neighbours listened attentively. ‘Many, many, many.’ The old JRR leader Ndikumana recounted the process starkly:
They selected among the population those who were educated, mainly the teachers in the primary schools, every person who had been educated at that time they would come and take them from their family, from their schools where they were teaching, they would tie them and bring them to the commune station and jail them. That was being done during the day. During the night a car would come and pack them, saying that they were taking them to [the provincial offices], that there is some information that they were going to be asked, that they would come back. But that was our last sight of them. That is why they selected them. Those ones who were selected, they were the Hutu.Footnote 30
The most prominent attack on the education system in the north occurred when the army entered the elite Don Bosco College in Ngozi town on 16 May 1972, and two days later began an abnormal process of controlled triage. The students were arrested en masse and sorted by ethnicity in the prisons, before the Tutsi alone were released. This approach was unique, Chrétien and Dupaquier (Reference Chrétien and Dupaquier2007: 238) considering it to be a possible indication of the comparative lack of intelligence that Governor Bizoza could muster on his region, and it stood in contrast to the approach taken in the rest of his territory. In the rural north, with secondary schools few and far between, it was the targeting of primary school teachers that brought the violence most profoundly into the community in the hills, and this proceeded with all the incisive specificity of the elite purges of Bujumbura and elsewhere. Hutu teachers were arrested in class, and disappeared. The purges moved progressively through the countryside, and left a bureaucratic trail; at the request of Bizoza, one commune reviewed the trajectory of its own teachers’ ‘date of imprisonment or desertion’, cataloguing the loss of twenty teachers from four schools during two weeks at the end of May.Footnote 31 The governor subsequently gave the order that replacements, where they were provided at all, would be appointed on the basis of ‘patriotic militancy’.Footnote 32 Schools that could no longer boast a full complement of staff were closed entirely.Footnote 33
The selection of teachers made children the primary witnesses of the genocide. The penetration of state officials into the schools underscored the targeted selection process, and from the schools the stories of fear spread out to the community; the children ran home through the fields with the news that their teachers had been summoned by name from the classrooms.Footnote 34 Ndabahariye Bernadette, who was in her fourth year of primary education at the time, recalled how she was in class when the police came to take away many of the teachers to the commune offices.Footnote 35 ‘The administrator needs to talk to them,’ the police said, but many never returned. Ndabahariye's uncle, a teacher himself, was taken from his home, but the peculiar muted savagery of the time was demonstrated when he was permitted to fetch a child from his niece's home to look after his wife while he was gone. The next day, finding him absent from school, Ndabahariye and her sister spent the day in tears. The remaining teachers advised them to keep quiet, and brought them to the commune offices to visit their uncle after school. There they met an army truck loaded with prisoners, their uncle among them; that was their last sight of him.
Throughout these targeted arrests, the state repression functioned through the mechanism of the physical list: indicted names written on a piece of paper. It was an expressive symbolic object as well as a practical method of order, an implement of force in itself. To helpless onlookers, pieces of paper carrying lists of names were the self-sufficient explanation for the scores of people forced to mount the trucks that would take them away to be killed.Footnote 36 To the JRR agent, called upon to enact ‘vigilance’ and obey the state, they were the mark of distant and unapproachable authority. It was the horror of the list that one such JRR leader invoked in order to narrate his realization of the process in which he was implicated, holding out his hand as if to clutch the papers on which were written lists of names – written, as he described them, in red ink. ‘It indicated those who were going to die,’ he said, but he would not kill them; they were taken away, as all unequivocally agree, to Ngozi, to Bujumbura, to the offices of state, hands bound before them.Footnote 37 Indeed, the deferment of agency in response to the list is reported to extend even to Governor Bizoza himself. One survivor account described the commandant confronted with too many prisoners to transport at once; folding the list in half, he read out the names of those to be taken first, before the truck returned to take the remainder. The survivor's name was overlooked in the fold, as if he had departed in the first load. When he was not called upon to board the truck, he was released (Chrétien and Dupaquier Reference Chrétien and Dupaquier2007: 239). The list, once written, took on a reified aura of higher direction, of invisible responsibility, of the controlled and sanitized authority of legal and bureaucratic violence.
Bureaucratic oversight and list making were so fundamental to the method of violence that they were invoked even in cases of transparent greed and opportunism. This was most palpable as the selection moved beyond the educated to strike against businessmen, market sellers, and anyone whose lifestyle betrayed a certain level of economic success. Ndabahariye, who saw her uncle taken away for being simultaneously Hutu and a teacher, reflected that state violence became more and more appreciably venal as it moved away from the schools; state agents would target those with a nice house or a bit of comfort, and would ask where the owner got their money for it.Footnote 38 And even these opportunistic actions could be expressed by means of the list. ‘Micombero looked for a pretext to kill people,’ described an old man on the border. ‘They would accuse a person that Ntare V has sent money to him. They said, “You have got money from Ntare V. So we have a list, a list of names, of those who are receiving money from Ntare. They must be killed.”’Footnote 39 Such accusations of treason were notoriously commonplace (cf. Nyandwi 1972; Hicuburundi 1972). But the dominating, bureaucratic authority of the list and the written word remained fundamental to the realization of violence, even if only as an improvised pretext for greed and murder.
The rationality of genocide varied over the months of bloodshed, from a civil war environment responding to armed uprising, to the elimination of known rivals, the cynical decapitation of the educated Hutu population, and the acquisitive ambitions of individuals, with an abundance of personal and private motivations blossoming in between. But at each step, in each incarnation of violence and oppression, the genocide of 1972 remained defined in the rural north by its exertion of controlled selection, a non-technological genocide managed by the simpler technology of rule, and incarnated in the listed names of its victims.
THE EXPERIENCE OF BEING KNOWN
The passivity of the victims who allowed themselves to be arrested without resistance, or who delivered themselves to summons that were, to say the least, disturbing, constitutes for the European observers a source of incomprehension, just as the repression expanded without apparently encountering resistance from the subaltern levels of the administration, in businesses, and even in the countryside. (Chrétien and Dupaquier Reference Chrétien and Dupaquier2007: 188)
The behaviour of those selected by the state has long been considered perplexing. ‘Leadership elements have been slaughtered,’ reported a US embassy cable that was published in the New York Times; ‘the rest are docile and obedient’ (Welles Reference Welles1972). This recurring trope of docility has been much repeated since, illustrating the ‘apparent placidity’ (Lemarchand Reference Lemarchand1996: 97) of cooperative Hutu, reproduced after the violence by ‘the attitude of resigned acquiescence in the face of discrimination’ (Greenland Reference Greenland1973: 449). The trope even passes on occasion into ‘feudalist’ conceptions of cultural submission: ‘such was the docility of people who had long thought of themselves as obedient serfs that most obeyed unquestioningly’, according to one retrospective summary (Krueger and Krueger Reference Krueger and Krueger2007: 115), while Chrétien and Dupaquier, in their far more robust handling of this issue, refer to Abbé Michel Kayoya's thoughts on ‘the tradition of blind submission to authority’ among other interpretations (Reference Chrétien and Dupaquier2007: 188).Footnote 40 Sylvestre Ntibantunganya, who later became president of Burundi (1994–96), agrees unequivocally, having heard how his own father responded to the order of ‘vigilance’ (Ntibantunganya Reference Ntibantunganya1999: 113). This trope of genocide narrative emerges with some prominence in the accounts of Hutu who escaped the violence, imagining themselves as having escaped the psychosis of obedience through the purity of exile (Malkki Reference Malkki1995: 99–100, et passim). It is a theme of such universality in accounts of the selective genocide that its basis in reality – the frequent obedience of individuals to the murderous state – can hardly be doubted. Expressions of astonishment at such a meek response, however, demand a critical attitude.
There is nothing alien or incomprehensible, nothing demanding explanation through a myth of ingrained psychology, in the obedience to oppressive power witnessed in those who did not attempt open resistance to their killers. Primo Levi observed that ‘the harsher the oppression, the more widespread among the oppressed is the willingness to collaborate with the power’ (Levi Reference Levi1988: 28). This is true both for those agents of violence who took part in the raids and arrests out of fear for their own lives, and for those subject to the raids themselves, the victims of violence. ‘Why flee? I prefer to die with my parents on my hill,’ expressed a young Hutu according to one second-hand account (Chrétien and Dupaquier Reference Chrétien and Dupaquier2007: 191).Footnote 41 ‘When I hear the soldiers come, I will lie down on the ground, face to the soil. In that way, I will not see when they are going to kill me.’ The prospect of a little more peace, a little more life, if the orders are only obeyed, is a powerful force that needs no culturalist hypothesis of mass-ingrained, feudal submission to explain. It is necessary to make the distinction between the desire to resist or escape, the power to resist or escape, and the belief that one has that power; for those who answered summons to attend ‘meetings’ that inevitably led to their death, the latter at least is questionable. Certainly, there was the opportunity to ignore the summons, to flee to the border, and unknown numbers took this opportunity.Footnote 42 What is less apparent is that this should appear as a viable solution to the majority, when the summons came in the garb of a state order violently pinning down society, curbing movement and displaying the state's ability to know, categorize and sort the population individually.
The docile response to state violence was as much a response to the methods by which it was achieved as it was a reaction to the bloodshed itself. The overbearing exertion of knowledge and power, closing down the options of flight and defiance long before the victim was taken, was conducted through the means of selection and control. The ability of the state to amass the intelligence required to assemble its lists of names was a terrorizing force. Even in the absence of a genuine civil war, the repression of 1972 demonstrated Kalyvas's theory of selective violence as a ‘joint process’ (Reference Kalyvas2006: 173–209), depending upon the hidden role of informants within the community. Individuals came to the communal administrators to whisper of planned ‘uprisings’, eliciting swift repression from the ‘forces of order’ in response.Footnote 43 ‘Because he was afraid,’ recounted one refugee at the time, ‘your brother farmer would give you up, and in the night they killed you’ (Nyandwi 1972). Collaboration through fear, fanaticism or opportunism extended beyond the members of the JRR, and the selective process of arrest and elimination intimated the state's unknown reaches of intelligence and power.
Above all, bureaucratic procedure constructed an inexorable atmosphere of impotence around the implements of the barricade and the list. Such invisible strength was the root of power. The agent of the JRR, police or army, likely unable to read the names on the list in his hand, might be known personally to the victim as a neighbour or acquaintance, or he might be visibly weak, one man controlling twenty prisoners. Yet behind him lay a machine of state in command of the technologies of literacy and knowledge that the agents at its disposal lacked. There was a literate state and an illiterate state, interlocked. The literate state, the core of authority that considered its enemies and produced the lists, was largely unseen, while the illiterate state, populated by informants and members of the JRR recruited or captured by a higher authority, had its power in the community increased even as they themselves felt their own freedom to act according to their conscience curtailed by the illegible papers that commanded their actions.
Bureaucracy communicated the state claim to legitimate violence, the procedural invocation of a motif of law that ran through the entire catastrophe of repression.Footnote 44 ‘To transcend itself, to transform itself into sovereign authority,’ consider Comaroff and Comaroff, ‘power demands at the very least a minimal architecture of legalities,’ or at least their ‘simulacra’ (Reference Comaroff, Comaroff, Comaroff and Comaroff2006: 35). The lists of names, simulacra of legal indictments, specified not just enemies but traitors, bamenja (see, for example, Chrétien and Dupaquier Reference Chrétien and Dupaquier2007: 191); it was genocide as policing, not just the dehumanization but the criminalization of the victims. The law courts in Ngozi town acted as a processing centre for much of the northern half of the country.Footnote 45 One notorious mass grave in the north is said to lie near the provincial Tribunal de Grande Instance (Hakizimana et al. Reference Hakizimana, Nkurunziza and Mbazumutima2012: 15). Through the universal projection of the rationality of selection, the process of violence was both sanitized and amplified to extraordinary levels of control. It disarmed dissent in its initial phases, when emergency and a fear of anarchy encouraged a widespread desire for order; it constrained dissent in its latter phases, when the only way out seemed already to have been closed. The order of genocidal violence in 1972 was an unprecedented, previously unimaginable, exertion of state power and destruction, ‘an unheard-of mechanization … of the process of extermination’ that inspired ‘paralysis’ (Chrétien and Dupaquier Reference Chrétien and Dupaquier2007: 189). This was conjured not only by the man standing before a prisoner with a gun, but by the system he represented, the pervasive mechanisms of state that had composed the lists, that controlled movement across the country, that entered deep into society. It is legitimate to question the extent to which this state control was a matter of reality or illusion; in the experience of those in the hills, however, this question could barely arise.
The experience of the methods of violence in 1972 was the experience of being known. Such dominant force – the root of totalitarian control – prompts the auto-surveillance of a population fearful of the state's apparently limitless capacities to know and categorize them one by one. The practical system of triage that lay at the heart of the repression ensured that the whole population was subjected to the methods of control and felt their effects. The genocide was thus coercive violence as much as it was exterminative. As Kalyvas remarks, a simple test to differentiate the two forms of violence is to ask if the violent actor intends to govern those it targets (Reference Kalyvas2006: 26). Given the considerable majority of Hutu in the country, there was no choice in the matter for even the most strident Tutsi-supremacist in government. Society was defined by opposition to the names included on the lists, but it was itself subdivided into ruler and ruled. Those categorized as criminals were the direct victims, to be exterminated; the targets of the violence were those who remained, coerced to obedience and conformity in the new order of things.
Survivors and analysts thus talk of the state violence in 1972 as a ‘repressive machine’ (NB 2012; Chrétien and Dupaquier Reference Chrétien and Dupaquier2007: 161, 164, ‘killing machine’: 202), flattening society into meekness and fearful obedience, but its structural aspect must be recognized. In the agonizingly managerial procedure of violence deployed by the state, the ‘law-making’ function of such violence is recognizable, an ordering yet ‘pernicious’ force of subjugation (Benjamin Reference Benjamin and Benjamin1978: 300). The barriers and lists were implements of violence that stated and created desired order in the hills. They proceeded through bureaucratic categorization, and in so doing established the categories and systems on which the country would subsequently function, a new society in a new terror of power. In their personal experience of being sorted, subjected to the oppressive categorization of an aggressive and dominating state, Hutu and Tutsi were shaped into the conscious communities that previously had been largely limited in political reality.
Leo Kuper classified Burundi in 1972 as an example of a genocide ‘in which the victims [had] some (significant) capacity to resist, or in which, objectively considered, the victims constitute[d] a serious threat’ (Reference Kuper1981: 103). But to maintain such a reading it is necessary to elide the distinction between the individual faced with such state violence and the potential of an imagined community that, as yet, many had not themselves imagined. Chrétien and Dupaquier (Reference Chrétien and Dupaquier2007: 191) note that the vast majority of refugees were driven before the army's re-conquest of Bururi; the comparatively few Hutu to flee elsewhere stand in contrast to the mass exodus of many Tutsi, as a self-conscious political entity, at the end of the Rwandan civil war in 1961. Beyond a select group of politicians and militants, the Hutu ethnicity had not constituted a corporate community for the majority of its members in the hills. Each victim met the violence of state alone.
This isolation substantially shaped the docility of victims in 1972, but in the wake of violence it equally inspired a new imagination among the targets who remained. ‘Those ones who were selected, they were the Hutu’;Footnote 46 the categories of selection inspired their own political saliency in society at large. A man named Ntiruvakure Sévérin chose to explain this inextricable connection between the selective methods of violence and the emergence of a shared, oppressed Hutu identity through a parable.Footnote 47 President Micombero had once come to the northern community of Mparamirundi before the unfolding of Ikiza, Ntiruvakure described. The president asked if anyone there could break a bushel of sticks bound together. ‘Of course not,’ the people replied. ‘We cannot break them because they are many.’ Micombero conceded, ‘That is true,’ and told them that to deal with so many sticks, it was necessary to remove one and break it, one at a time, until it was over. ‘That was his strategy,’ said Ntiruvakure. The people did not know what it meant until they saw their most exceptional Hutu neighbours taken and broken.Footnote 48 Another man on the border, who had previously spoken of being persecuted during trips to Rwanda in the mid-1960s, recalled the flight to refuge in 1972 as a moment of revelation. For those like himself who fled, ‘They were well received there because the government, the bourgmestre, was Hutu. So they were well received because they were Hutu who were fleeing to Rwanda. They perceived that they were brothers.’Footnote 49 The Rwandan government had indeed long held to this perception, but only now did it begin to be reciprocated on a massive scale. The population of Burundi was subjected to the triage and categorizing methods of state-driven, ethnically defined, selective violence, and the new order constructed by these methods of coercion and extermination far outlived the regime that put them into such devastating practice.
CONCLUSION
‘Violence can first be sought only in the realm of means, not of ends’ (Benjamin Reference Benjamin and Benjamin1978: 277). As such, the means of violence in turn become an object in the search for comprehension. It may appear a simple thing, but its significance and consequence for all caught up in violence has the potential to be considerable. In the tragedy of Burundi in 1972, the tool of selective violence destroyed the victim, but it also shaped the perpetrator, witness, survivor, and those whose actions encompassed all three roles, devastating and transforming a world that was partly constructed out of the bureaucratic and selective processes of authority and power. The implement of order-making violence reveals the order it creates.
In 1972, the process of selection was preparatory to the taking of life. The basic tools of barriers and bureaucratic paper were not weapons, and did not shed blood. Yet they stood as implements of violence inasmuch as they were the methods by which colossal, systematized destruction was realized. The symbolic passage à l'acte of the meta-process of violence occurred in the application of these implements; the barrier and the list formed the link between the specification of a victim and his execution. When death was dealt out of sight on such an enormous scale, the means by which the victims were extracted from society were the means by which violence was done to the entire population. The state presented itself in its methods of categorizing, isolating, exterminating and terrorizing, pursuing control in the violent construction of a new, oppressive order. And it is through these means that the population, of all ethnicities and in all positions of society, learned to reconsider their relationships with each other and with the state. The catastrophe of 1972 was defined by its strained association of selection and destruction, of limitation in practice and totalization in effect. Its consequences were rooted in the methods of violence as much as in the calamitous experience of violence itself.
