Omar Valdimarsson in Nyanza Lac, Makamba province, Burundi
It’s happening slowly but surely. The Burundians who fled the civil war in their country after 1993 are coming back. Of the nearly half a million who fled to Tanzania, more than half have returned to a country largely at peace for the first time in over a decade.
Until recently, there was still sporadic armed violence in the hills around the capital of Bujumbura, allegedly perpetrated by the one remaining rebel group which has not signed on to the peace agreement of 2004, but earlier this month the final signatories were put on the page.
Since early 2002, nearly 300 thousand refugees have come back under the auspices of the UNHCR (the UN’s refugee agency), nearly 70 thousand of them in 2005, following the peace agreement in Burundi and elections held then. The return has been much slower this year – only 3,200 until 7 May.
UNHCR officials and other knowledgeable people in Burundi do not venture firm opinions on why the repatriation has slowed to a trickle – but the conventional wisdom seems to be that an influx can be expected in July-September, after schools in the camps are out and the refugees’ meager crops have been harvested.
Watching as two groups came across the border last week, it was striking that most of the returnees were young people who had left with their parents during the war and were now coming back with their own children and husbands. For the most part, they have grown up in the refugee camps in Tanzania and are now eager to come home and live in peace.
But as they left with nothing, they come back with nearly nothing. Esta Kambura is 20 and has little memory of life in Burundi. She’s now back with her two young children, 3-year-old Violette and 9-month-old Loy, rejoining her husband Elias Nyandwi, 24, who came across a month earlier to find them a place to live.
While Esta and Elias are fortunate in the sense that they’re being welcomed back to his village (where nearly everyone else is also a returnee), they’re almost a perfect fit for the group identified by the Burundi Red Cross and the International Federation as among the most vulnerable. And although Esta is illiterate (Elias can read), she has about her an air of determination and smarts that will undoubtedly help her get resettled.
It’s not going to be easy. “It takes most of us up to two years to feel at ease again,” said a village leader among those who welcomed the young family back into the community, having himself returned a few years back. “It takes time to build the house, to plant and to harvest and to come back to the life we had before.”
It’s a close-knit community in Nyanza Lac on the shores of Lake Tanganyika in Burundi’s southernmost corner. The villagers are fervent Pentecostalists, accustomed to helping each other out. It has become tradition in the community to prepare traditional food for the returnees – to help them go back to meat and cassava and bananas instead of the maize and beans they were given in the refugee camps. “Real Burundi food,” said the village leader as the others murmured their agreement. “We are used to eating meat and fish here. In Tanzania we never had any fish or meat.”
The Burundi Red Cross, supported by the International Federation of Red Cross Red Crescent Societies, aims to “support vulnerable returnees in their trek to and integration into their new communities, namely in provinces of Makamba, Ruyigi, Muyinga, and Kirundo, while strengthening community infrastructures to deliver basic services to vulnerable people (both locals and returnees).
In total, the operation will target 22,000 beneficiaries including 10,000 assisted returnees as well as 500 women-headed households (2,500), 1,500 vulnerable families (7,500) and 2,000 pregnant women,” as it says in the emergency appeal issued in late March this year.
To this end, the International Federation appealed for 1.2 million dollars but it has been slow in coming, making it difficult for the Burundi Red Cross (which is undergoing a major transformation and has improved by leaps and bounds in the last couple of years) to give their countrymen the support they so desperately need.
Burundi Red Cross’s energetic Secretary-General, Anselme Katiyunguruza, admits that the response to the emergency appeal has been disappointing.
“We need more assistance if we are to become the organization that we should and could be,” he says. “Coming out of a long civil war, we have almost nothing in terms of material resources. But we have about 40,000 volunteers across the country and they are all willing to work.”