Burundi : the CVR continues its controversial investigations

Since Monday, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (CVR) has launched investigations in six provinces in southeast and northeast Burundi. The highly controversial commission in charge of reconciliation between Burundians, which has so far only looked at the 1972 massacres that took more Hutus than Tutsis, announced last Friday that its work will concern all crises (1885 to 2008) according to its mandate. INFO SOS Médias Burundi

Pierre Claver Ndayicariye, president of the CVR, announced the activity last Friday during a press briefing he hosted in the commercial city of Bujumbura.

The concerned provinces include Makamba, Rutana, Ruyigi, Karusi, Muyinga and Kirundo in the southeast and northeast of Burundi.

Mr. Ndayicariye emphasizes that this is a second operation because the first took place last year in the provinces of Cankuzo, Bururi and Rumonge in the east and southwest of the country.

“This operation aims to know the people murdered or disappeared during the cyclical crises that Burundi has experienced,” he explained.

“It also seeks to identify the perpetrators of massacres, the people who tried to protect others, the criminals who have already taken the path of going to ask for forgiveness and the families of the victims who have already forgiven the executioners,” added the president of the CVR.

The very controversial commission in charge of reconciliation between Burundians, indicates that through its census, it will try to give names of the victims and the alleged perpetrators of the massacres. The CVR, which has already described the 1972 massacres that killed more Hutus than Tutsis as “genocide against the Hutus of Burundi”, says that the activity will concern all the cyclical crises that Burundi has experienced. According to its mandate, it must look into the tragedies that have bereaved Burundi between 1885 and 2008. That is to say, between the date of the Berlin Conference on the partition of Africa and the year when the last rebel movement laid down its arms in Burundi.

Pierre Claver Ndayicariye calls on the families concerned by this operation to prepare themselves accordingly to give the true version of the story.

The CVR is one of the instruments provided for in the 2000 Arusha Peace and Reconciliation Agreement. It remains the most criticized of the commissions set up within this framework. It is attacked by Tutsi rights associations who accuse it of only being concerned with the massacres that took more Hutus than Tutsis.

On December 20, 2021, the president of the highly controversial commission declared that the 1972 massacres that took more Hutus than Tutsis constitute “a genocide against the Hutus of Burundi.”
This was on the sidelines of a presentation of a third activity report to both chambers of parliament in the commercial capital Bujumbura. But President Évariste Ndayishimiye indicated in May 2022 that it is not yet time to declare that “the killings of 1972 constitute a genocide.”

Burundi has the same ethnic composition as Rwanda, its northern neighbor where the genocide against the Tutsis in 1994 was recognized by the UN.

In Burundi, despite the recognition of the 1972 massacres commonly known as “the events of 1972” as “a genocide against the Hutus” by the majority Hutus in power today, the two ethnic groups are still struggling to agree on the name of the crises that claimed their people.

Until now, the Tutsis remain convinced that the tragedy that befell their people following the assassination of the first democratically elected Hutu president Melchior Ndadaye in 1993 was “a genocide against the Tutsis,” which is less of a concern to Mr. Ndayicariye and his commission who have refused in some provinces to visit sites where mass graves of Tutsis have been reported to them.