Burundi: a life in fear, Caroline Moorehead

Sun, 05 Oct 2003 23:00:00 +0000

J.R. is a thin, small young man. He comes from Bujumbura, the capital of Burundi, where he was a student at the university until April 2003. Since then, his father and his only brother have been killed. Since his arrival in Britain in May, he has been living in a hostel for refugees. He has applied for asylum and been refused, and now awaits the result of his appeal. He speaks a little French, but no English. His manner is one of shocked and disbelieving misery.

“Everything in my life went wrong in April”, he says. “My father was a member of the opposition party and we were constantly watched by the security services. He was a Hutu and had already been arrested several times. My mother, who was a Tutsi had died after an illness in 1993. The three of us, my father and my brother and I lived together.”

Burundi’s nine-year civil war has been marked by atrocities committed both by the largely Hutu rebel forces, and by the Tutsi-dominated army who have slaughtered civilians in ethnic attacks – most of Burundi’s population is Hutu – across the country. In the spring of 2003, the transfer of power to a new (Hutu) president, Domitien Ndayizeye, was accompanied by fresh outbursts of fighting, much of it triggered by government-sponsored paramilitary forces known as “guardians of the peace”, who have tortured, raped and murdered with impunity.

“On 1 April, the security forces surrounded our house. There were Tutsi soldiers from the army with them. They started shooting and my brother was hit. I escaped out of the window and ran to my uncle’s house, and he hid me. I hurt myself falling and he looked after me. Later my aunt went out and heard that my brother had died and that my father had been arrested and taken away. She was my mother’s sister and a Tutsi, so they wouldn’t do anything to her.

“Two weeks later, the security forces came back to our neighbourhood. They said that they were looking for rebels. They came to my uncle’s house and arrested me and took me to their headquarters in a jeep, tying my arms behind my back with a belt. I was very frightened.”

J.R. finds it very hard to describe what happened next. These are things he did not want to tell the immigration officer who first interviewed him in the UK, or even the solicitor assigned to look after his case. He cries, heavy sobs of grief, as he talks.

”There were six of them. Because I was a Hutu and they were Tutsi, they said that they would do terrible things to me. They took my clothes off, even though I kicked and fought. Then when I was naked, they beat me with their batons and accused me of being with the rebels. They made me masturbate them, and then they raped me. Next day, they came back and raped me again, and then the next day again. They told me that they were going to stretch my fingers, to make them long like Tutsi fingers and not short like Hutu ones, and they said that they would make my nose long and thin like theirs. They kept me in this small cell, without a toilet, and when they came to me they all crammed into the cell and beat me. They beat me on my ankles with a metal bar, until I couldn’t walk and they gave me electric shocks. But the worst was when they raped me. That was the worst. How will I ever recover from that?”

J.R.’s captivity lasted a month. For much of that time, the guards came back to torture him. But his aunt and uncle had been trying to find ways to secure his release, and at the end of April they paid a bribe to the security forces and he was freed, first into a hospital and later home. But he was not safe, and it was clear that he would have to leave the country. There was no firm news of his father, though there were rumours that he had been charged with treason and was awaiting trial in the same prison in which J.R. had been held.

It was once again his uncle who managed to help J.R. fly from Burundi to Britain. Since his arrival at Heathrow, he has no news of his family, nor does he know of any way to contact them.He has pains in his shoulders, where his arms were stretched almost out of their sockets during beatings, and his back aches permanently which makes sleep hard. In any case, he says, he seldom sleeps. Nightmares and flashbacks keep him awake, and his asthma, which was once mild, now makes it hard for him to breathe. What frightens him most is the possibility that he may have Aids, and he has not yet been able to face taking the test that would confirm it. He is just 20 years old.

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Burundi: a life in fear, Caroline Moorehead