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Rwanda - Burundi Relations

For many years, Burundi has accused Rwanda of working hard to destabilize it as well as supporting armed groups against it. Former President, late Pierre Nkurunziza said his country was “militarily attacked by the army of Rwanda.” Rwanda has accused Bujumbura of harbouring and supporting elements hostile to the Kigali administration.

Rwanda and Burundi both faced protracted periods of violence in the 1990s, leading to significant societal upheaval. In subsequent years, Rwanda’s improvement in health has been far greater than Burundi’s. Burundi emerged from a decade-long civil war in the early 2000s that had ethnically driven causes, like Rwanda.

Rwanda is a small country in central east Africa. After the Great War, the League of Nations mandated Rwanda and its southern neighbor, Burundi, to Belgium as the territory of Ruanda-Urundi. On April 6, 1994, the airplane carrying President Habyarimana of Rwanda and the President of Burundi was shot down as it prepared to land at Kigali. Both presidents were killed. Over the course of the short period from April through July of 1994, beneath the cover of an ongoing civil war, extremist members of Rwanda’s Hutu ethnic majority targeted the nation’s Tutsi minority for rape, torture, and murder. Starting in April 1994, within a three-month period, more than 800,000 Rwandans were murdered because of their ethnic identity. Even today, terrible acts of violence continue to target Tutsis in nearby Burundi.

The Economic Community of the Great Lakes Countries (CEPGL) is a regional initiative established in the early 1990's to foster economic cooperation and development among the DRC, Rwanda and Burundi. After nearly a decade of inactivity due to regional conflict, in 2009 Burundi and Rwanda have taken steps to revive the CEPGL, but to succeed the forum needed the DRC to commit to the program.

The parallels between the two countries have been mirrored more recently. In the summer of 2015, both countries began the process of changing their constitutions to allow the president to run for a third term. Rwanda’s legislature voted and approved the change, based on a popular petition and with very little opposition.

Burundi’s Parliament rejected the proposed constitutional changes, and the country has experienced protracted civil unrest and concerns about renewed ethnic violence. Since the 2000 Arusha Accords ended Burundi’s civil war, the country has continued to face challenges, but its politics had been relatively free of violence. Burundia President Nkurunziza’s pursuit of non-inclusive, nonconsensual elections in 2015 sparked a crisis. The repression and violence has forced over 220,000 Burundians to flee the country.

Burundians have a tendency to compare their current economic and political condition to that of neighboring Rwanda, deeming (and rightly) that Rwanda is far and away the more advanced of the two. They credit Rwandan President Kagame,s strong leadership and political savvy for the disparity. Although President Nkurunziza has tried to emulate Kagame with his declarations of compulsory Saturday morning community service, free primary school, and free health care for children under five and pregnant women, he lacked the charismatic decisiveness and the informed political vision that characterize for Burundians his Kigali counterpart.

A survivor of years on the lam in the bush, Nkurunziza had a certain streetwise survivor's savvy, but he surrounded himself with a number of shadowy figures widely purported to be manipulating events to keep the ruling party in power. Their machinations are believed to include extortion, intimidation and even murder. Whether Nkurunziza himself was involved in illegal acts in unclear, but it certainly was plausible that some of his closest advisors, most particularly Security Services Chief Adolphe Nshirimana, condone the use of violence to achieve their political objectives.

Data from UNHCR showed that by 2020 Rwanda was hosting around 77,000 refugees from DRC, and 71,000 refugees from Burundi among others, in camps and urban settings. According to UNHCR, as a result of election-related tensions in neighbouring Burundi, Rwanda opened its border to Burundian refugees who have fled the country since April 2015. Mahama Refugee Camp located in Kirehe District in the Eastern Province has become the country’s largest camp – hosting Burundian refugees since the emergency. It has a population of around 60,000 refugees.

In November 2019, Rwanda carried out an attack on military positions of the Burundian army located on the Twinyoni mountain in Marura, Mabayi, Cibitoke Province Northwest of the country, killing an unidentified number of Burundian soldiers as well as injuring dozens. Burundi later through her minister of foreign affairs, Ezechiel Nibigira condemn the attack and called upon regional and international bodies to reign in on Kigali.

While delivering his end of year 2019 address in the capital, Bujumbura, Nkurunziza said Rwanda was behind the attack on Kabarore on July 10, 2015 and the failed attempt coup to overthrow him on 13 May 2015. “We are not militarily attacked by elements in the army of Rwanda, but we are militarily attacked by Rwanda. It is Rwanda’s government policy to constantly destabilize the region. Since 2015, Rwanda government has been sending fighters to militarily attack Burundi,” Nkurunziza said.

“We have apprehended very many fighters on the battlefield and they have told us how they were recruited, trained and armed by Rwanda’s regime. We don’t only have evidence for the October or November attacks, our evidence date back to 2015,” he added.

After the May 2015 aborted coup plot, Bujumbura said its perpetrators like General Godefroid Niyombare and many other opposition leaders who allegedly played a direct or indirect role in it, enjoy shelter provided by Rwandan authorities. Bujumbura severallt demanded that the coup plotters are handed to Burundi for trial, something the Kigali administration is yet to respect.

On 8 June 2020, Burundi President Pierre Nkurunziza died, officially of «cardiac arrest», after a brief hospitalisation. Nkurunziza was replaced by Evariste Ndayishimiye. After Nkurunziza's death and the subsequent election of Ndayishimiye as President, it was anticipated that the two countries would easily settle their differences, but this seemed to be far fetched. In July 2020, Kagame said his country was committed to ending the existing tensions between the two countries if the new administration of Burundi was ready for the same.

“There have been problems… but the most important thing now is to look for solutions to end them,” Kagame said.

“This is the objective we want to achieve with the new leaders of Burundi, and if President Ndayishimiye and his collaborators also choose this path, we are ready to reach an agreement with them,” he added.

President Ndayishimiye, who didn’t mention the name of the country, described any efforts to settle tensions as hypocritical if that unnamed country still holds and protects perpetrators of the 2015 coup, as well as holding Burundian refugees in Rwanda against their will. It was clear to Burundi citizens which country he was referring to. The new President’s government was composed primarily by the old guard of the late President Nkurunziza’s regime.

In July 2020, 324 Burundian refugees in Rwanda, in an open letter, wrote to their leader Ndayishimiye, asking to be repatriated. The petition drawn up on July 26, 2020, was signed by five Burundian refugees representing the 331 refugees who support it. The refugees put their phone contacts but leaders in the Rwandan camp housing them later said they didn’t endorse the letter. “We do not want to have such relations with a country that uses malice, a hypocritical country, which claims to want to restore good relations with Burundi, while placing a thorn under our feet,” Ndayishimiye said in Busoni, near Burundi’s northern border with Rwanda.

“If they really want to revive relations with Burundi, let them hand these criminals over to us, so that they face our justice system. Burundians will never be satisfied until those responsible for the 2015 crisis are held accountable,” added Ndayishimiye.

Rwanda’s President, Paul Kagame faced obstacles in restoring his country’s relations with neighboring Burundi after his August 2020 calls to settle the differences, were disregarded by his Burundian counterpart, Évariste Ndayishimiye, as hypocritical.