Negotiating and Sharing Power: Burundi’s Bumpy Road to Reconciliation Without Truth

Abstract

As in many other transitional settings, reconciliation has been a political mantra throughout Burundi’s complex transition from civil war to peace. A central merit of reconciliation-as-a-mantra is that it has facilitated allowed a unifying and pacifying discourse among political and military elites as well as other opinion leaders. Despite fundamental disagreements about almost all aspects of reconciliation—its definition, its timing, its mechanisms—all of Burundi’s political and societal elites embraced it as common public good. It sometimes seemed as if, by insisting and repeating that Burundians need it and want it, reconciliation might become a self-fulfilling prophecy for Burundi. Not surprisingly, the notion of reconciliation in Burundi therefore has, over the past twenty years, added a very normative dimension to public political discourse. Although very vague—an important feature that enables the common use of its normative dimension—reconciliation generally refers to how society and relations between individuals and groups should ideally be, despite all the divisions in Burundi’s recent past that frequently turned violent.