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Burundi MSD opposition 'joggers' get life sentences | BBC
A court in Burundi has sentenced 21 opposition supporters to life in prison for participating in an illegal demonstration that turned violent.
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Burundi parliament rejects disputed draft constitution - Burundi | AFP
Burundi's parliament failed Friday to adopt the government's highly controversial measures to revise the constitution, which could have threatened a delicate ethnic balance in a nation still healing from decades of conflict.
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A remarkable process of ethnic engineering has been taking place in neighbouring Burundi and Rwanda. After a failed democratization attempt in the early 1990s, both countries experienced an extremely violent transition process. Despite the many similarities between the two countries, they have adopted radically different approaches to address long-standing ethnic divisions. While Rwanda has opted for a policy based on ethnic amnesia and an integrationist policy centred around civic identity, Burundi has institutionalized its societal segmentation through ethnic power-sharing along the lines of Lijphart's consociational model. This comparative analysis explains the differences from two perspectives. On the one hand, in line with historical antecedents, ethnicity is engineered in a way that serves political elite interests. On the other hand, path dependency, in particular the modality of political transition in both countries, explains the notably divergent policies on ethnicity.
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This article analyzes the trends of the Lake Tanganyika fishery, including: fishing effort, the changing uses of gear, and trends in employment in the fishery. Because of the observed increase of fishing capacity (e.g. the numbers of vessels, licenses and fishermen), this article addresses whether an effective fishery management program can be implemented on the lake. Past management efforts have been made from within the basin by the individual countries (Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo, Tanzania and Zambia), transnational organizations (Food and Agriculture Organization), and the Lake Tanganyika Authority. Using current notions of fishery management on large lakes in the region and ideas from a case study from Gambia, West Africa, this study suggests that effective fishery management on Lake Tanganyika requires the adoption of a formal Monitoring, Control & Surveillance system, community surveillance, an improvement in licensing systems, and a limitation in the number of fishermen and fishing units.
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Richard Mosse Captures the DRC in Candy-Colored Infrared | Huffington Post
In candy-colored infrared, Richard Mosse captures the lush Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) landscape, along with the violence that surrounds the region, disorienting the viewer by making war both pretty and nauseating.
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The film explores sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), with gripping testimonies from both survivors and perpetrators and insight from analysts and civil society activists. Impunity helps drive the horrific levels of sexual violence in DRC: it is more than a "weapon of war", and is not confined to the battlefield.
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Based on ethnographic research among the ex-Gécamines workers of Panda (Likasi, DR Congo), this article studies the dynamics of the spousal relationship in a post-industrial context that has been long characterized by paternalism. The results of this research suggest that, though men and women living in this mining community talk about their spousal relationships by invoking the ideal of Christian marriage promoted during the colonial period, in practice such relationships faced important changes following Congolese independence in 1960. The nationalization and subsequent dramatic decline of Gécamines caused changes which directly affected three central dimensions of the colonial family model, namely monogamy, the ideal of domesticity, and male authority. If men and women continue to reference this model, it is because, in times of growing poverty, it allows spouses to remind one another of their respective duties as docile housewives and responsible husbands, and to command respect as virtuous Christian families in the local community.
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• High attendance, low attrition, good sustainability and satisfactory intervention fidelity were observed. • A weak/moderate effect was found for participants’ post-traumatic stress symptoms. • Large reductions in internalising symptoms and moderate improvements in pro-social scores were recorded. • Caregivers noted a moderate to large decline in conduct problems at 3-month follow-up. • 22% of the sample of participants had been abducted by the LRA and 99% reported fear of attacks in the future.
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Pourquoi la condamnation de Simbikangwa est historique | le carnet de Colette Braeckman
En leur âme et conscience, les jurés de la Cour d’Assisses de Paris ont jugé que Pascal Simbikwanga était coupable de crime de génocide et de crime contre l’humanité, et non de simple « complicité » et l’ont condamné à 25 ans de prison. Vingt ans après le génocide qui a fait près d’un million de morts au Rwanda, un mois avant la commémoration de cet anniversaire, à Kigali et à travers le monde, le procès qui vient de se terminer est historique.
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Hell and healing: Rwanda twenty years on – By Kris Berwouts | African Arguments
Has Rwanda changed a lot, I want to know.
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Rwanda’s rebirth is by all measures remarkable considering that for over five decades it was characterized by systemic governance failures, authoritarian rule, entrenched ethnic tensions, corruption and a spiral of extra judicial killings. Indeed, the failure of state institutions to galvanise citizens into productive means of labour and the use of government structures as instruments of social disharmony, culminated in the horrors of 1994 and the loss of one million lives. Twenty years after the genocide Rwanda is experiencing significant improvement in poverty levels, women and youth empowerment, transparency and accountability, democratic governance, respect for the rule of law and a profound mindset shift towards self-reliance.
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Rwanda's genocide trials through the gacaca community courts, between 2002 and 2012, have attracted substantial critique and also become a key vehicle for analysing wider political and social dynamics, including policy-making under the Rwandan Patriotic Front. A common criticism of gacaca is that it allowed the Rwandan state to deploy the language of devolved, popularly owned justice while further centralizing and consolidating state power. Based on fieldwork conducted over ten years, including more than 650 interviews and observations of 105 gacaca hearings, the article responds to this criticism and argues that while we should be sceptical of the Rwandan government's overly romantic depiction of gacaca as organic, decentralized justice and critical of other dimensions of state policy, we should be equally sceptical of characterizations of gacaca as simply another means for the state to entrench its power and influence in the countryside. This article contends that both perspectives are reductionist and fail to acknowledge the complex ways in which Rwandan citizens engage with the state and participate in government-initiated community-level processes such as gacaca.
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Performance, poverty and urban development: Kigali’s motari and the spectacle city | Afrika Focus
In this paper I explore tensions and conflicts over poverty reduction and urban development in Kigali, Rwanda’s capital in terms of theories of performativity. On one hand, motorcycle taxis offer large numbers of young men good livelihoods – reflecting the government of Rwanda’s stated commitment to poverty reduction, especially amongst youth; on the other, motorcycle taxi drivers suffer harassment at the hands of city authorities and police, who are keen to eradicate motorcycle taxis from the urban scene altogether. I interpret this tension as a conflict over the appropriate performance of development in the city; I argue that in pursuit of urban development, the city itself becomes an image, projected in order to attract the investment which will give body to the simulated spectacle that Kigali present. Conflicts between the city and motorcycle taxi drivers erupt because motorcycle taxis cannot perform to the aesthetic standards of the new Kigali. In conclusion, I suggest that the rendition of Kigali’s development as image has broader lessons for studies of development in general. Specifically, these conflicts expose the operation of images and their performance as political resources, conferring intelligibility and legitimacy in the spectacle of national development.
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The current cross-sectional study investigated the protective function of a measure of belief in personal change—personal growth initiative (PGI; Robitschek, 1998)—on physical and mental health outcomes in a genocide-affected population in Rwanda. Specifically, we examined whether an individual’s belief in their ability to change and develop had an adaptive role in managing symptoms of distress. Prior research has demonstrated that high levels of PGI are associated with psychological well-being (Robitschek & Keyes, 2009), and lower levels of depression and anxiety (Robitschek & Kashubeck, 1999). We found that genocide survivors who reported high levels of depression and low levels of PGI experienced greater physical impairment in their day-to-day life, and identified fewer positive personality changes as a result of their experience (i.e., posttraumatic growth; Tedeschi & Calhoun, 1996). The results suggest that PGI might be an important psychological factor in enhancing recovery and well-being in the aftermath of adversity.
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Re-examining resistance in post-genocide Rwanda | Journal of Eastern African Studies -
The scholarship on Rwanda interprets a large swathe of rural activities as types of resistance to government policies instituted by the current ruling party, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). This paper presents a detailed life history of an elderly rural man who actively resisted ethnically discriminatory violence in Rwanda in 1973, 1990 and 1994. His decision not to participate in the state-supported violence provides an archetypal example of active resistance and allows for an analysis of what it means to resist state power in a particular time and place. This ethnographic research provides one route to nuance the current interpretations of resistance in Rwanda. It proposes that the dominant accounts of peasant resistance, which draw heavily on the theoretical work of James C. Scott, often neglect power differentials within rural communities, and fail to take adequate account of the normative dimensions that underpin an individual's decision to resist. It concludes with a call for a more careful analysis of how and why people resist state power in Rwanda.
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"She Makes Me Ashamed to Be a Woman: The Genocide Conviction of Pauline" by Mark A. Drumbl
On June 24, 2011, ICTR Trial Chamber II convicted Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, formerly Rwanda's Minister of Family and Women's Development, of conspiracy to commit genocide and of genocide; of the crimes against humanity of extermination, rape, and persecution; and of the war crimes of violence to life and outrages upon personal dignity. She was sentenced to the harshest punishment possible, namely, life imprisonment. At the time of her conviction, she was sixty-five years old. Although much of the literature on gender and conflict focuses, appropriately, on women as victims of violence, women also act as agents of violence, including mass atrocity, during conflict situations. The Nyiramasuhuko case offers an opportunity to more carefully examine this textured, and largely underappreciated, aspect of the metastasis of atrocity. This is the central preoccupation of this Article.
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Rwanda has made important progress since the start of the decentralization process in 2000. Local government enjoys an unprecedented range of competences and resources. With the exception of the provincial level, elections are generalized, something novel in the history of the traditionally centralized Rwanda. This, however, conflicts with widespread analysis that decentralization, instead of empowering the local level, has improved control from the centre through top-down policy-making and control of local governments and the population. This article aims to improve our understanding of the paradoxical nature of Rwandan decentralization. To do so, it first analyses the Rwandan decentralization process by disaggregating it into administrative, financial and political dimensions. This demonstrates that, in all three dimensions, decentralization is characterized by the heavy role of the centre, and the promotion of tightly monitored, technocratic and depoliticized local governments. The article then explains such design by focusing on the political elite's perception of its environment. It argues that the vulnerability collectively experienced by the political leadership, rooted in the experience of the genocide, its search for legitimacy, the volatile international environment, and the dependency on international aid, has spurred it to design local institutions in a way that promotes swift implementation of its development agenda and limits local political entrepreneurship and elite capture at local level.
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Children and youth, in whom visions of national development are invested, are central to post-conflict state-building efforts. In the case of Rwanda, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) has initiated an ambitious programme of state re-engineering that seeks to transform Rwanda into a knowledge-based economy and thereby achieve middle-income status by 2020. Success or failure of this imagined future is largely contingent on the 65% of the population under age 25. Through cross-analysis of three research studies, this paper explores how RPF policies have converged with the lives of children and youth, so as to get a pulse on the post-genocide micro-social environment and thereby examine the effectiveness of the RPF's governance. This approach provides key insights into these dynamics by assessing how the RPF's policies related to children's rights, school-based education and transitions to adulthood have affected the lives, expectations and aspirations of young people. It is argued that the RPF's commitment to rapid reconstruction and development, such as universal access to education, has resulted in promising developments for young people, and has generated high aspirations for the future. However, the purposive imposition of the government's goals is predicated on a specific vision of a promised future that is often at odds with young people's daily realities. This dynamic risks generating a new sense of exclusion and foreclosing opportunity for many young people. Thus, as the RPF moves forward with its Vision 2020 goals, it must do so with a nuanced and astute assessment of how these policies interact with young people's experiences and shape expectations. While young people largely subscribe to the RPF's visionary approach to development, where it contradicts their daily realities, young people's responses weigh heavily on the possibility of the vision of either the RPF – or young people – being fully realized.
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Although still predominantly rural, Rwanda is one of the world's fastest-urbanizing countries. This paper considers the Rwandan Patriotic Front's (RPF) approach to urban development in the context of intense pressure on land and a stated long-term agenda of moving towards a future that is ‘100% urban’. The RPF government has won plaudits for its transformation of Kigali, and its Land Tenure Regularisation programme is proceeding at a pace few anticipated. Its approach to the urban question remains, however, both highly controversial abroad and contested within the country. There is widespread acknowledgement that aspects of the government's urban agenda have been disadvantageous to the poor, but it is also unclear whether the implementation of this agenda is furthering or hindering their overarching drive for economic growth, structural transformation and political stability. In particular, the expropriation of urban land and the political–economic interests embedded in the real estate sector have critical impacts on Rwanda's development trajectory. Utilizing a ‘political settlements’ approach but introducing a spatial perspective focused on the transformation of Kigali, this paper explores the governance of land reform, urban planning, expropriation and property taxation, analyses how these illuminate the broader settlement in place, and considers the implications for Rwanda's future.
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This article attempts - for the Rwandan case - to answer a fundamental question of state-builders in Africa: to what extent and how is authority broadcast over people? There is much controversy concerning the nature of governance by the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) in contemporary Rwanda. This article moves beyond existing knowledge on local government structures and practice by analysing over 350 life histories of rural Rwandans collected in 2011. It will be explained that these data provide an insight into the 'subjective realm' of governance experience and function as a social commentary on the nature of governance during the era of RPF regime consolidation: 2000-10. An immediate observation - based on a simple word frequency count executed on the total sample of life stories - is the high presence of 'authority' in the lives of Rwandans. This insight points towards a significant degree of state reach under the RPF in Rwanda, contrary to what is often observed in Africa. In addition, the findings identify an overall perceived improvement in basic service delivery but also reveal the often authoritarian nature and, at times, overreach of underlying governance practice. The observed state-society relations are qualified by examining a number of life story narratives. The article concludes with reflections on the methodological, theoretical and policy implications of the observed dialectic of state reach and overreach discernible in the lives of peasants in contemporary Rwanda. It calls for a reconsideration of 'state fragility' both in the Rwandan case and globally.
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Since the collapse of Rwanda's state institutions in 1994, including the state's security apparatus, the military has been at the centre of the country's politics and development. Crucial to the political and economic strategy of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) is the national army. However, analysis is scarce on the politics of the Rwandan military and how it has been constituted and forged since the RPF came to power. This paper seeks to address this under-researched area by investigating the processes used by the government of Rwanda to develop its national defence forces. In doing so it avoids simplistic narratives such as ethnic subjugation and instead highlights the unique factors leading to the creation of today's RDF and how it has been forged through various socialization experiences such as training, fighting together and peacekeeping as well as an emphasis on welfare and political education. Furthermore, it is posited that the military reflects the broader political landscape in Rwanda, and that decision-making is underscored by concepts of tradition, liberation and modernity. How these concepts interrelate is the key to understanding the military in Rwanda, but also wider governance mechanisms and strategies employed by the RPF.
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@RichardGoldston Backstory Part 1 | Steve Terrill
Rwanda, Kagame, and the Mind-Bending Propaganda Machine
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President Paul Kagame of Rwanda video conference with Brown students | Watson Institute
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How to spread Rwandan propaganda, and intimidate opponents? Twitter, of course. | Daily Maverick
Last week, a few unfortunate clicks revealed to the world that the Twitter account of Rwandan President Paul Kagame is run by the same person who spews pro-Rwanda propaganda under the handle @RichardGoldston. The faux Goldston is, of course, allowed to be a lot less guarded than Kagame himself, and a trawl through his Twitter cache offers up a few revelations – none of which are complimentary toward South Africa. No wonder SA-Rwanda relations are at an all-time low.
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Rwanda’s Twitter-gate raises questions about the central role of RPF Twitter-trolls in calling out foreign journalists who seek to hold it to account for its excesses at home and abroad. President Kagame’s reactionary tweets provide insight into the political reality behind his government’s carefully crafted narrative that Rwanda is a nation rehabilitated from the ruin of the 1994 genocide. Twitter-gate is also illustrative of the harassment and intimidation to which critics of the RPF regime regularly experience.
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I am a gay Ugandan about to go home. This law will tyrannise my life | The Guardian
A day after the anti-homosexuality act was passed, a tabloid listed me as a 'homo'. This hatred is new to my country, and driven by US evangelicals
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Is the Crimea referendum a good model for Africa? – By Richard Dowden | African Arguments
What would happen if African peoples where given the chance to vote in referenda to decide which country they wanted to be part of or if they wanted their own?
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• I explore land reform that integrates statutory and customary tenure. • I examine what this implies for tenure security of customary landholders. • Land reform inevitably feeds into institutional multiplicity and competition, and serves as a venue for the renegotiation of land governing authorities and regulations. • In Uganda, through such reform, customary authorities are delegitimized and local norms renegotiated. • Tenure security transforms while smallholders are still not protected.
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Climate Variability and Crop Production in Uganda | Journal of Sustainable Development
In this paper, the relationship between climate variation and crop output in Uganda for the period 1981 to 2008 is examined. The time-varying ARCH model of the crop production function is used to estimate the relationships. Analysis of the incidence of rainfall and temperature variation from the long-term average indicates that it is insignificant. Estimates of the trend of rainfall and temperature suggest a gradual decline in volume of rainfall and record of temperatures in Uganda in the present and near future. ARCH model estimates show that a variation in rainfall and temperature from the long-term mean has significant effects on crop output, while exponential increase in rainfall has detrimental effect on crop output. It is recommended that the government should support farmers to adopt small-scale irrigation systems; and capacity of weather forecast agencies should be strengthened to monitor and educate the public on present and potential near-future climate variations.
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President Museveni and Uganda’s intervention in South Sudan | Democracy in Africa
In this blog piece, Michaela Collord explores Uganda’s intervention in South Sudan. She argues that, to date, President Museveni has skilfully muted criticism of his intervention at home and abroad, although this relative silence might be lifting.
