New life for Burundian refugees
2010-06-17 15:15
Ulyankulu - Among the million Burundians who fled 40 years of war, some are starting a new life as Tanzanians while returnees have only seen their UN status change from refugee to displaced.
As the UN's refugee agency reports its lowest worldwide repatriation figures in two decades, few situations better exemplify the difficulty of making return possible or palatable for the world's refugees than Burundi's.
For scores of thousands of Burundians who fled ethnic massacres in their country in the early seventies to the safety of neighbouring Tanzania, four decades of second class citizen status have just come to an end.
In April, Tanzania said it was naturalising 162 000 Burundian refugees and their descendants installed in three large camps in the west of the country, including this one, Ulyankulu.
"Only those who have been in a refugee camp can know how hard it is," Ferederiko Kivulunzi, 59, told AFP, reflecting on the 38 years he has spent as a stateless person.
A few weeks ago Kivulunzi, who arrived here as a 21-year-old bachelor in 1972, fleeing ethnic violence in Burundi, was made a Tanzanian citizen.
"We've got rid of the refugee label, now we're Tanzanians!" Kivulunzi said, his relief palpable.
"I'll spend the rest of my days giving thanks to God. Now we can move around freely in Tanzania as Tanzanians. They say we'll even be able to get a Tanzanian passport."
For years Kivulunzi thought he would "have no choice but to die as a refugee, without any nationality, like a stray dog".
Limited interest
Material living conditions on this site which is half-forest, half-swamp were not bad. Kivulunzi has four hectares of fertile soil, a house with cement walls and a corrugated iron roof. All his nine children went to school and the oldest is now a Catholic priest.
But he was not free to come and go. He could only leave the camp if the person in charge signed a permit. And he was not allowed to have visitors at home.
"For nearly 40 years I wasn't able to hold my head up high," he said.
Rosa Icimpaye, encountered coming out of the camp's Pentecostal church, was also delighted.
"I'm happier than words can say," she said.
"I was born here. This is my country. Burundi I know only by name. My greatest wish has been granted."
Young or old, all the former refugees who have been naturalised take only a very limited interest in what is going on in their home country.
Back in Burundi meantime, it's a different story.
Saphia Bizimana, 48, fled her home country in the same years as Kivulunzi at the age of 10. But she is one of the half a million Burundian former refugees who have returned home since 2002.
Like many others in this tiny central African country where the population density is around 300 people for every square kilometre, she has no land.
Saphia, who married and had six children in what was then Zaire, now scrapes by in a "peace village" in Mutambara, south of Bujumbura, along with 300 other families in a similar situation.
"I ran away from war in Burundi. And then I was caught up in the war in Congo," she said referring to the first war in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1996-1997 which ousted the dictator Mobutu Sese Seko.
Peace village
"That's when I decided to come home," she said cheerfully.
On her return, she tried to get her family's plot of land in nearby Rumonge back: but the land had been occupied by a military barracks.
Other returnees have found their plots taken over by former neighbours or by government farming initiatives.
So in 2007 she settled for life in a "peace village", one of the toy town housing estates put up by the UN refugee agency to house the thousands of Hutu returnees and Tutsi displaced that the government doesn't know what to do with.
Along with a small grey house on a grid system, returnees get three goats and some ready-planted pawpaw and avocado trees.
Saphia lives at number 125 on Third Street. She says she is grateful for the house but complains, along with her neighbours, that the returnees parked in the peace villages have no means of earning a living as they have no land.
They all rely on casual labour or hawking goods: poorly paid and irregular work.
Denis Niyungeko, who lives at number 238 on the sixth street, was born in Zaire after his Burundian parents fled their country in 1972.
He too fled Congo after the 1996-1997 war, initially into Tanzania and then back into his home country. Although frustrated by his reliance on casual jobs, he is happy to be back home.
"Exile is always exile," he says.