Livestock, Land and Political Power: The 1993 Killings in Burundi
| Author | Tom Bundervoet |
| Published date | 01 May 2009 |
| Date | 01 May 2009 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0022343309102657 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
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vol. 46, no. 3, 2009, pp. 357–376
Sage Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi,
Singapore and Washington DC) http://jpr.sagepub.com
DOI 10.1177/0022343309102657
Livestock, Land and Political Power: The 1993
Killings in Burundi*
TOM BUNDERVOET
MOSI, Vrije Universiteit Brussel
This article examines the characteristics of the victims of the October 1993 massacres in Burundi.
Using information on parents of the respondents of a 2002 demographic household survey, the author
finds that the probability of a parent being killed during the events is significantly affected by age, sex
and wealth, in the sense that older, wealthier and male persons were more likely to be killed. Using the
median level of education of a parent’s offspring to proxy the parental investment in human capital,
the author finds that people who invested more in the human capital of their children ran a higher risk
of being killed. The analysis also shows important spatial disparities in the killings. In trying to explain
these locational effects, the author focus on two key hypotheses set forth with respect to the October
1993 events in Burundi: the land crisis and the questionable role played by the Front Démocratique du
Burundi (FRODEBU), the dominant political actor at that time. The author finds that communal land
pressure significantly increases the probability of being killed and that communal popular support for
FRODEBU increases, in a non-linear fashion, the risk of being affected by the killings. The results are
interpreted in light of the prevailing political economy of 1993 Burundi.
Introduction
The October 1993 mass killings in Burundi
have received little attention in international
media or academia. This lack of attention is
surprising, since Burundi’s process of politi-
cal democratization (1988–93) was perceived
by the international community as ‘exem-
plary’ for other African countries. However,
the initial optimism that followed the demo-
cratic elections of June 1993 was shattered
during the early hours of 21 October, when
a battalion of Tutsi paratroopers stormed the
residence of the president – a democratically
elected Hutu civilian – in an effort to reclaim
political power that had been lost during the
elections. Although the coup attempt failed,
the president and some of his high-ranking
ministers were killed. In the days and weeks
following the coup, between 50,000 and
100,000 people were killed, both by peasant
supporters of the assassinated president and
by the army that moved in ‘to restore order’.
The 13-year-long civil war that followed
the coup claimed another 200,000 lives
and took an enormous toll on the country’s
infrastructure and economy.1
* The author would like to thank the Flemish Interuni-
versity Council (VLIR) for enabling two research stays
in Burundi in 2006 and 2007. I express my gratitude to
UNFPA-Burundi for making available the data used in this
article and to Yves Couvreur for providing me with addi-
tional data necessary to finish the article. I am indebted to
Philip Verwimp, Peter Uvin and several anonymous ref-
erees for useful comments on earlier drafts. The dataset,
codebook, and do-files for the empirical analysis in this
article can be found at http://www.prio.no/jpr/datasets.
Correspondence: tom.bundervoet@vub.ac.be.
1 Income per capita fell from 251 USD in 1993 to 83 USD
in 2004, while gross primary school enrolment, which stood
at 67.8% before the crisis, decreased to 42% in 1996–97.
It was not until 2002 that school enrolment was back at its
pre-crisis level. Life expectancy at birth fell from 51 years in
1993 to less than 42 years in 2005 (IMF, 2007).
journal of PEACE RESEARCH volume 46 / number 3 / may 2009
358
In the wake of the October 1993
massacres, various research commissions
were established to investigate the events.
These commissions were to examine the
possible role of the Front Démocratique du
Burundi (FRODEBU, the dominant politi-
cal party at that time and the party of the
assassinated president) in instigating, organ-
izing or somehow facilitating the killings.
The conclusions of the various commissions
contradict one another and are highly con-
testable. The report of a May 1994 prepara-
tory UN fact-finding mission to Burundi
concludes that the massacres were not part
of ‘any premeditated plan for the extermina-
tion of the Tutsi ethnic group by the Hutu’,
but rather the consequences of the coup and
the political assassinations of 21 October
1993 (UN, 1995: 33). In this view, the
massacres were the result of a spontaneous
outburst of anger of the Hutu peasants in
reaction to the loss of ‘their’ first president
ever. However, one year later and in sharp
contrast to the preceding report, the Inter-
national Commission of Inquiry for Burundi
concludes that
Where the massacre of Tutsis took place, it
was not merely a hostile act by one political
or ethnic group against another, but an effort
to completely destroy the Tutsi ethnic group.
Tutsis were not simply killed in a spurt of vio-
lence, but systematically hunted … .
and
The Commission considers that evidence
is sufficient to establish that acts of geno-
cide against the Tutsi minority took place in
Burundi on 21 October 1993, and the days
following.... (UN, 1996: 73–74)
According to this view, FRODEBU officials
were actively involved in instigating and
organizing the massacres, acting according
to a plan that was constructed beforehand.
In this article, I use a logistical regression
model to test hypotheses about the nature
of the 1993 massacres in Burundi and to
examine the characteristics of the victims.
Although it is well known which types of
regimes are more likely to kill their civilians
(see Harff, 2003; Rummel, 1995) and at
what point during the regime’s lifetime this
is most likely to happen (Gurr, 1994; Krain,
1997; Harff, 2003), much less is known
about the characteristics of individual per-
petrators and victims of genocide or mass
violence. Studying the mass killing of Jews
in a Polish town during the Holocaust,
Browning (1992) argues that the perpetra-
tors were ordinary men without a strong
adherence to the Nazi racial ideology that
motivated the Holocaust. Similarly, Straus
(2006) finds that perpetrators of the Rwan-
dan genocide did not have prior antipathy
or hatred towards Tutsi that might explain
their participation on ideological grounds.
In contrast, Mann (2000) argues, based on
a sample of 1581 Nazi war criminals, that
most of these Holocaust perpetrators were
ideological killers and already had careers in
violence and Nazism prior to the genocide.
From a socio-economic point of view, two
micro-level studies on the Rwandan geno-
cide suggest that perpetrators were ‘ordinary’
men, in the sense that they were not worse
off than their non-participating counter-
parts. Straus (2006) argues that perpetra-
tors of the Rwandan genocide were average
adult men in terms of age, education, pater-
nity and occupation, while Verwimp (2005)
finds that perpetrators were more likely to
come from households drawing a larger share
of their income from off-farm activities. This
includes land-poor wage workers as well as
land-rich farmers and government officials.
As to why people become participants in
mass violence, the literature broadly distin-
guishes two categories.2 The first category
consists of self selection into violence and
conains people who kill out of pure ideological
or racial motives or who simply ‘like to kill’.
This group is relatively small but necessary to
start genocide. The second and largest group
2 For more elaborate discussions of motives of perpetrators,
consult Valentino (2004), Mann (2000), Uvin (1999),
Browning (1992) and Straus (2006).
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