We all woke up very early the next day, ready to begin. I was feeling like I always did on the morning of a trial: anxious, stressed and vaguely unwell. I wondered if people would show up. What kind of solutions could we offer people who have suffered the kind of social upheaval that Burundi experienced? Would the training address the major needs to overhaul a system in need of much attention and fixing?

People were streaming into the state of the art conference center at the Hotel Amohoro by 8:30. “Amohoro” means peace in Kirundi. The hotel manager was very anxious to make a good impression since they had made a major investment in their conference room. It was state of the art – especially for a hotel in the developed world. A full sound system was available with individual microphones and head sets. This training would be the first major event to use his new facility.

Outside the actual meeting area was a second room with a 360-degree view of the city. To the east you could see Lake Tanganyika. To the west were the hills from where the rebels had recently initiated their sniper fire. The view was lovely. In fact, Burundi is often referred to as the Switzerland of Africa. I saw why.Pierre Claver Mbonimpa opened the conference with welcoming remarks that outlined the desperate need to protect individuals from torture and mistreatment, followed by Karen’s opening message of hope and solidarity. The room contained 60 people – police in uniforms, judges, lawyers, prosecutors and civil activists. They listened attentively to the opening remarks.

We started the first exercise of the day. We displayed a series of questions on the wall designed to elicit the values that inspired the participants to enter their respective professions. Each person had a notebook to write their answers. Each professional group identified the values that were most important to them. The first group to report back was the police. I didn’t know what to expect. I have my own anti-police biases. What they valued most were respect, legality, impartiality, integrity, service and professionalism. The civil society spoke eloquently of equality and love of their country. The prosecutors spoke of integrity, impartiality, patience, legality, respect for human rights and professionalism. The defenders identified independence, defense of just cause, professionalism, loyalty, fraternity, dignity, humanity, honor and courage.

By the time we broke for lunch my anxiety had been transformed into a feeling of affinity with the group. Each group expressed what they were seeking in slightly different terms but the end result was the same -a quest for justice. The defenders heard the police speak the same words and share the same dreams that they did. The prosecutors were motivated by the same goals as the civil society.

That afternoon we showed six pictures and built a hypothetical case around the pictures. The first picture was designed to suggest some kind of a crime. It was a picture of a couple standing in front of a broken window. We had intentionally made the misdeed inconsequential to allow the group to fill in the facts so that it would be culturally relevant. That is exactly what happened.

Each group of participants broke into their professional groups to answer the questions associated with each picture of the hypothetical. The questions were designed to be open-ended leaving room for cultural interpretation. What we thought we would see was a simple story of petty misconduct from the police and prosecutors. We assumed the defenders’ perspective would include police misconduct and two innocent people.

Instead, each group looked at the pictures from the same cultural prism and came up with an almost the identical story. The story reflected the larger reality of years of victimization of ordinary citizens. The story they told was their story of random violence perpetrated on people just wanting to get on with their life.

Having not been to Bujumbura before, we hadn’t realized that the city is riddled with broken windows that never get fixed. The windows are not the work of kids throwing rocks or petty thieves reaching into store fronts to help themselves to someone else’s property. Windows are shot out by rebels who are engaged in an on-going ethnic civil war. Our attempt to show a picture that would not raise a red flag did just the opposite. For the participants, a picture of a broken window is a symbol of their broken country. And each and every one of them is victimized by the ramifications of this broken society. Innocent men and women get drawn into the fray just by walking down the street. No one is exempt from the residual detritus of a war-torn society. A broken window is synonymous with the war. Rebels had engaged in a shooting and windows were broken. Ordinary citizens called the police to report the shootings. The police arrived and found this innocent couple at the site and arrested them for further investigation.

We had a hypothetical case that spoke to the everyday problems of everyday people living in a conflict zone. This hypothetical would serve as a reference point for the group to articulate problems and potential solutions. By personalizing an archetypal story they had also begun a process through story-telling.

Day two started off by Karen reciting a poem and an invitation for volunteers to join in telling a story or reciting a poem. The first exercise of the day was to list weaknesses and strengths of the existing judicial system. After a half hour discussion, the different groups reported on what was and wasn’t working. A police officer noted the absence of defense lawyers during the arrest and interrogation phase. Magistrates and prosecutors articulated the need for more defenders to represent the victims of crime. Universal themes, everyone recognized, were jail overcrowding, pretrial delay, arbitrary arrests, unchecked violence to force confessions and an overall lack of respect for the laws.

The next lecture began to tackle these problems by focusing on solutions by enforcing existing provisions of the Burundi penal and procedure code. The Burundi code set limits on how long a suspect can remain in pretrial detention before appearing before the magistrates. This law is typically ignored because the system is over-taxed with prisoners held in local jails and prisons for months and even years without ever going to court. It is such a common problem that the practitioners have become desensitized to it. But everyone had just reaffirmed the will to respect the law. It wasn’t terribly difficult for the group to make the leap from the commonly voiced aspiration to respect the law – to the pragmatic translation of that aspiration into a practical application. Respect for the law necessitated enforcing the rules set for pretrial detention. Defenders needed to bring these cases to the court. Prosecutors needed to dismiss cases where the law was violated.

Magistrates needed to enforce the limitations and apply the law equally. Everybody was equally at fault and everybody had the potential to begin change immediately. To fail to do something would contradict their beliefs. The power to begin changing the system was palpable. The fact that detaining people beyond the proscribed times limits constituted mistreatment was identified. The participants debated their priorities, respect for the law, respect for the community, presumption of innocence and obligations and responsibilities of the judges to release. Ultimately the values that had been articulated on day one –respect for the dignity of the individual and presumption of innocence within a framework that prioritized the rule of law was the key that would unlock the jails and begin to solve the problem of pretrial delay.
The afternoon lecture further refined the issue of pretrial detention.

The rest of the day was spent in groups exploring the power of the law and strategies for protecting the very values they had agreed were worth protecting. Proposed legislative changes to the penal code were explained and debated. People agreed and disagreed with a healthy respect.

On day three people shared their poems reflecting their dreams for the future of their country: ending torture and reinforcing justice, liberty and dignity. The defenders met for an in-depth strategy discussion about how to use the constitution and the rules of nullity and other legal protection to safeguard their clients. The civil society group began organizing a project they could undertake to advance the system.

During the afternoon, roles were assigned to dramatize the original hypothetical story by imagining what would happen to these two individuals from the time of arrest until their appearance before the magistrates. A few new facts were introduced to create circumstantial evidence of guilt. The male suspect, now identified as Mr. King, had been associated with a rebel group several years before. After his arrest, his house was searched illegally and an inoperable Kalashnikov rifle was seized. Roles were assigned so that the participants could “get into the head” of their adversaries within the system.

Three defenders would perform the judges’ job. Two prosecutors stepped into the shoes of the accused. A police officer played the part of the defender. The defenders stepped into the judges’ role with zeal belittling Mr. King every time he tried to profess his innocence. They saw their role as extracting a confession. Everything short of a confession was a lie. He was insulted, marginalized and hectored. During this judicial interrogation he was ordered to kneel before the court. Is this a regular event in the criminal courts? Were the defenders overly emboldened by their new-found power? How must it have felt for the actual prosecutor, now in his role as the accused, to be humiliated and forced to his knees by the very court he usually works with. When the police officer appeared, as the defender, to assist his client, he was ordered from the court room. His services would only interfere with the fact finding mission of gaining a confession regardless of the truth. When the accused still did not admit complicity in a crime, he was removed from the court room and beaten by his jailors.

The next morning three men stood to begin the day’s activities. They had obviously planned something because they had printed pieces of paper in their hands. Referring to their script they began to sing a cappella “John Browns Body Lies a Moldering in the Grave” to the tune of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” In Bujumbura, a prosecutor, judge, and civil activist were singing about the American abolitionist who tried to free the slaves. John Brown’s planned uprising at Harper’s Ferry failed in the short run, but was a catalyst for other abolitionists and a precursor to the emancipation of the slaves. I stood to join with the others in the singing.

The final planned activity of the training was the presentation of the trial of Mr. King and his friend for aiding rebels in disturbing the peace. Today the performers would reenact the trial from the perspective of their daily work in the system. Judges would judge, defenders would defend, prosecutors would prosecute and police would testify. Everybody got to work to prepare for the trial. During the four days leading up to this moment people had worked hard at the exercises. Now it was more real. That sense of importance pervaded the room. The participants had brought their robes. The defenders and prosecutors wore their black with white ermine collared robes. The magistrates put on their robes. The accused were ushered into the court room. The audience was silent. Two years of detention had passed since the time Mr. King had been bullied out of the court room. Now he and the co-defendant had two competent attorneys at their side. They had prepared motions that raised every claim and every misdeed that the system had perpetrated on their clients. They made motions to nullify the proceedings and release their clients for violating the pretrial detention rules. They prepared a motion for release based on the torture of Mr. King. They claimed a violation of his right to representation when the court had rejected his request for legal representation at the initial proceeding. The court took the motions under consideration requesting that the trial proceed on the merits. At this point both accused had the opportunity to make their case in eloquent proclamations of their innocence. Their lawyers presented the facts buttressing their claims of innocence. And the prosecutors attempted to demonstrate all the facts which could be interpreted as evidence of guilt. Witnesses were called to support the defendants. The police were called to testify. Finally the judges ruled. They had prepared written findings. They rose to their feet to underscore the importance of their role. And they ruled. No longer would torture be tolerated. No longer would clients languish in jail for years before a hearing. Justice could not be held back any longer. John Brown might lie a moldering in the grave but his message – to stand up and fight for what you believe in – was resonating through that room.

In my career as a public defender, I can claim to have set a few peoples’ lives straight. But I never thought I would have the chance to play a part in the transformation of a justice system. I think it actually happened.

The training was over. Four days ago we were strangers. Now we were partners in the same endeavor. It was time to celebrate our new relationships, new fervor, new skills and new resolve. The chairs and tables were removed. Music was piped in and we all started to dance together.

There weren’t any court reporters, computers or clerks to update the files. The court dockets were stacked in a large pile on the bench. I could tell right away that getting justice in Burundi would be a painstaking, inefficient and labor-intensive process.

The courtroom, which would only be handling civil matters that day, was filled to capacity with citizens who would be appearing before the judges that day. In an American courthouse, you would see lawyers everywhere. In fact, there would be more lawyers than clients waiting in the halls. This was not the case in Burundi. Only two attorneys were present that day, excluding Mehdi and me. We later learned that there are only about 90 lawyers for the entire country. Of these lawyers, only a tiny percentage practice criminal law and all of them are concentrated in the capital of Bujumbura.

The first case called was a property dispute and no attorney appeared. One of the parties in the dispute approached the bench and the judges began to question him. Apparently the second party was not present. After some hemming and hawing, the magistrates decided that the case would have to be continued to allow the missing party to appear. If this case was a harbinger for the broader system, there would be more cases than would ever be resolved. There was a Sisyphean quality in that courtroom.

Later that day, I learned about the enormous problems the criminal courts tackle while trying to manage their criminal calendars. There is no infrastructure to transport prisoners from jails to courthouses. There are no vehicles to take judges to the provinces to hear cases near the detention centers. On top of these challenges, the judicial system had recently been shut down by a series of strikes. Before arriving we had been warned to expect a nationwide, week-long judges’ strike to protest the 40% reduction of their wages. The clerks had been on strike just a week before. The judges planned to strike one week every month until their salary demands were met. The unstructured, unproductive quality of the court setting made me wonder what happened to people in jail during these strikes.

After court we met the Minister of Justice, Jean Bosco Ndikumana. He was very forthright in expressing his aspirations for improving the judiciary system and implementing good laws to help the people. He said he wanted more than anything to build a system of laws that would help people live in peace and security. He said he welcomed our participation in rebuilding the defender system in his country. Unfortunately, when we began to speak of specific plans to build 12 defender resource centers he continued smiling at us, like any good politician would, but his eyes seemed to lose focus and glaze over.

Our next meeting was with Anaclet Gasamirwa, the Director General of Prisons, was more productive. Like Mr. Ndikumana, he shared his frustrations with us. He lamented over the lack of progress he had in reducing the number of people languishing in prisons awaiting access to courts at the pretrial stage of the proceedings. He confirmed the lack of a transportation system to deliver prisoners to court appearances. He told us that of those waiting in custody, nearly 70% are awaiting trial and are presumed to be innocent. Yet they will wait together with the condemned, the petty thieves and the most serious criminals for months, even years, before their cases can be resolved. We learned that the more serious cases often get more attention and are resolved quickly, leaving the run of the mill cases waiting forever to access the limited resources. He concluded that the failure to provide early access to counsel was the major cause of the jail overpopulation. All the prisons in the country are housed beyond capacity. The conditions are deplorable. The most disturbing revelation was the fact that men, women and children are housed together.

When Mehdi first arrived I was not aware of the extent of his qualifications, I was just relieved that he spoke French. His first meeting with IBJ confirmed his commitment to see the project through to the end. He would eventually help design the training, prepare the training materials, and be the primary trainer, all pro bono. We got down to work and began to brainstorm on how to design a cross-cultural four day training that would speak to the needs of the various participants with whom we would be working. We held a series of work sessions over the next three months.

Practically speaking, we didn’t know what to expect. Neither Mehdi nor I had been to Burundi. Even though Mehdi was familiar with the framework for their antiquated French Civil Procedure Codes, we didn’t know what the actual practice of law would be like.

Karen’s experiences working in China, Cambodia and Vietnam suggested that the starting point for rebuilding and healing was to get people to engage in identifying the values that motivated them to enter their professions in the first place. Taking it beyond a basis of fundamental skill building, our training would start with each group identifying the highest values they associated with their profession. As we planned, we decided that it was critical that the various groups articulate their hopes and dreams for their system. We also prioritized creating exercises that would sensitize the participants to the particular difficulties and each other’s perspectives. Finally, to get people to come for all four days we had to include a measure of humility well integrated with lots of humor and fun. If, at the very least, we could help create feelings of respect and trust among the group, we would have achieved a lot.

Then, the week before our trip, we experienced a minor catastrophe. Mehdi wasn’t going to be able to get a visa for the Rwanda portion of the trip because the French had severed their diplomatic relations with Rwanda. I had already left for Burundi to handle the pre-training logistics when I heard the news. To my relief, I learned that Mehdi was tenacious. He parked himself in the visa office and managed to get the visa issued two hours before closing time on Friday. On Sunday he boarded his flight to Bujumbura.

IBJ had already formed a strong partnership in Burundi with a local NGO, APRODH, the Association for the Protection of Human Rights and Detained Persons. The organization was founded by Mr. Pierre Mbonimpa, known throughout Burundi for his unwavering dedication to the protection of the rights of prisoners in his country. A former prisoner and victim of torture himself, Mr Mbonimpa had fearlessly campaigned against state-sanctioned torture in his strife torn country for over a decade. Despite laws prohibiting torture and other human rights violations, such abuses were still rampant in the country’s overcrowded prisons.

In 2006, IBJ began working together with Pierre Mbonimpa to strengthen Burundi’s criminal justice system. We initiated a rights awareness campaign with the distribution of a poster in Kirundi, the tribal language of the country, illustrating fundamental rights of the accused to be free from torture and to have access to an attorney. The poster campaign was almost too successful. 10,000 posters were printed, but after distributing 7,000 of the posters, APRODH stopped the distribution because they were inundated with many more requests for help than they could handle. It was time to take the next step and build a viable legal system, capable of providing basic legal representation to the thousands of ordinary prisoners waiting for representation and access to a courtroom.

Preparing an in-country training requires understanding of the culture, history and the legal system of a country. I knew the history of the Rwanda genocide, but Burundi’s history had not been as well-documented. A crash course in Burundi history made me realize that this training was going to be much more than just a legal training. IBJ was taking on the much bigger challenge of attempting to work within a legal system virtually collapsed from years of war.

In modern adversarial courtrooms the rules of engagement are clearly defined and chivalrous. But in a post-conflict country the adversarial lines in the courtroom could reflect the history of mistrust and violence. Our main challenge was in designing a training program that would harmoniously bring adversaries in the Burundi criminal justice system together and give them advice on how to reform their system and heal their countries’ open wounds.

To further complicate things, my entire body of experience was within an English speaking, common law system, while the Burundi legal system was a Francophone civil law system. Our final hurdle was working with our small grant from the UN Against Torture that just about covered the travel costs to Geneva, but no more. So the first obvious priority was to find a French-speaking attorney interested in volunteering to work with IBJ.

I knew no French attorneys, had no budget to hire a French trainer, and spoke no French, but saying no to this challenge was not an option. So I forged ahead.

Rwanda and Burundi are inextricably bound by ethnicity and a shared history of colonialism. Violence in those countries escalated into genocidal civil wars that ravaged the societies, their governments and their legal systems. Hutus are the majority population in both countries. Historically, the Tutsi have held the minority and ruling power. Originally a monarchy, by the turn of the 20th century the European colonial powers were gobbling up these two countries as a part of their African land grabs. At the close of the 19th century Germany annexed both independent Kingdoms along with Tanzania. This area, known as the Great Lakes region of Africa, was renamed German East Africa. During the First World War, Belgium conquered the area from its vantage point in the Belgian Congo. With the German defeat at the end of World War I, the area then became known as the Belgian Occupied East African Territories. The League of Nations officially granted Belgium control over the occupied lands in 1924 and the area was named Ruanda-Urundi. With the demise of the League of Nations in 1945, the countries became a United Nations trust territory with the goal that they would transition towards independent rule. That independence did not actually happen until July 1, 1962.

During Belgian’s rule, their strategy of governance was to control the two predominant groups through a policy of ethnic divisiveness. The Belgians introduced identity cards that required the ethnic identification of either Hutu or Tutsi. To further control the population, the much more populace Hutu were subordinated to the dominion of the Tutsi minority through Tutsi preferences for advanced education, jobs and employment. The Tutsi were also in control of the military. When independence was finally proclaimed the two countries of Rwanda and Burundi were recognized, neither country was prepared for governance.

Burundi began a thirty-year reign of Tutsi military dictators. The seeds for ethnic tension, sown by the Belgians, grew into years of ethnic violence. In 1972, 1988, and 1993 the Tutsi controlled government engaged in campaigns of ethnic cleansing against Hutu civilians. The first campaign resulted in the death of 500,000 Hutu. Democratic elections in 1993 resulted in the victory of a Hutu dominated party, the Front for Democracy in Burundi. The democratically elected Hutu president, Melchior Ndadaye was assassinated with months of the election and a new round of genocidal killings of Hutu ensued.

Rwanda’s history ran a parallel course, but on a reverse route. At the time of independence it was the majority Hutu population that gained control of the government. A series of ethnic cleansings by the Hutu against the Tutsi erupted at similar intervals to the Burundi unrest. In 1963 an anti-Tutsi backlash by the Hutu government resulted in the killing of 14,000. With each wave of violence in Burundi, Hutu refugees fled into neighboring Rwanda. Meanwhile Rwanda refugees were forming guerilla movements from the safety of Uganda. These Tutsi guerillas founded a military band, the Rwandan Patriotic Front, dedicated to returning to Rwanda and claiming the country back from the Hutu. By 1993 a cease fire was signed between the Hutu government and the Tutsi RPF rebels. The cease fire – known as the Arusha accords- called for a power sharing between the Hutu and Tutsis. With the eruption into Civil War of Burundi, the tentative Arusha cease fire crumbled. On April 6, 1994 the two Hutu presidents of Burundi and Rwanda were assassinated together when their plane was shot down. This incident sparked the internecine genocidal killing that resulted in the slaughter of 800,000 Tutsis and Hutu moderates in four months. The genocidal killing caught the attention of a world that watched in disbelief but failed to stop the killing. The Tutsi guerillas finally took control back and set in motion a Diaspora of Hutu who fled to neighboring countries to avoid punishment for their genocide.

Since that time, despite substantial international assistance and political reforms, Rwanda continued to struggle to foster growth and reconciliation. Part of this is due to the fact that Rwandan stability is undoubtedly dependent upon stability in Burundi, and instability had reigned in Burundi until 2003 when a cease fire was negotiated and a period of relative peace occurred.

I say relative peace because our training program was almost cancelled when a rebel group located just outside the Burundi capital of Bujumbura began shelling the city two weeks before our scheduled departure. By the time we arrived in Bujumbura on May 15, 2008 the shelling had stopped and the city was once again enjoying a period of relative calm. I hoped it would last.