I arrived at International Bridges to Justice in November of 2007 to fill the role of Deputy Director. Prior to working at IBJ, I was a public defender in San Francisco for twenty-two years. I had met the founder of IBJ, Karen Tse, in 1992 when we were colleagues in the SFPD office. After gaining experience as a defender, Karen moved on to a career as an international human rights attorney. She founded IBJ in 2001.When I began working at IBJ, the organization had already developed an expertise in training attorneys and developing systemic solutions to implementing criminal laws in Asia. Preparatory work had already been completed to expand IBJ’s programs into Burundi and Rwanda, and one of my first assignments was to organize the first training of defenders, judges, police, prosecutors and members of civil society in Burundi. Contemporaneously, IBJ had plans to follow up work in Rwanda by launching a rights awareness campaign in that country.

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.