Sustainable Peace by Piece

Today is a national holiday.  It is the day that Burundians remember the assassination of the first ever democratically elected president of Burundi– Melchoir Ndadaye.  It is also the day that people remember the beginning of the “crisis,” the word Burundians use to describe their 13-year genocide.  The first mass grave was dug on October 21 to bury the bodies of the President, his cabinet members, and other Parliament members from his party. 

It is also a day that reminds me how little we, the western world, paid attention to the events of this small country. 

This morning I was reading the book From Bloodshed to Hope in Burundi, a memoir written by the U.S. ambassador to Burundi during the first years of the crisis and his wife.  Given the significance of today in Burundi’s history, I thought I would share with you a passage:

In terms of realpolitik, Burundi scarcely matters to the outside world. The United States, for example, has zero economic interest in Burundi: total trade between the two countries in 1993 amounted to only seven million dollars– less than one day’s Christmas sales at a large metropolitan department store. We have zero military interest: nothing that Burundi could do militarily would ever threaten the United States or even a small developed nation. We have zero political interest, for Burundi’s government has neither the clout nor the respect to influence other nations. Burundi matters only if we care about human life–if we believe that it makes a difference when people suffer terribly, when they grow up impoverished and uneducated, or when they see their chidlren and parents fleeing through the forest to avoid being hacked to pieces or shot to death for no reason other than ethnicity. Only if we believe that all human life has value; that God created all people, not just some; and that in some perhaps mysterious but nonetheless inescapable fashion we are bound together in a web of destiny in which what touches one life vibrates for all–if we believe those things, then Burundi matters. And if so, then the assassination of Melchoir Ndadaye affects us as well.”

In remembrance of Ndadaye,
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