Jermaine McCalpin: Truth and Reconciliation Commission after the 1972 Genocide in Burundi

In this episode, Jermaine McCalpin joins us for an in-depth conversation on the overlooked 1972 genocide in Burundi. We discuss the historical and political conditions that led to the violence, the colonial construction of ethnic identities, and why Burundi remains absent from most global genocide narratives. Drawing from his fieldwork and oral history projects, McCalpin reflects on the challenges of memory, reconciliation, and international recognition, and shares insights from leading student research trips to the region.

00:00 | Introduction & Biography
01:52 | Overview of the 1972 Burundi Genocide
05:52 | Specific Causes and Political Context in Burundi
09:24 | Pre-Colonial Social Divisions and Belgian Reinforcement
13:58 | Why the Burundian Genocide Is Marginalized
16:35 | Fieldwork and Student Research Trips to Burundi
18:33 | Student Reflections and Key Moments from the Field
20:37 | Teaching Genocide: Preparing Students for Difficult Topics
22:52 | Testimonies and Survivor Stories
25:16 | The Reconciliation Process in Burundi
29:47 | International Actors and Forced Reconciliation Models
35:18 | Role of the International Community
37:09 | Post-Genocide Ethnic Dynamics in Burundi Today
39:37 | Public Perception of Instability and Violence
41:53 | Intergenerational Legacies of Genocide
47:22 | Ethnic Identity and Storytelling in Burundi
48:13 | Education and Genocide Memory
51:11 | Global Support for Burundi’s Healing and Recognition

Transcript

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her words stung deeply when she said, I wish there was a way that I could retrieve the person I should have been. And that hit on a very personal level because in many ways, while we think only of the lives lost, we're also not thinking of the decimation of human potential and capital that could have maybe made Burundi farther along economically, politically and culturally. Using just base, rote, socio-economic indicators. Burundi is one of the economically poorest countries in the world. Genocide is a new word combining the Greek word genocide against meaning, race or group with the look of the Latin severa meaning to. Kill became interested in genocide because it happened so many times. How is all against the violence as the opposite? The extremists are one against all. This is not to forgive, but to understand. A podcast series discussing genocide studies with experts and those connected to its critical questions. I'm Luis Gonzalez Aponte, co-host with Saba Karim. And what we're about is really to try to understand why evil happens, why there are perpetration in genocidal scenarios and scenarios of mass atrocity, not to forgive, but to understand give, but to understand. Not to forgive, but to understand. Jermaine McCalpin is a scholar of transitional justice and genocide studies, whose work spans the Armenian genocide, reparations for slavery, and Native American genocides. We discuss the 1972 genocide in Burundi, its historical context, and the challenges surrounding its recognition in global discourse. McCalpin also describes recent research efforts and educational work conducted in the country. Please enjoy our conversation. Can you share a brief overview of the Burundi genocide and its historical context? For instance, how is it distinct from other genocides in Africa, specifically the Rwandan one? So they Burundian genocide, interestingly, is one of few genocides in the Great Lakes region. Interestingly enough, it happened or occurred two plus decades before the Rwandan genocide in 1972. The part of the history that has to be explained is that both these territories were once administered under the Belgian protectorate, as Rwanda-Burundi, right, as one territory, and eventually became two distinct independent nations having independence at about the same time. And ten years after independence in Burundi, there was a genocide. Now, just to clarify that the “ethnic makeup” of both countries are identical, so they have the same kind of percentage share as per the demographic information of Hutu, Watutsi, and Batwa, right, so they have the same kind of demographic profile. The distinct difference is that in Rwanda, at the turn towards independence, the court major group, the demographically larger group, the Hutu, they took power, post-independence. In the Burundian genocide, the smaller group, the Watutsi took power in Burundi. It's also the strength of the military, as we know, about post-colonial regimes in Africa and the strength of the military vis a vis civilian authority. And so in 1972, there was a genocide in Burundi. It's often not talked about primarily because in many instances it happens during the height of the Cold War, historical tensions and so much of the focus was simply on whether or not a country, especially recently independent countries in Africa, whether they were aligned with the West or with the East. And so in this context, all of this is happening in the shadow of Burundi, developing, you know, politically post-independence. So ten years after the independence of Burundi, the genocide occurs and the minority population in terms of demographics, the Tutsis are in control of the government and the military and are said to have perpetrated genocide. It's far more complex on the Hutus, but it's far more complex to the extent that when we think of genocides and we think of kind of singular groups being killed, persons may have been killed from both demographic groups. And I am pressed to call them demographic groups because they are not really distinct ethnic groups. They were symbolically manipulated for political and other purposes in the same way that in Rwanda it occurred. Right. Because we know that markers of ethnic difference, culture, language, etc. And these groups coalesce around the same kind of culture, language, religion, etc.. And so they are really more like ethno-social groups. So that how the Rwandan genocide happened; when it occurred in 1972, it essentially eliminated 10% of Burundi's population. So at the time, in 1972, Burundi's population stood at about 3.3 million as per that census. And so about 300,000 persons were killed, primarily Hutus. I understand that since you talked about also the similar ethnic makeup in these two regions, to find out what's the cause of the genocide in Burundi is basically like trying to answer the same question about the genocide in Rwanda. But I do want to still ask, is there anything that is maybe more specific to Burundi that caused a genocide to happen there? And if that is the case, how does it relate to the country's broader social and political landscape? The way I often explain genocides, especially in the Great Lakes region, just as in Rwanda, is that you have the historical context: colonialism, the history of political arrangements and relationships between these groups, the history of economic relationships between these groups, because in both Rwanda and Burundi, this idea of Hutu Tutsi was more a socioeconomic social class distinction. When colonialism occurs, first Germany, but more so through the Belgians it it calcifies and concretizes this socioeconomic difference and this class difference that it becomes an ethnic difference. And so if you gained possessions you were Tutsi, and if you lost possessions or were poor, you were a Hutu. And so these kinds of labels were really social class distinctions rather than clear and calcified distinct ethnic differences. So you have the historical contexts. And then you have the predisposing factors that political competition will lead to violence. When that violence is framed within ethnic proclivities and the competition for access to the state as the post-colonial grab for power happens, results in genocide in Burundi. Because the Tutsis are in power, they were often the more privileged of the social class. They had greater access to education. In the Burundian context. And so they essentially got independence because there was a Prince, Prince Rwagasore. He was he wanted to take the country above these ethnic proclivities. He was essentially killed. His children were also killed. And that ideal of a non ethnic Burundian state where it was to be Burundian and not your ethnic proclivities, that dream was dashed. And so part of the way in which genocides take place is that you have to scapegoat. So part of the explanation was that there were invading forces from the Congo who were essentially killing Tutsis, and it is alleged that they were allied with Hutus. And so there always has to be a justification to initiate the killings, not cause them, but initiate them because presumably a plan is always in place. Genocides are never random, they are rational and they are calculated, they are deliberate and they are willful and they are systematic. And so in the Burundian case, it is no different. But it was playing on these kind of ethnic boogeymans. That the the Hutus are bent on destroying this state that we're building. And so they must be eliminated or silenced. Now, I just wanted to touch on something which I see that reappears in all the books on the Rwandan genocide. Olivier Nyirubugara, in his book“Complexities and Dangers of Remembering and Forgetting in Rwanda”, for me, clear the question that I had for a very long time. Often blame the colonials, the Belgian colonials, to be more specific for the division between these two ethnic tribes, that is the Hutus and Tutsis. And for the ensuing genocide that happened, however, what Olivier Nyirubugara points out is the fact that these divisions existed even prior to the arrival of colonials in that region. It's just that they reinforced these differences through documentation by issuing identity cards and having that ethnicity emphasized. So is that a view that you also hold? Partly because groups are groups, social groups that exist in all societies. There is no kind of romanticizing of Precolonial, Rwanda or Burundi that said that there were no tensions, but there's nothing in what I've seen in either polities to indicate that it led to large scale violence. And so that's why I give the explanation that colonialism provides a historical context and then it exacerbates the predisposing conditions are factors. Whenever there is competition for access to resources, in this context, state resources under a colonial state, those are filtered in Africa and elsewhere through ethnic competition, right through maybe religious competition through political group difference competition. And so if we think of competition for access to state resources as the underlying context, one could never say it caused it. It was a historical context and a predisposing factor. But there are other things that need to happen. And what are the other things that political leadership symbolically manipulates this difference between these groups and justifies actions that tend towards eliminating competition. Because if you think of all genocides, they start on the premise that one group needs to be eliminated. I call it an extreme nation building project. To carve the nation state in the interest of only one group. Both of us can coexist. Never mind that we coexisted for centuries in both Rwanda and Burundi without this kind of violence. So I'm not I'm not making a romantic argument that somehow there was no tension historically, that tension was symbolically manipulated by colonialism, by the Belgians. In the case of Rwanda, they had ethnic I.D. cards. They didn't have them in Burundi. But then when you superimpose a patrimonialist agrarian society, then how information is processed and how people respond to authority, then you can see the possibilities of genocide. So I think in many ways, certainly no one could say in the long degree that from the 1880s, when colonialism sets foot in the Great Lakes region, that that placed Rwandan and Burundi on a path of genocide, I would not take that deterministic view. But colonialism provides a context. One of the questions, of course, which goes to the very heart of the reason why we're having this conversation today, this important conversation about recognition of the Burundian genocide, maybe could be articulated as follows. Why do you think that the Burundian genocide has been overshadowed or marginalized in global discussions compared to other major genocides? You know, without being Orwellian, it's the idea that all genocides are equal, but some are more equal than others. And in an extreme sense, all genocides matter, but some matter more than others. And so the perception historically is that this kind of ritualistic killing is endemic to Africa. And so this is how, “Africans solve their problems”, these kinds of racist tropes and stereotypes in relation to violence makes Africa right with the predisposition to kill its citizens. Never mind that most of the genocides of the 20th century, the most murderous of genocides, have taken place outside of Africa and between the 20th and 21st century, governments, including democracies, have killed more of their citizens than any other means In terms of war. Almost 200 million people have been killed by their governments in the last century and a quarter. So when we talk about Africa, it's already fighting this perception of not only criminality and violence prone, but the idea that these are ancient kind of tribal, primordial instincts, instincts that lead towards genocide. While Rwanda was unfolding, the Balkans region was dealing with genocide in the former Yugoslavia. But the perception of these two were that one is, you know, people working out political competition and the end of a mega state and in the Great Lakes region, it is these two tribes, because even the even the nomenclature of tribes is offensive and problematic because it presumes primordial, primitive, backwards. These people never call themselves tribes. They were ethnic groups and they were fashioned into this kind of mode for political competition. The Hutu and the Tutsi were socioeconomic relationships, and they became ethnic. Once you added colonialism to the cocktail. Let's speak about what has been done so far by you and your team, to put the Burundi genocide on the map, for instance, what led you to begin taking students on trips to Burundi? How do these trips enhance their understanding of the genocide and its aftermath? So I'd like to first give credit because it is not of my initiation, but my dear friend, that both you and my associate met in 2019 at the Genocide Conference in Cambodia. Jeanine Ntihirageza. She pioneered this research team. We went in 2022, I was on that trip 2023 and early 2025, and in those three research trips, we've taken over 20 students and we have conducted lots of interviews, but more so it's not just towards creating an oral history archive, it is towards making this story known to the world. Part of what we share with our interviewees is that you have a story that is important to the world, needs to know that Burundi is not a forgotten country and that the genocide of 1972 is not forgotten. And so we want to ensure that when genocide studies catalogs the chronology of genocides in the 20th century, the late 20th century, does not forget or remove or ignore or put as a footnote the Burundian genocide. But silence is pervasive, and so it takes a while for silence to yield towards speech. And I think that's the importance of our work. It's a multi-year, primarily driven by oral history, but it's also towards ensuring that when we talk about genocide studies, the Great Lakes region generally and Burundi are not forgotten. What have been some of the most impactful moments for your students during their visits to Burundi? Most of them we would have prepared them with kind of pre-departure discussions about shedding“Eurocentric kinds of biases” in relation to stereotypes concerning Africa. And so they have some measure of preparation, but nothing prepares you for being on the ground. So they are seeing for themselves this. They see the people, they are interacting and exchanging ideas. We are seeing the natural flora and fauna of the country. We are seeing the need for economic assistance, but we are also seeing the resilience of people, the industriousness. So when when we have conversations after the trip with students, almost all of them point to, I never realized that I would have had this kind of experience because they didn't necessarily check all of their biases and biases are difficult to shed. In just two weeks. But it was a grand education in understanding societies other than the privileged societies that they come from. But more importantly, the most impactful part of it is that they are part of telling the story. So they have this sense of pride because they are acting as transcriptionist, they are interviewing, they're there, they are videographers, so they are integral to the process of collecting these stories. And so the students are impacted in the same way that the researchers are impacted in the same way the interviews are impacted because we're not only culling information from them, but what we have said to them is that what you have to say matters. We want to dignify and re-humanize those people that have died and also those who have suffered in silence for 50 plus years. How do you approach educate your students about such a sensitive and painful topic and what reactions do you typically observe from them? I think one of the things is that you prepare your students for that. You know, like you have warning and disclaimers is like: warning the images that you may see may be graphic and disturbing and may portray violence. We do that in a kind of academic setting. We say, listen, that we are going to go places, that we will interact with things that may be emotionally disturbing and unsettling. And so we want to prepare you for this, but we also want you to understand that there is always a space for exit. If something becomes too difficult, it's okay. We can pause, you know, you can be excused, but we want them to understand that this happens in the field because we're dealing with the reality of life. This isn't just simply a survey collecting data. It is about recounting; people would recall the trauma. And so though revealing is healing. According to Bishop Desmond Tutu, you can also be re-traumatized by storytelling. So while storytelling is cathartic, retelling the story can also be re-traumatizing. And so we have these conversations every evening. We would have kind of not just a debriefing, we would have a healing circle so that persons could provide in a non-judgmental and transparent way, describe what impact the day's proceedings had on them. You know, and I think that is very valuable because many of them would never have gone into the field to do research. When I say in the field, I'm talking literally and figuratively. Because we're going into rural areas, we're going to villages, we're going into communities. We're interacting with all aspects, not just in the city and in the capital. We're interacting all across the countryside with Burundians of all ethno-social groups and of all kinds of religious and political views. Can you share any personal stories or testimonies from survivors? Sure, it's personal, obviously, I won't reveal the names, but one of the most impactful stories was a woman who she lost her father in 72. She was about ten years old and she never got the opportunity because he was the sole breadwinner and they just never recovered, circumstances happened. And she never got the opportunity for formal education, and her words stung deeply when she said, I wish there was a way that I could retrieve the person I should have been. She wanted to retrieve the person she should have been. And that hit on a very personal level because in many ways, while we think only of the lives lost, we're also not thinking of the decimation of human potential and capital that could have maybe made Burundi farther along economically, politically and culturally. Using just base, rote, socio-economic indicators. Burundi is one of the economically poorest countries in the world. But I would offer the argument that economic poverty is not the same as potential. Because in many ways what we saw was the potential of Burundians to lift themselves up the industriousness of Burundians, and that if given the proper opportunities, certainly they could be better. But what I also didn't see is this kind of correlation that often happens in many westernized societies of incidents of poverty and violence. I saw industriousness, you saw people working and who are not afraid of hard work. Because while they may not fit the economic indicators of progress, they were doing things that connected them to the environment. To the soil. That is as natural and organic as you can get the connection to the soil that you saw women in rice paddocks that you saw them harvesting bananas, that you saw them growing small livestock, that you saw them burning coal. That you saw them doing things, grinding maize, that you saw this kind of communitarian resourcefulness that we can band together and still be a resilient people. So, yes, poverty exists. I would never be disabused of that reality. But that's not the only part of the story of Burundi. I saw resilience. I saw people coming out of the shadows because some people were just talking for the first time in 50 years. In 50 plus years, they had never publicly shared the story. So there was this very kind of silence that it's not just that people didn't speak, it's that they didn't know how to speak. But once we provided this environment, they spoke freely, they spoke candidly. And I think in many ways, even if re-traumatization initially is possible, certainly catharsis is more likely because they have gotten so much off their chest. I mean, we often talk about how difficult the conversation about reconciliation and trust is in the context of Rwanda, and I think there are many instances where people have said or compared, projects by the U.N. and other NGO’s within that region. Their forgiveness agendas. They've compared these forgiveness and reconciliation agendas to other projects in those countries by foreigners such as the AIDS project. And criticism towards forgiveness, and reconciliation still exists within that society. What has been the process of reconciliation in Burundi since the genocide and how successful or not have the efforts been? Part of what needs to be unpacked is what do these words mean in this context? Rashi Bhargava, a social philosopher, says Reconciliation is really a fortunate byproduct of justice. It's it shouldn't be the thing that we are working towards. It's that when other things occur, truth, justice, proprietary and reparative processes, then reconciliation is likely. Because guess what we saw? We saw persons who were dispossessed of their lands because they either had to flee or it was occupied and years later, with an intent to return either to that community or to that plot of land, it is now occupied by someone, presumably of descendants who had either killed their relatives or inherited that property from the perpetrators. And this idea of that land, so many persons we spoke to land was far more important than, okay, I want to forgive someone that I don't even know because not all of them knew the people who killed their loved ones. So it's like forgiveness is very nebulous. Because there's no concrete person to forgive. So we can talk about what exists at the national level and so Burundi has chosen to use a Truth and reconciliation commission. I call the process, the Truth Commissionizing process, because it is this idea that everything can be packaged in the way of transitioning from violence, mass violence into this mechanism called a truth commission. And many of them have been patterned of South Africa. But South Africa isn't the only example of a truth commission. What I do find problematic is the idea that forgiveness must be natural, and it is the highest human good. You're at the height of the moral apex. If you can forgive. And we tie it to amnesia this idea that if we're going to forgive and move on, then we have to forget aspects of the past. I remember when I was doing research in South Africa and there was a woman who had a placard vis a vis the TRC and she said, We don't have amnesia. We will not forget. And so this idea of forgetting in order to forgive and in order to reconcile, the question I always ask is: what is the basis of reconciliation? What are the expected fruits of that reconciliation? Do I get land in this reconciliation argument? Do I get some kind of reparation in terms of compensation, what happens in reconciliation? In the South African experience We can be clear that what is most obvious is national reconciliation, that at the level of politics, it did not descend into a civil war. I don't know if 31 years on we can say that South Africa is a reconciled society in terms of how these racial groups and economic groups interact with each other. So we can talk about political reconciliation. There hasn't been large scale acts of violence by any of these two major groups in Burundi in since maybe 2005. But does that mean that all of the conditions that created ethnic tensions have dissipated? Absolutely not, because politics is always the accelerant to ethnic violence. I really like that you pointed out these nuances in the in the context of reconciliation, because, yes, we can have political reconciliation. We can also have reconciliation that comes as a result of more natural processes. So the question of when the UN and other NGOs come in and try to promote these projects, how effective are they when we want to artificially cause the process of reconciliation to happen? So maybe in our discussions we need to also, since we love to make distinctions as academics and also we need to make these between what is the project of reconciliation, what does forgiveness mean? And just as we have so many writers like Paul Ricœur who talks about forgiveness, remembering and these topics, we need to be able to further look into what forgiveness and reconciliation means. So on that, how do survivors of the genocide navigate life to the according to you? And what are the biggest challenges they face in the aftermath? So one of the questions that was often asked by the interviewers to the interviewees is: have you forgiven those who killed your family members, your loved ones? And you get those that are grounded in religion. Well one aspect of religion that says I must forgive in order to be forgiven. Another person says that if I don't forgive, then I am keeping myself in a prison. Kind of the Bishop Tutu, school of thought that when we forgive, we free ourselves from our prison as well, and not just the person to be forgiven. And then there are others who say, but I have nothing to show for me, forgiving the other person. In other words, the material conditions there are material conditions that must exist in some people's minds that we interviewed for forgiveness to happen. You can’t still have my land. I'm as poor as can be. I have no resources. I was denied the opportunity to go to school. And so if you multiply that across these two, two and a half, generations, since 1972, the economic and social and other potential of many families were essentially ripped off, sorry, ripped away. And so when you think about it in that way, should we talk about material conditions of forgiveness? I find the Truth Commission projects and many of these projects, they are as flawed as the general transitional justice projects that happened in the wake of the end of communism, because somehow if you create a mechanism that has the nomenclature of truth and reconciliation, then naturally and automatically these societies move to truth and reconciliation. I've studied maybe about half of the truth commissions that have that have existed, and there is nothing automatic that in truth telling or with truth telling will come reconciliation. Yet we continue to twist these things together. The South African TRC actually articulated about five different types of truth, and it says one of them, the last one is official truth. That's essentially what the Truth commission itself will produce. But there is narrative truth. Truth as storytelling. Then there was forensic or factual truth. Then there was dialogic or social truth. And then it occurred to me that Michael Ignatieff, in talking about truth commissions, he says, for the best we can expect truth commissions to do is to minimize the number of lies that circulate publicly without being challenged. And it may seem negative, but it's actually very pragmatic because we have assumed that once truth commissions complete their report, then this will be truth that will be accepted by everyone. And that's part of the problem with truth commissions, because truth is always going to be contested in these social circumstances. So when we have interviewed victims, the first thing they ask us when we get to that discussion about forgiveness and healing and reconciliation, they said, I am being asked to do something, but what are the perpetrator groups? What are those who committed genocide? What are they being asked to do? So I must forgive. I must remain in my condition. The same conundrum in South Africa that wealth is still entrenched in the hands of whites. And that while blacks have political power, 80% of the economic wealth of South Africa is still held by the white minority. So when we think about the balancing act, truth can never automatically lead to reconciliation without justice in the middle. There's no other way the equation can work. So it's not truth equals reconciliation. It's truth, plus justice equals reconciliation. What role has the international community played in preventing the genocide as well as in assisting in post-genocide recovery? Well, I can't speak because I don't know much about the role of international agencies there generally, in terms of that work. What I can talk about is the ways in which, you know, support for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and its work. You know, there were instances where that kind of funding was withdrawn. And so they have existed. With approximately only 5% of their total budget. So there have been asked to catalog first the genocide of 1972, but then to talk about and to catalog subsequent mass violence and mass killings, including 1993, 2005, etc... You know, kind of violence fomented by, “ethnic competition”. And so you're asked to talk about and to catalog truth and then to take this back all the way to colonialism and colonial political development and whether or not the seeds for this kind of ethnic violence were sewn but were subsequently thwarted by post-colonial political leaders. There's no doubt the seeds were planted, but if there weren't watered, they wouldn't grow. And so that is part of what we see when we talk about Burundi. So there is on the ground the same kind of international development agency present as with many other countries in the global South. You don't see that same kind of on the ground in terms of the political process. Let's speak a little bit about what's going on now. So how do the dynamics within Burundi today reflect or continue the ethnic tensions that led to the genocide? I wouldn't call myself an expert in that part of the conversation because, we are two weeks and we are traveling across the country. I never felt a sense of unease. Our concern for my personal safety, I think in many ways the rhetoric is that we are all Burundians. And that Burundi wants to work towards this idea that we no longer see ourselves within these ethnic through these ethnic lenses. Again just like we think of it. This is something that we work towards. But we have to create the structural conditions. Here is the challenge to create the structural conditions that anyone who comes by can’t scapegoat one group for causing, losses in society because part of how genocides happen is through scapegoating. That in the case of Rwanda, it's the economic decline is because the Arusha declaration was signed, that we have to compromise with these people and so the fall in the price of tea, 1989 to 1990 world crisis meant economic decline. Whenever there is economic decline, someone has to be blamed and it can't. The capitalist economy can't be the global international financial system. It has to go down to the brass tacks. And that's when you blame the people are suffering the same. Because in the context of Rwanda, in the context of Burundi, it's not the case where, okay, one group is just prospering during economic downturns and the other is just absolutely starving. And so when we think of politics, you know, the first definition I got as a student was the way in which we understand and manage our social affairs under the reality of scarcity. So there were always this scarcity. So politics is about management or in some instances mismanagement. And part of that management is to manage conflict, compromise and cooperation. How do Burundians view the ongoing political instability and violence that persists in the country? We never asked that question. And it's a sensitive question because, I think in many ways the current generation have some distance away from either the genocide of 1972 or the mass violence killings of 1993 and beyond. They have some distance. So we saw lots of young people, but they were not connected to the same kinds of political realities. Many of them were more global and transnational in their outlook. It is the generation of those in their forties and fifties even who are really in need of a kind of transformation because they would have grown up either in the shadow of the 1972 genocide or would have been at university or in high school when the killings happened on both sides in 1993. So I think in many ways it depends on who you ask the question most of where we went. Like I said, we traveled across maybe two thirds of the provinces in Burundi. We met with primarily rural folks, but we also met with persons in Bujumbura. So I get the sense that there is a kind, I wouldn't say a false peace, but there is a kind of awareness without fear. So there's a hesitation, you know, But I don't see it manifested in the way that as we moved about and it could be that it was not yet close to an election. I know some elections are supposed to happen in a few months, I think at the assembly level. So around that time you tend to see greater unease because people have the memory of what has happened before. I don't expect that it would tend towards such kind of political violence, but if you have enough accelerant, then even a small fire can become an inferno. I ask the question primarily because I'm in the middle of reading Blood Papa by Jean Hatzfeld. And of course, he talks about the legacy of the genocide in Rwanda, and how it affects the different groups, you know, where the children of survivors and perpetrators carry on with the legacy of the genocide by harboring resentment towards each other. So I think having been marked by these readings and and having the chance to peer into how it affects them insidiously made me think that I don't think of the generations that come after any genocide actually are spared from the suffering. Some of them try very hard to prove themselves, like the children of Hutu perpetrators, and they feel embarrassed about what their parents did. And then, of course, you have the orphans, you know, the orphans who have to be the orphans of say the Tutsi victims, the generation that came after. Will then have to manage with being taken care of by other families, by other parents, foster parents. But there is there's like a two decade difference. And so there's also a demographic difference. So those who would have at least been born at the time of the genocide in Burundi are now 50 plus. So they're in a different they're in the sixth decade of life. Versus, you know, those who are the children who are abandoned or who are very small, you know, after the Rwandan genocide, what still exists is because there hasn't been much external conversation about the genocide, is that even though it has happened so long ago, there is also a kind of frozen in time. Because we now had to ask people to go back 50 years or 50 plus years to talk about what they may have been told because some were too young when the genocide happened. And we interviewed only persons who would have been born, you know, before the genocide. So those were the persons we had interviewed but we spoke to persons one gentleman we spoke to, he lost his parents. He was very young. So he would now have to rely on the stories that were told to him. Because he didn't have much of an experience. He was about three or four years old. And so what you see is socially how groups have coalesced with a particular narrative related to the genocide. I think what is maybe saving Burundi is this idea that in many instances, the generation of those who were either perpetrators of the genocide or survivors of 1972 are older, are more willing to accept that. But though it's not universal in terms of culpability. But I think what sets apart the Burundian genocide in terms of our analysis is that so much of this was never publicly shared. People would know, that this one testimonial, the guy we interviewed he said he ended up marrying the daughter of the man who stole his father's clothes and his father’s land. So you can't get any more layered and complicated than Véronique Tadjo’s book as well, The Shadow has an exact or similar... Because it was very common in Rwanda, in Burundi, because in many instances there was also, you know, we call it intermarried. But again, these are ethno-social groups. So you have Hutu marrying Tutsi, Hutu men primarily marrying Tutsi women. And the dynamics of that group relationship and ethno-social relationship, and that these societies are, you know, patrilineal. So the lineage of children are really through their father. And so that also has its own layers that even if you know. So I think in many ways there is some complexity and it is difficult if even tempting, to simply, you know, reduce them to ethnic difference because in many instances, if we go beneath the surface, same kind of socio political reality, same kind of socioeconomic status, same residential status, similar religious status. So none of the “traditional indicators” of ethnic difference exist in most instances. What you do have is that historically, like Mamdani had described in Rwanda, is that these socioeconomic relationships become ethnic proclivities and they become concretized into immutable differences. And that became the challenge of Rwanda and Burundi, that these socioeconomic differences became immutable identities. I'm just remembering when you speak about the differences, between ethnicities, for instance, according to the law, people there aren't supposed to make that difference. But an account by this Tutsi survivor who's a high school teacher called, Innocent Rwaliriza. And the report from her is that you don't have to ask people what ethnicity they are. The moment they start speaking about history and the way they speak about it, you can already identify... Right, because everyone comes from the perspective of the stories that they were told that were passed down because of the deep belief in the tradition of storytelling. As history. So it's not just, my father's telling this story. This is the historical account. So it's history as storytelling. What's the role of education in keeping the memory of the genocide alive in Burundi? Part of the Truth Commission hopes to happen is public education and awareness in relation to the genocide. No genocide can be properly remembered until and unless there is wide scale public education. I think that is part of the challenge within the context of, the Burundian polity. But education is not just simply formal. It is also how is the genocide remembered? There is no singular national monument. Describing or depicting because and here is where it becomes messy, because the argument is made that that kind of memorializing may be antithetical to healing and reconciliation, because even the contestation of who is to be remembered, who is to be forgotten, what is to be remembered, what is to be forgotten. Why is this to be remembered? Well, first of all, many, victims, there is no kind of forensic way of determining all victims. In many of the places they were just simply a collection of remains and belongings. And so the forensic, the idea of forensically sorting out all of these individual victims. So we have had to, the government would have to rely on families to really document who are the victims. Like in many other societies, there have been the disappeared. Just another euphemistic way of saying they have never been found. And with almost certainty, they they were killed right in the Argentinian case where people were thrown from helicopters and planes, etc.. But there are so many disappeared without a trace. And so I think memorialization is one way of remembering the past. But even that is going to be contested. So how comes we don't remember 1993? Our how, there is always going to be contestation. And so I think that is part of the challenge. But I know the you know, the Truth commission is attempting to do that Herculean task of wanting to talk about the past in a way that it's Burundian history, that it's a Burundian story and not a Hutu versus Tutsi, Tutsi versus Hutu story. And I think that is the challenge of the Burundian polity, not just of the TRC, but to make it a Burundian story. Now, the final question for you. What is the most important thing the global community can do to support Burundians healing and reconciliation efforts moving forward? I think the first part of the solution in terms of global assistance is really to dignify the reality of a Burundian genocide. That's the first thing, because I've been to many genocide conferences. I've seen many chronologies of genocides in the 20th century. And I've seen genocides that have essentially happened around the same time, including in Cambodia, where we were in 2019. And those genocides are there and then Burundi is skipped over. It never existed. So it's like the metaphorical tree falls in the forest and no one here is it did it fall? And so it is really to not just acknowledge, but to dignify that nearly 300,000 lives were lost in 1972. And those people should be remembered by acknowledging the genocide. Genocide awareness is critical as a first step to global advocacy, strengthening global advocacy concerning genocides that are happening today because there has been no cure for the contagion of genocide. And so we continue to declare never again. But part of it is how much have we learned? And in this instance, I think there is there are great lessons from the Burundian genocide of 1972. This was Not to Forgive but to Understand with our guest Jermaine McCalpin. To our listeners. Don't forget to like, subscribe, and stay tuned for more discussions.