Beyond the political and institutional crisis in progress since October
19, 1995, Burundi is shaken by a deep identity crisis.
The fact is that the social individuals and groups composing the Burundian
people are afflicted by a crisis with identity. Product of the history, this
crisis of identity is characterized by a major change in the way in which
the Burundians individually perceive their relationship with the various
social groups and position themselves to the Society as whole.
On which level of identification does most specific and most intense Community
feeling crystallize nowadays which is used as support of our political conscience?
By a slow evolution and the crystallization of the Community feeling moved
from the national level to the ethnic level.
The ethnos group (or what holds place of it) became for our identity conscience
the major sociological support. A beam of both exogenous and endogenous factors
gave to this change an impulse become irresistible as it was spread. Let
us consider this evolution without state of heart and build a new State on
this new sociological basis.
Burundi became a country where the basic political unit is not any more
the individual but the ethnic community. The new State to build will be the
legal expression of this new sociological reality. The origin of the ethnic
conflicts of these 30 last years in our country is that in the State-Ethnos
groups which became Burundi one applies of the political rules conceived
for the State-Nation that it ceased being. The constitution of March 1992
illustrates this unhappy confusion.
The bursting of the Burundian Nation in ethnic communities did not have
the legal translation which it required on the level of the structure of
the State.
As soon as there is inadequacy between the type of the State and the sociological
structure of the human community that this State expresses, necessarily a
disjunction appears, a disordered state, inevitably burst a crisis. The facts
are obstinate; let us cease continuing a dream. The State-Nation is nothing
any more but one illusion legal, let us have the current to draw up the certificate
of death of it. Let us match the facts with the law. Failing to keep a unit
State, let us build a Community State, by defining for the 2 ethnic communities
the rules of cohabitation in physical space and political space, regulate
cohabitation ready to guarantee to Tutsi as with the Hutu physical survival
and the political power (on a strictly equal basis) to which they aspire
all. The rules of cohabitation thus defined will be formalized by a new Pact
and will be consigned in a new constitution.
Here is the only way of putting an end to the spiral of violence which blooded
our country during 3 last decades.
