When the mob came to kill the 1 000 women, children and old people who had come to him for refuge, Evariste Nyatanyi gently told the angry, machete-wielding men that they would have to kill him first.
The attackers were Tutsi, like Nyatanyi himself. The refuge-seekers were Hutu. Only a few kilometers away, Hutu mobs were killing Tutsis.
But Nyatanyi would have none of it at his house. As the former civil servant explains: ”Being Hutu or Tutsi makes no difference, for we make one people: Burundians. All human beings have the same red blood.”
Nyatanyi (56) is one of about 200 men and women being honoured at a Heroes’ Summit starting on Friday in Burundi’s capital, Bujumbura, where they will tell their stories in the hope of healing some of the country’s deep wounds.
While international attention lately has focused on neighbouring Rwanda and the 10th anniversary of the genocide that killed more than 500 000 people, the 1990s were a traumatic time for Burundi too.
It began in October 1993, when Tutsi paratroopers assassinated Burundi’s first democratically elected president, a Hutu. While the roots of the war are about power and privilege among the Hutu and Tutsi elite, leaders on both sides have used ethnicity to whip up violence.
But the men and women brought together at the Heroes’ Summit, sponsored by the United States organisation Search for Common Ground, rejected demagoguery. Instead, they stood up to the Hutu and Tutsi mobs who prowled the country.
In Bugabira, a village in northern Burundi, Hutu families came to Nyatanyi’s home for protection from rampaging Tutsi militia, and were saved.
About 400km away, in the central town of Gitega, Evariste Ndabaniwe came to the brewery he managed and found a Hutu mob outside the gates, hunting for the Tutsi employees inside.
It was the day after his cousin, president Melchior Ndadaye, was assassinated.
”Do not do this in the name of the Ndadaye family,” Ndabaniwe, a Hutu, recalled telling the crowd. ”I, too, am sad about this death, but it is not a reason to kill others.”
For eight hours, Ndabaniwe kept the mob at bay until police arrived and dispersed them. No one was killed at the brewery that day.
Search for Common Ground, a Washington-based organisation that promotes peaceful ways of ending conflicts, has broadcast many of these stories through its radio production company, Studio Ijambo, over the past five years. The summit will allow many of the rescuers to meet for the first time, while also bringing together people with similar stories from Rwanda, Congo and Uganda.
”Through all of the ethnic massacres and genocide there have always been courageous people who say no, and by bringing them all together we want to honour them and open an opportunity for them to learn from each other and reinforce their contribution to peace and reconciliation,” said Lena Slachmuijlder, Studio Ijambo’s director.
Tribal reconciliation in the country of eight million people is critical to its future as it heads toward an election in October.
A power-sharing agreement reached in August 2000 brought the main Hutu rebel group into a government now led by a Hutu and divided equally along ethnic lines. Only one rebel group has so far refused to join.
Another rescuer being honoured this weekend is Jean Johan, a Hutu trader. He hid Aline, a 22-year Tutsi woman, and her mother, for 10 days in a compost pit behind his house In the northeastern province of Karuzi, where 15 000 Tutsis and Hutus were killed.
Johan says his neighbours threatened to kill him when they found out, so he married Aline to give them both extra protection under tribal customs governing marriage.
Rebecca Hatungimana, a Tutsi who saved 41 Hutu neighbours when she and her husband, an army officer, fought off a Tutsi militia armed with spears and machetes, best described the mentality needed to take Burundi forward.
”We did this because we were convinced that human life is sacred,” Hatungimana said. ”We did it because morality obliged us to act. We should not put forward our own ethnic group, but rather our humanity. We were created by the same God. We are the same people.” — Sapa-AP