The United States and Burundi: Genocide, Nickel, and 'Normalization'
Morris, Roger
The United States and Burundi: Genocide, Nickel, and 'Normalization' ROGER MORRIS In recent months the Nixon Administration has secretly decided to move toward closer relations with the...
...One assumes such decisions are made in the White House...
...citizens, or reporting events...
...The United States," concludes the paper, "has proved its point [that is, its repugnance toward what has happened in Burundi] for both domestic and [Burundian] consumption...
...The French and Rumanians are also reported to be interested in Burundi's nickel...
...The killings most recently reported in the Western press followed four futile incursions by rebel Hutu refugees in March, May, October, and December 1973...
...Then there is the nickel...
...Should American taxpayers' foreign aid dollars, so desperately needed in so many countries, be justified in Burundi chiefly to grease the way with an ethnic dictatorship for Kennecott or some other U.S...
...The same sources say the U.S...
...influence over the final disposition" of potentially vast new deposits of nickel recently discovered in Burundi...
...During 1973, by all accounts, the bloodshed and tension in Burundi continued...
...Ambassador Robert Yost returned to Burundi...
...But Tutsi "attitudes," as the policy paper reportedly adds in a footnote, have "prevented" the relief from being a "positive" element in the Embassy's work...
...They were "minor" reactions, said a U.S...
...intelligence officer called "Burundi's final solution...
...Improving our relations with Burundi has been "a major point of interest," said one official source, "whenever the companies talk to us, and that's all the time...
...Tutsi officers are reportedly being trained by the Soviet Union and Greece...
...A United Nations survey discovered in the summer of 1973 what may be as much as a $14 billion deposit of nickel in Burundi...
...Which American firm the United States will favor with this inside intelligence on the nickel negotiations, officials cannot say...
...The policy of "minimal relations" was reaffirmed publicly by Assistant Secretary of State David D. Newsom in a letter to The Washington Post on June 14, 1973, and repeated last fall by officials testifying at House Foreign Affairs Committee hearings...
...The United Nations is our best bet for advising Burundi on the dickering," said one source...
...With U.S...
...population programs in poor countries sometimes looked upon as suspect on racial grounds, such aid to a regime identified with genocide could endanger wholly legitimate and vital programs elsewhere...
...The new policy toward Burundi scarcely displays the intellectual rigor or idealism or bipartisan Congressional consultation he pledged to bring to Foggy Bottom...
...Only weeks after the latest violence and less than six months after the embassy reported "thousands" of Hutu killed, the State Department is said to have assured President Nixon that, "despite the continuing raids by Hutu from neighboring safe havens, the Burundian government has refrained from taking reprisals against indigenous Hutu...
...corporations scurrying to Central Africa...
...Embassy in Central Africa...
...The firms are not in "a good competitive position," an official memo of last fall is said to conclude, "due to present policy...
...After consultation in Washington, U.S...
...Little of this was explained when the State Department recommended "normalization" to the White House in mid-January 1974...
...diplomats...
...Maryland, presided over a campaign of systematic genocide of the Hutu ethnic group, who made up eighty-five per cent of the country's population but who have been completely dominated for centuries by the political, economic, and military power of the Tutsis...
...The absence of such realpolitik points up another question: where was Secretary Kissinger in these discussions...
...This initiative abruptly reverses repeated pledges by U.S...
...policy toward Burundi...
...But the January 11 policy paper dismisses the human rights issue and American public concern as a "continuing complication" for U.S...
...officials that Washington would conduct only "minimal relations" with Burundi until there was "genuine national reconciliation" in the wake of the mass murder of at least 200,000 people during 19721973 in a nation with a total population of 3.2 million...
...Normalization" with Burundi, as officials term it, may stir added controversy on human rights issues for Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, already under fire for equivocation on the exile of Alexander Solzhenitsyn...
...diplomacy...
...Tribal fears and hatred continue," the memo reportedly indicated...
...Embassy as "authorized, condoned or participated in" by "elements" of the Tutsi "power structure...
...But then such aid would not ensure the "final disposition" of the nickel or give the U.S...
...The new policy seems slightly more plausible when considered in terms of economic motives...
...Embassy, say officials, reported only recently that anti-Hutu radicals among the Tutsi have "strengthened their position" in the government since June 1973...
...It would be difficult to justify withdrawal now," says the January 11 policy paper, "when we stayed in 1972...
...Sources describe the paper as saying that real progress toward "racial stabilization" through any sharing of political power is "virtually impossible" with "strong elements" of the Tutsi regime viewing armed strength as the "only guarantor of Tutsi survival...
...coffee purchases from Burundi which account for a critical sixty-five per cent of the foreign earnings of the Tutsi regime...
...funding population control programs to be run by a government which has pursued a deliberate policy of ethnic murder...
...policy toward the genocide has been subtle but steady...
...Embassy officer, "except in the case of the May incursion, after which several thousand Hutus were killed...
...influence in Burundi has "never been more than minimal...
...government sources confirm, too, that the Burundian regime is arming itself at an almost frantic pace...
...The new Burundi policy, adopted without consulting Congress, comes as the Administration faces major Congressional opposition on foreign aid and growing concern over corporate influence on U.S...
...By 1974, more than 200,000 were dead, and 100,000 driven into exile in nearby countries...
...The new U.S...
...The Ministries of Interior and Foreign Affairs and the presidential staff are now dominated by Tutsis who were, as one official analyst explained, "major architects of past repressions...
...corporation intent on exploiting nickel...
...The regime, the policy paper reportedly predicts, may continue "to use brutal force from time to time to maintain itself...
...The U.S...
...During the summer of 1972, Hutus were slaughtered by gunfire, knives, and mass live burials at the rate of a thousand a day in what one U.S...
...As for the new U.S...
...As for cultural exchanges, one official summed up the impact of recent history in Burundi: "I guess we'll be working mainly with Tutsi...
...Embassy in Burundi has channeled more than $600,000 in humanitarian relief to victims of the ethnic reprisals...
...aid programs envisioned for Burundi, officials see the maternity clinics and their possible population control impact "as a model of what can be done in over-populated, predominantly Catholic countries...
...He quoted Catholic missionaries caring for Hutu refugees: ", . . women and girls had their bellies opened and breasts cut, pregnant women had had their children taken out and left dead by their sides . . . this time is worse than the first . . . now they want to finish all the Hutu population in the South, either by killing them or making them run away...
...But while the State Department urged African states to restrain the Tutsis, it refused even to consider the question of U.S...
...During the 1972 killings, the United States suspended its small self-help aid fund ($100,000) and cultural exchanges...
...Embassy more "reason for being...
...interests in Burundi if the Hutu, who still outnumber the Tutsi five-toone, are likely some day to claim power...
...U.S...
...Its "raison d'etre" must lie in aid programs calculated to ingratiate it with the host government...
...None of this reportedly surprised U.S...
...Other sources point out that such expectations make little sense, since the largely Catholic Tutsis have traditionally resisted any efforts to diminish their growth, and that birth control programs in Burundi would be directed by the Tutsi regime at the Hutus, many of whom are Protestants...
...He has served in the State Department, on Henry Kissinger's National Security Council staff, and as a legislative assistant in the Senate...
...Humane and needed as they are in the developing world, maternity clinics in Burundi could take on ominous implications...
...The Burundians have entrusted the sensitive matter of assaying the deposit and advising them on commercial negotiations to the United Nations, with the expectation that the multibillion dollar find will be let for contract late this year...
...Would a Hutu regime then lavish its nickel on a country that aided its former tormenters...
...Writing about Burundi in his 1973 report to the Congress on foreign policy, President Nixon observed that "countries have a right to take positions of conscience," presumably including the United States...
...Meanwhile, international efforts to stop the violence in Burundi, mainly by the Organization of African Unity, have repeatedly failed...
...The list of interested firms and their missions to Burundi since July 1973 is a small Who's Who of the American minerals industry: American Metals Climax, Bethlehem Steel, Leon Templesman and Sons, Kennecott, Falcon Bridge Nickel Mines...
...The Tutsi regime, concluded Le Monde, "seems simply to be organizing itself for a new clash...
...But the aid is "both useful and necessary," officials quote the paper as saying, "because it is difficult over time to maintain a large diplomatic establishment in Burundi without any apparent substantive raison d'etre, in the midst of an autistic and suspicious society...
...Now it was time for "normalization," providing "opportunities for American corporations that are interested in exploiting the major new mineral discovery...
...Officials acknowledge that pressure from the corporations to change U.S...
...So long as U.S...
...Against this backdrop of recurrent violence, the United States will now try to draw closer to the Tutsi regime by renewing the $100,000 aid fund, giving $52,500 for three Burundian-run maternity clinics, and reinstituting cultural exchanges...
...On January 29, apparently having taken State's assertions at face value, Brent Scowcroft, Deputy Assistant for National Security Affairs, is said to have sent back to the State Department President Nixon's approval, as officials quote the memo, to "begin the normalization" with a "modest allocation" of resources "predicated on continued evidence that the government of Burundi is following a national policy of respect for human rights...
...We've got our sources of information there...
...Washington never spoke out publicly to describe or condemn the genocide, "frustrated," as one policy-maker put it at the time, by the lack of a "suitable opportunity...
...In other words, a small American Embassy in a tiny strife-torn Central African state cannot adequately function just by administering substantial relief funds, protecting U.S...
...David Ottaway reported a savage new outbreak of killing in The Washington Post of June 19...
...What are the implications for American foreign policy of a diplomatic bureaucracy that has come to rely on foreign aid as a raison d'etre...
...diplomats...
...Frightened by an attempted coup in April 1972, the ruling Tutsi minority in Burundi, a nation the size of Roger Morris is director of Humanitarian Policy Studies for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and is the author of "Passing By," a book on U.S...
...most of the Hutu students seem dead or gone...
...In October 1972, however, the U.S...
...If some humanitarian aid for Burundi is justifiable—and it surely is in light of the country's poverty and agony—why not provide it through the United Nations or some other humanitarian channel in a manner that does not imply American or international support for the policies of the Tutsi regime, as apart from the needs of its suffering people...
...Some officials worry that the bureaucratic attitudes on Burundi evoke too readily memories of the old rationalizations on Vietnam...
...Eyewitnesses say perhaps 10,000 more were murdered in 1973...
...Beyond political or economic designs in the new policy, official sources say there is also a bureaucratic factor...
...Official sources say the aid is designed in part to "increase U.S...
...Embassy has written that the new American aid effort "could go down the drain," its benefits "overwhelmed by adverse local trends" (presumably an official euphemism for more killing...
...aid to Burundi may be small and unavailing, admits the policy paper...
...told Burundi privately that it could not expect normal official relations—resumption of aid and exchanges—until a "genuine national reconciliation" takes place...
...Should the United States be drawn into any political involvement in any African country, seeking the favor of any side, where the prospect of violence is so clear...
...On November 21, Henry S. Hayward reported in the Christian Science Monitor eyewitness accounts that "silent murder on a massive scale continues" in Burundi...
...This arrangement seems to please State Department officials...
...As a study in policy-making, the new moves toward Burundi leave questions that may go beyond that small country and the limited U.S...
...The policy change, authorized by President Nixon on January 29, involves new American aid, including a "population control" program...
...They were there," one diplomat said of the nickel scouting parties to Burundi, "while the '73 killings were pretty heavy...
...Though Belgium, the former colonial power, stopped arms aid in 1972, new military aid is said to have come from Egypt, Algeria, China, North Korea, and Libya...
...Privately, the change has also drawn heated criticism from officials familiar with the events that led up to it...
...Over the last two years, the U.S...
...And nowhere, say officials, have the policy deliberations questioned the propriety of the U.S...
...The ensuing government reprisals against Hutus in Burundi were reportedly characterized by the U.S...
...Yet what of the "long term" U.S...
...As for $150,000 purchasing Tutsi "moderation" in what is seen as a struggle for "survival," State Department officials acknowledged in a Congressional hearing last fall that U.S...
...interests there...
...On January 15, 1974 Le Monde reported from Burundi that, "according to certain witnesses, the army and police continue to liquidate, more discreetly now, the Hutu suspected of having participated in the uprising [of 1972...
...Officials say that a January 11 policy paper written by the American Embassy in Burundi rationalizes this new money and involvement as providing "increased credibility" to pro-Western moderates in the country, yet the same paper is said to contradict that reasoning...
...The find sent agents of U.S...
...Finally, of course, what of human rights...
...The United States and Burundi: Genocide, Nickel, and 'Normalization' ROGER MORRIS In recent months the Nixon Administration has secretly decided to move toward closer relations with the small Central African state of Burundi, despite official reports that ethnic genocide by the Burundian regime continued to claim thousands of lives during 1973...
...officials regard human rights as a "point" to be "proved" for "consumption," we seem condemned to continue foreign policies without respect, particularly among the young, both at home and abroad—with consequences far beyond the dubious actions unfolding in an obscure U.S...
...experts call it "one of the largest resource discoveries in the world...
...But "the President's policy" of minimal relations had a "positive impact" on Tutsi moderation...
...Recent intelligence reports from Burundi are said to haye described how Hutus have been forcibly removed from border areas, herded into the center of the country, surrounded by a cordon of Tutsi settlements...
Vol. 38 • April 1974 • No. 4
