Home is still home, even without land

As if life as a refugee is not hard enough, life as a returnee - for some Burundians - seems even harder, especially for those considered "long-term" refugees, who left the country in 1972 after ethnic killings. The first problem is resettlement; a home for the refugee’s family and a piece of land to till to reintegrate into society in a country that is one of the most densely populated in Africa. Since most long-term refugees have been away for more than two decades, they face even more difficulties returning home if they did not have refugee status in their host countries. Besides the 1972 killings, sparked by animosity between the minority Tutsi and majority Hutu communities, hundreds of thousands of Burundians have fled their country due to years of civil war. Another massive population displacement occurred in 1993 when civil war broke out after the assassination of the country's first democratically elected Hutu president, Melchior Ndadaye, who was allegedly killed by paratroopers of the then Tutsi-dominated army. However, in August 2000, political parties and rebel groups signed the Arusha Peace and Reconciliation Agreement, which paved the way for a transitional government. This process culminated in democratic elections in August 2005, when former rebel leader Pierre Nkurunziza was voted in as president. With these developments, increasing numbers of refugees started returning home, even those who had spent more than 30 years in exile. The Burundian government estimates that since 2000, 68,000 long-term refugees have returned home. The head of the government project Support for Repatriation and Reinsertion of War Affected People, Fabien Yamuremye, said returnees who left in 1972 were being registered twice a week, with the majority from Rumonge in the southern province of Bururi and the southeastern province of Makamba. However, he said about 190,000 were still living in Tanzania. Little assistance Yamuremye said the repatriation of long-term refugees was different from that of those who had left the country after 1993. More preparation was required for the 1972 returnees, he said, since many of them had nowhere to go - their homes and land having been reallocated. He said a tripartite commission - comprising officials from Burundi, Tanzania and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) - was organising their repatriation, taking into account their specific problems such as the need for land and housing. He added that an inquiry was under way to determine the specific needs of the 1972 returnees and the amount of money required to organise their repatriation successfully. Meanwhile, those returning home on their own free will receive little aid. The UNHCR public relations officer in Burundi, Catherine-Lune Grayson, said the refugee agency was not facilitating the repatriation of the long-term refugees "because the conditions of their return have not been met". Since most of the long-term refugees had not been living in camps but with Tanzanian communities, they had to prove their refugee status to qualify for a three-month UNHCR aid package for returnees. This consists of food rations, household goods, tents and other implements aimed as easing their resettlement. Rumonge administrator Léopold Ndayisaba said it was deplorable that most of these long-term refugees returned home to find their land and homes occupied. In their absence the government had reallocated their homes and land to others or for public use. Under Burundian law all land belongs to the government, which can make these allotments of plots unoccupied for long periods of time. No land - No house Philemon Nyandwi was born in Tanzania to parents who were also long-term refugees. He went to Burundi in April 2005 to assess the prospects for returning but more than a year later, he is still waiting for conditions to improve before sending for his wife and four children. He said that given his present living conditions, he would not bring them to Burundi. "If you saw where I live, you would not even ask the question," he said. Nyandwi also complained about his exclusion from the distribution of food aid by humanitarian agencies. "When food is distributed, we never know who gets it. Since I came back, I have never received one single soya bean," Nyandwi said. Unlike Nyandwi, Germain Ntibarufata, another returnee, did not return of his own accord. He was forced out of the Democratic Republic of Congo after war broke out between militia groups and government forces in the east of the country. With his wife and eight children, Ntibarufata stayed at the Gatumba Transit Site until August 2004, when a massacre of Congolese refugees of Banyamulenge origin took place. Burundian nationals were then transferred to Rukaramu, the Mutimbuzi Commune of Bujumbura Rural Province. Since then, Ntibarufata has been at Rukaramu with other 89 families awaiting resettlement, sharing a four-square-metre room with four families. For him, living in a transit camp is a great injustice. His family had owned land at Kajaga in Mutimbuzi Commune but the government allocated it to private developers while they were in exile. "Nice homes and hotels have been built on our land," Ntibarufata said. "Saga Plage [hotel] is there, the Hotel Club du Lac is there and many other nice private houses. They told us we would get other land, but we have been waiting for four years now." He said they needed land to farm to feed their families. Yet, even without land, returnees like Nyandwi and Ntibarufata have not received aid to build homes. "As long as the land issue is not settled, the UNHCR will only bring them emergency aid," Grayson said. Yamuremye blames the delay in their resettlement on the reluctance of the administration to designate land for them. He said whenever land was available the authorities only helped the returnees by erecting walls and offering them roofs and windows. Land commission In July, the government established a commission on land and other properties in an effort to ease resettlements and solve disputes arising from the repatriation of long-term refugees. The commission's chairman, Abbot Aster Kana, said the team would neither operate as a conciliation body nor as a court: the commission would review complaints and help restore property to their owners. "Wherever possible, the land may be returned to its first owner or be shared; if not, the returnees will be allocated new land," Kana said. Where the commission fails to resolve the issue adequately, a complainant may seek legal redress. However, Kana said, the commission would not deal exclusively with returnees; it would work for all landless people such as the Batwa, the indigenous hunter-gatherer forest-dwelling communities, who are often neglected in society. Meanwhile, there is a need for an intermediate measure to provide shelter for the returnees. Yamuremye said the commission - within the Ministry of National Solidarity, Human Rights and Gender - had been set up to identify all the possible sites where those who do not have land or do not know their places of origin could be settled, pending a permanent solution. Yet, despite land representing a crucial challenge, it is not the only issue returnees must cope with - they also face problems of access to medical care and education for their children. Nyandwi has set up the Union for Burundi Repatriates to petition the authorities to attend to their plight. Nyandwi said it had 5,000 members whose main objective was to ensure their claims were presented to the government. "We want to prepare for our children and ensure that they do not go through the problems we have experienced," Nyandwi said. Even so, the returnees are happy to be home, despite the problems. "Home is home. We have eaten roots and leaves in Tanzania, we were called foreigners there, we can as well continue eating them here," Nyandwi said. jb/js/mw/oss