MISR review, v. 1, issue 1
Date
2016-08
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Publisher
Makerere Institute of Social Research, Makerere University, Kampala, UG
Abstract
This paper studies the challenges of land restitution in Burundi
after phases of violence. The paper traces land relations from the
precolonial to the colonial and postindependence periods. With sovereignty
shifting from body to territory in the colonial period, bodies that
had been marked as indigenous (indicating those who first cleared the
land) were newly marked as ethnic. In the postindependence state, politics
and ethnicity, as products of continued racialized, centralized despotism,
were expressed in law as well as in violence. Violence in 1972 led
to the exile of part of the population and the gaining of land for another
part, with the state facilitating this process. With the return of the population
after this and the subsequent 1993 violence, and the formation
of a new government (the product of the Arusha peace talks in 2003),
a new land commission, the National Commission of Land and Other
Assets, sought to resolve property disputes between abahungutse (repatriates)
and abasangwa (residents). In its first mandate in 2006–11, the land
commission advocated for the sharing of property. With the same but
more hardline government in 2011, the properties were to be given to
the former refugees because, it argued, the residents had enjoyed the
“illegally” obtained property for a long period of time. This paper shows
how land rights are tied to citizenship and indigeneity. In theory, the
land commission seeks reconciliation in which everyone is regarded as
a survivor, but in practice it marks out victims and perpetrators...
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