MISR review, v. 1, issue 1

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..