ABSTRACT
Burundi consists of three ethnic groups. Broadly speaking, the Hutu comprise 85 per cent of the population, the Tutsi 14 per cent and the Twa 1 per cent. In 1966, only a few years after achieving Independence on 1 July 1962, a small group of Tutsi military officers from one region took power. From this moment onwards until 1993, this small minority controlled the country to the political, social, and economic exclusion of the Hutu majority. An election in 1993 brought a Hutu president to power, but he was killed a few months later in a bloody coup. The resulting crisis led to a civil war, which formally ended in 2005. Following the signing of the Arusha Peace and Reconciliation Agreement in 2000 and the Pretoria Accord in 2002, there was a decisive shift in Burundi’s political landscape towards Hutu political enfranchisement. This was, to a large extent, successfully managed and kept on track by the efforts of the international community. Yet international intervention also reproduced and strengthened the neo-patrimonial political economy that had characterized pre-war and wartime Burundi.
