Understanding ethnic violence through the lense of betrayal

In the African Great Lakes region, Hutu and Tutsi for the most part live peacefully side by side, while at times they have committed genocide and other atrocities in the name of ethnicity. Much of the literature on the area claims that the conflicts are not about ethnicity at all: that ethnicity is constructed, instrumentalized, and manipulated by political elites in order to achieve certain goals and that the main issue is access to resources and/or political power. Others claim that the conflicts are less about the skillful manipulation of identities by greedy elites and more about genuine grievances among the common population. Neither position explains in full, however, the ambiguity of ethnicity in the region—the fact that enemies become friends and friends become enemies almost overnight.

In a chapter called 'Betraying Trust and the Elusive Nature of Ethnicity in Burundi', Simon Turner explores the ambiguous nature of ethnicity through the figure of the traitor. It is a chapter in a book about traitors edited by Sharika Thiranagama and Tobias Kelly 'Traitors: Suspicion, Intimacy and the Ethics of State-Building' (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). Turner argues that the traitor transgresses the boundaries of ethnic belonging, thereby permitting the constant negotiation and policing of these boundaries.

There are, however, two different kinds of traitors at play. The first kind of traitor in popular imagination is the Hutu next door who used to interact freely with Tutsi and who suddenly turns into a dangerous ethnic “Other,” killing Tutsi neighbors and friends indiscriminately. He is perceived as a traitor in the sense that he breaks the faith and trust of his close friends and neighbors, betraying intimate relations (kin, friends, neighbors) due to a loyalty toward ethnic categories.

In these constructions of the traitor in popular discourse, the traitor is believed to be created by an inner, demonic, and very real ethnic identity, and betrayal lies in pretending that ethnicity does not matter. There is a second kind of ethnic traitor, however, in Burundian narratives on ethnicity: people who choose to turn their backs on their “true” ethnic identity. This is especially a central narrative among the Hutu, who are concerned with Hutu individuals who try to become Tutsi for reasons of personal gain. Based on concrete case studies of the various perceptions of treachery in Burundian ethnopolitics, Turner's chapter explores how these two apparently opposing modes of treachery relate to the ambiguous position of ethnicity, thereby contributing to ethnic violence in Burundi.

While the first type of treason destroys interethnic harmony and the second type blurs ethnic belonging, both kinds reveal an understanding of ethnicity as inescapable yet malleable. The traitor, on the one hand, illustrates the ability of individuals to manipulate and hide ethnic identities, while, on the other hand, the narratives point out that individuals cannot escape their inherent and deep-seated ethnic identities in the long run.