c. 1996 Religion News Service

WASHINGTON _ David Niyonzima, sitting in the quiet comfort of a breakfast meeting here thousands of miles from his native Burundi, studied the food on his plate as if the words he searched for might be there.”You get the news,”he told a group of reporters and peace activists, referring to the ongoing civil war that has claimed 150,000 lives since 1993.”But the thing you miss is the physical contact _ the things there that are beyond words _ the tension, the fears. They are the heart of the whole thing.”Western countries have not yet heard the cry of innocent blood,”he added softly.

Niyonzima, a Burundian Quaker pastor, is on the last leg of a 12-city tour sponsored by the American Friends Service Committee. He is trying to keep awareness alive of Burundi’s agony and to urge support for initiatives that would end the long spiral of violence that has made his country and neighboring Rwanda emblems of contemporary genocide.

The son of one of the first Quaker converts in Burundi during the 1930s, Niyonzima is a member of the Evangelical Friends Church in Burundi and general secretary of the Burundi Yearly Meeting, based in Kibimba in the central province of Gitega. There, he oversees 70 Quaker congregations, which claim 9,000 members.

And Niyonzima has tried, in the nonviolent tradition of his denomination, to be a peacemaker and reconciler, a counterweight to the extremist leaders of the warring ethnic factions of Hutu and Tutsi.

It is a job Niyonzima has carried out since June from Nairobi, Kenya, where he and his wife, Felicity, and three children now live. They were forced to flee Burundi when his name appeared on a death list. He had already narrowly escaped death once before in 1993, when troops burst into his Quaker training center in Kibimba and killed eight students.”We’ve had massacres before,”he said, ticking off conflicts in 1965, 1969 and 1972, when the minority Tutsis killed thousands of Hutus.”But those could be denied because it was only the Hutu who were suffering. The current situation is unique because this time, everybody recognizes there is a problem. Everybody is fearful.” In that universal fear, he finds a measure of hope.”That everybody sees the problem is a bit of a solution,”he said.”It provides a common ground from which we can base our efforts.” Niyonzima began his peace-making efforts shortly after the 1993 killings when he helped form the inter-ethnic Kibimba Peace Committee, which tries to bring local Hutus and Tutsis together in dialogue. In January 1994, he was instrumental in establishing a crisis committee to aid in the distribution of relief aid to a Tutsi refugee camp at Kibimba.

In Nairobi, the exiled Niyonzima began organizing meetings between Hutu and Tutsi clergy from Burundi.”We cannot just talk about `Quaker peace.’ Everyone must be included and we must cooperate with other denominations,”he said.”We Burundians can do something about the situations.” The Nairobi effort brought together Burundian church leaders from both ethnic communities.”They would meet and then reach out to political leaders, becoming a bridge,”he said.

Niyonzima said organized religion in Burundi is playing a more positive role than it had in Rwanda, where some members of Catholic and Protestant clergy have been accused of not only condoning the genocidal violence that racked the country in 1994, but also participating in it. As many as 1 million Rwandans died in the violence; hundreds of thousands more were displaced from their homes.”The church in Burundi has a good attitude,”he said.”The attitude is different, the credibility is there.” The Nairobi peace initiative, however, has been stopped because of the sanctions, he said, referring to the economic embargo imposed on Burundi by its African neighbors July 31. The sanctions were imposed in response to a coup in which Tutsi military leader Pierre Buyoya seized power from President Sylvestre Ntibantunganya.

Though Pope John Paul II and other religious leaders have called for an end to the sanctions because of the pain they impose on innocent people, Niyonzima voiced support for the economic embargo. He argued the sanctions have had little impact on the mass of people in the countryside, but are beginning to crimp the style of the political leaders and could lead them to engage in a dialogue to settle issues.”The dialogue between the politicians must be done,”he said.”We need more cooperation, more support.” While voicing support for the sanctions as a means of getting the politicians to the negotiating table and ending the violence that began in 1993 when Tutsi soldiers assassinated Hutu president Melchior Ndadaye, Niyonzima rejects armed intervention.”Why push that when you haven’t pushed the dialogue?”he asked.”It’s not that it (dialogue) has failed; it’s that it hasn’t been done.” At the breakfast at Davis House, a Quaker hospitality house for international visitors just a mile from the White House, Niyonzima made a soft-spoken but passionate plea for the community of nations to become involved in Burundi’s peace-making efforts.”The international community is walking away as Burundi is being pulled into the abyss,”he said.”There is a tendency to give up, and say there is nothing I can do.” Burundi has little to compel international attention or involvement.”I have been directly asked,”he said,”`Do you have minerals, do you have oil?’ But I can only answer, `We are human beings created in the image of God. How can you not care?'”

MJP END ANDERSON