September
2003
The
Healing Power of Soccer: Scoring Goals in Burundi
By Dylan Mathews
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“I was in the middle,” recalls Adrien Tuyaga.
“Each side wanted me to join them and participate in the violence.
I thought I would be killing my mother if I joined the Hutus and betraying
my father if I joined the Tutsis. This is how I started to think of
ways to pull people together.”
Adrien comes from Burundi, a country ripped apart by a fratricidal
war that has claimed the lives of over 200,000 people. Like neighboring
Rwanda, the conflict in Burundi is popularly portrayed as one in which ‘age old’ ethnic enmity between the Hutu majority and Tutsi
minority routinely manifests itself in extreme violence. In reality,
the conflict is the result of a deliberate and calculated use of violence
by members of a small self-appointed and self-advancing élite,
acting in the name of the two main ethnic groups in their ongoing struggle
for political power.
With a Tutsi mother and a Hutu father who was killed during the first
genocide massacres of 1972, Adrien wasn’t prepared to do as so
many young men of his age had done and take sides in the conflict. Instead
he began organizing soccer matches between Tutsi and Hutu youth. “I
targeted the youth leaders because they could start or stop the violence.
It didn’t matter how well they could play soccer,” Adrien
explains. The matches were a hit so Adrien began organizing a tournament
involving mixed teams—Hutu and Tutsi together on the same side,
playing against other Hutus and Tutsis. In this way the seemingly impenetrable
barriers that separated the two groups began to fall away.
Adrien, who by now had formed a small organization called JAMAA—which
means “friends” in Swahili—then began bringing together
many of the Hutu and Tutsi youth to talk about the violence that many
of them had participated in. “Look. I didn’t profit from
any of the killings,” says Emile, once an active member of a Tutsi
militia. “I was poor before and I am poor now. The politicians
told us to kill and now we have to pick up the pieces.”
This ‘trauma counseling’ was complemented by efforts to
reintegrate the youths back into their communities by providing jobs,
training and seed-funding for small income-generating projects with
financial help from abroad.
Now, whenever tensions escalate in the city, Adrien and his friends
quickly mobilize, targeting the youth most likely to be sucked into
the violence. “Stay in solidarity, keep peace as your objective,
protect it,” was the message JAMAA recently took to the streets
in response to mounting tensions in the capital city, Bujumbura. “The
message was understood,” says Adrien. “The leaders [of
the militias] turned from violence to peace.”
Dylan Mathews is the author of War Prevention
Works: 50 Stories of People Resolving Conflict (Oxford Research Group,
2001), a collection of inspiring stories from around the world. This
is an edited excerpt from an article first appearing in New Internationalist
magazine’s “Get it Right” December 2002 issue. The
full text—and other articles like it—can be read at www.newint.org.
Reprinted with kind permission.
