Burundi village attack leaves 26 dead ahead of referendum

[muriel_volestrangler]

Source: BBC

At least 26 people were killed after armed attackers targeted a village in north-west Burundi, amid tensions ahead of a controversial referendum.

The group crossed from the Democratic Republic of Congo into Cibitoke province, officials said.

They went house to house with guns and knives, burning homes, witnesses said.

Correspondents say the attack may have been an attempt to disrupt next week's referendum which could extend the president's term until 2034.

Read more: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-44094758

---

Why kill random people because there's going to be a referendum? These were just psychopaths looking for an excuse.

[DRoseDARs]

1. I suggest you read the article you posted. Gives some historical context.

This wasn't random violence, this is long-simmering hatred decades-old boiling to the surface yet again. Some people still haven't stopped fighting the last civil war that "ended" in 2005.

[muriel_volestrangler]

6. No, that doesn't explain it

Massacring a village is not going to stop a referendum, or get people to vote one way or the other. The victims were just normal people, not the government, or the opposition.

To decide that the best way to advance your political cause is to murder innocent people is psychopathic.

[DRoseDARs]

7. These are different ethnic groups with bitter hatred for each other. Check your Western privilege.

Step out of your cultural and historical norms, and try to fathom the misery of their lives. Stop applying what you view to be normal life to their lives. These people have been living under the shadow of multiple genocides, actual fucking genocides that the world repeatedly ignores or tsk-tsks and does nothing about, over the past several decades in the region. Many participated, many survived, many passed the memory and hatred onto their children to continue the cycle of violence. This wasn't about stopping the referendum. This wasn't about changing votes. This was about exacting revenge and spilling more blood. The president is viewed as a symbol of the enemy retaining further power for himself. But that's just a shallow and convenient pretense. The last Burundi civil war "ended" in 2005 but never really ended.

[muriel_volestrangler]

8. Fuck it, it's not "Western privilege" to say that the murder of 26 people is psychopathic

The misery here is generated by the murder. The murderers did not have miserable lives caused by their victims. There is no evidence that the murderers were the target of genocide; but we do know they killed. You've got one thing right: "this was about spilling blood".

You claim to know a lot about the perpetrators. Who were they? What do you claim they or their families suffered? Have you given their identities to the Burundi or DRC authorities, or the UN?

[DRoseDARs]

9. I can't help you if you're dead-set on being willfully ignorant of the region's *recent* history.

Historical context matters, and the history isn't even that far-removed from today.

[muriel_volestrangler]

10. Face it, you're making excuses for murder.

Calling out murder is not 'Western privilege', nor is it "willfully ignorant". Historical context does not stop these people being violent psychopaths.

[DRoseDARs]

11. Arguing from Strawman isn't helping you.

You asked the question, "Why kill random people because there's going to be a referendum?" I answered in the next post in an attempt to begin enlightening you to a tragic part of the world. You stamp your feet and lash out at me because you're frustrated that I'm not giving you a simple answer to a complex issue.

[muriel_volestrangler]

12. It's the article that suggests it was because of the referendum. You moan about the killers' lives

saying we must think of their misery, and you tell me to "check my Western privilege" for saying they're psychopaths (and that is you "stamping your feet and lashing out" - at me). Yes, you are making excuses for them.

You are enlightening no one. Trying to play a moral relativity card for people who massacred a village is not 'enlightened'.

[DRoseDARs]

15. You demonstrate beautifully why genocides keep happening and the world is reluctant to intervene.

Your reductionism of this to "psychopaths" dismisses the underlying causes of the tragedy that has been ongoing for decades in the region, reduces the hundreds of thousands of lives lost to mere statistics, rejects the work of humanitarian aid workers, peacekeepers and negotiators. Psychopathy is a mental disorder, treated by doctors with medications and therapy. The killers and their victims have both lived experiences. They grow with and are shaped by fear. Fear of each other. Generations of people have only known back-and-forth violence, have known precious little of peace. Only endless hate. How can there be any hope for them to break the cycle when so many of those on the outside refuse to understand what has happened and is happening and will continue to happen until something is done? Projecting your safely lived experiences onto those who have not known safety only prolongs their misery. Moral relativism? Moaning about the killers? THAT'S what you're getting from this? Hopeless.

[Hortensis]

14. Yes. The history behind this is enormously complex.

A long time ago I tried to read beyond just an autobiographical book by a genocide survivor, and the more I read the less I "knew." The surprise here is that people are reading about 26 violent deaths in Burundi.

And, sure, Muriel, I'm guessing we can reasonably assume psychopathy will be seen in some who participated in this directed terrorist attack. After all, psychopathy is all too common in stable, advanced societies, probably 1 in 30 or more, so how much more likely is it to be found among people who lived through, and in some cases participated in, unspeakable horrors and never joined the many who returned to their communities and tried to resume normal lives?

But psychopathy alone doesn't even begin to explain why this organized group traveled many miles through very difficult, dangerous terrain to murder in Burundi. Recognizing that there is more than one factor involved is evidence of intelligence at work, cognition analyzing existing and new information.

[DRoseDARs]

16. I'm trying not to get angry or take it personally, but this thread has really bothered me tonight...

This thread has literally kept me up all night. It breaks my heart that I'm apparently arguing with someone over this. I don't know about #BeBest, but we as a world need to #BeBetterThanThis.

[muriel_volestrangler]

17. Let's be clear: you were the one who made it personal

You told me to "check my Western privilege". So it's a bit late for you to whine that you don't want to take it personally. I'm pissed off you're arguing that murderers have miserable lives, and that I "demonstrate why genocides keep happening". I'm glad you're taking time to think about this, rather than sleeping in denial of the attitude you have.

[Hortensis]

18. :) Most people ARE better than this, DR. Most DUers

read threads for what thoughtful people post and/or to seek agreement with their own views. They just pass on by what they don't agree with. Some of us not so repelled by strife do stop to comment, then then move on.

[DRoseDARs]

19. And others, come Hell or high water, dig in their heels whether it's a good idea or not...

I'm exhausted in more ways than one now.

[Jedi Guy]

20. I think I understand what Muriel might have meant by "psychopathy."

Because you're right: we are, all of us on DU, privileged in that we don't live in a place where things like this happen. These people live in a world where hacking your neighbors to death has become normalized, because as you point out, the hatred is passed from one generation to the next. Each group views the others not as people, but as enemies. The prevalence and strength of the cultural hatred has resulted in the dehumanization of the "others" to the point that hacking them to death with machetes and burning their homes is just what one does. And if they don't do it first, then the others will do it to them, because it's happened before.

We can't imagine living in that world. The poorest of us have privileges and resources that these people can't imagine. We live in a society where violence is proscribed and it's accepted that one doesn't physically attack or kill others, regardless of how strongly one disagrees with them. When someone does display that kind of remorseless brutality in our culture, it's not uncommon that they actually are psychopathic.

To us, the mindset of "hack a different group to death with machetes" is psychopathic, not in a clinical sense but in a shorthand sense. It's a quick way to rationalize events like these, rather than a literal psychiatric diagnosis. This mindset is so outside our frame of reference that "psychopathy" is a label we can put on the behavior in order to understand it from our point of view.

I don't think any moral relativism was intended, and I don't think Muriel was exercising privilege. I think that, in a moment of shock and revulsion, she used a term to describe the behavior in the only way she could think of at that moment.

[karynnj]

2. Either to stop the referendum because the country is deemed too dangerous

or it is not random, but in an area that is against the killers.

[christx30]

3. So stop democracy because of the actions of criminals

and murderers?
Better idea: Government tracks these people down. Slaughters them without mercy. Holds another referendum.

[DRoseDARs]

4. You understand that these 3 countries have suffered several genocides the past few decades, right?

Zaire (now Democratic Republic of Congo), Rwanda, Burundi. At least one of the recent genocides was specifically because the government incited one group of people to track down and slaughter without mercy another. And they did. With gusto. And machetes.



Goddamn, people are wearing their cultural and historical blinders today.

[karynnj]

5. I was answering the question asked - which was why kill random people?

I was certainly not recommending or accepting their reason.

[oberliner]

13. Absolutely awful

[Sunlei]

21. Now Americans have military bases in Africa and also China set-up bases right next door to them.

They target American Jets with lasers , as stated last month. Just wait for WW3, they won't need missiles to knock everything out of the sky and 'burn' stuff from space.