110 Scarcity and Surfeit
assistance substituted for any efforts to mobilise internal resources and thus
frustrated even minimal domestic capital accumulation. Thirdly, donors and
development partners preferred to deal directly with the government rather
than with the private sector and civil associations. Public enterprises and the
government administration benefited at the expense of the private sector, sti-
fling competition and growth. Civil society was not helped to develop inde-
pendently. The overall result of this interaction between aid and government
policy is massive foreign debt, and falling per capita income.
However, on balance, international aid can also create extreme pressure
for reform if donors threaten to withdraw it or actually do so. In the after-
math of the 1988 violence, political reforms were pushed through by the
threat of reduced aid, especially by France, one of Burundi's main donors.
We have already noted the extreme effects on the economy when interna-
tional financial assistance was scaled down following the derailment of
democracy in 1993 and its eventual freeze in 1995 following the initiation of
the regroupment policy. This placed the Burundi government in a desperate
economic position. Whether the sanctions fulfilled their intended purpose of
bringing the government to the negotiation table is discussed elsewhere in
this chapter.
Government dependence on income from exporting primary commodities,
especially coffee, to developed markets has already been noted. The nation-
al economy is therefore extremely vulnerable to price fluctuations in inter-
national commodity prices, and coffee prices are notoriously unstable. The
price swings in the mid-1980s brought Burundi's economy to the brink of cri-
sis. The IMF and World Bank reacted with pressure for economic structural
readjustment, including a cut in military spending. This threat to elite inter-
ests, among other factors, contributed to the outbreak of violence in 1988.
The Connection between Predation and Violence
The previous section analysed the causes and effects, domestic and interna-
tional, of Burundi's predatory state and economy. We postulate that this
predatory system leads to conflict and violence through the following mutu-
ally reinforcing mechanisms.
First, the elites use violence to gain and maintain control over the state
and its patronage resources. Violence is targeted at potential and perceived
competitors for power. This is illustrated by the brutal extermination of most
educated and influential Hutus in 1965 and 1972.
Second, there is a temporal correlation between economic crisis and gov-
ernment violence and repression. This is because the resources with which
the government has to feed its client base shrink, therefore weakening the
position of elite factions within their own networks of patronage. This can be
seen as the main impetus for violence in 1988, following pressure because of
falling coffee prices and international calls for structural readjustment.