Burundi: An interfaith platform that rebuilt “everyday peace” after the 2015 crisis
POST-CONFLICT HEALING
Takeaway: In Burundi’s post‑2015 landscape, interfaith leaders made peace practical, replacing silence with steady, local routines that pulled people back from the edge.
In April and May 2015, Bujumbura boiled over. The ruling party backed President Pierre Nkurunziza for a third term. Courts sided with him. A coup attempt on May 13 failed. What followed was grim: killings, grenade attacks, targeted arrests, families on the move. By May 2017, UN counts estimated roughly 420,000 Burundian refugees and about 200,000 people displaced inside the country. The danger was not only violence. It was the slow slide into numbness, treating fear as normal.
In that break, the Conseil Inter-Confessionnel du Burundi (CICB), also known as the Inter-Religious Council of Burundi, chose a deliberately local response. In 2018 and 2019, with EU support through the Communities Richer in Diversity (CRID) project, CICB ran interfaith dialogues, youth sports and cultural events, and public marches across Bujumbura Mairie, Bujumbura Rural, Muyinga, and Rumonge. Not abstract gatherings. Think football games on school pitches, traditional drummers in neighborhood squares, joint cleanups that turned into conversations. The aim was clear enough: reduce recruitment into party-linked youth militias, cool ethnic and political radicalization, and rebuild what many call everyday peace. A baseline survey captured the urgency. In Bujumbura Mairie, 35.9% of respondents said they personally knew a victim of political violence.
CICB’s programming faced a hard fact. Rival youth wings had become de facto enforcers, especially the Imbonerakure of the CNDD-FDD, repeatedly accused by rights groups of intimidation and abuse. CICB’s “transformation pathway” tried to bend that arc. It trained local clerics, women, and youth leaders as prevention actors, stitched ties back together across mosques, parishes, and neighborhood councils, and offered nonviolent outlets for energy and anger. The case study describes work at the colline, or hill, level, exactly where rumor and retaliation usually start. In practice, that meant trusted voices pushing back on hearsay before it hardened, and creating spaces where rivals could meet without a microphone.
The interfaith voice showed up outside the peace lane too. As health officials worked to lift routine immunization and later COVID-19 uptake, the Ministry of Health and partners enlisted religious and local leaders to counter hesitation and bring families back to clinics. It appears to have helped for a simple reason. Parents still trust their imam after Friday prayers, their priest after Mass, and the pastor who knows their child’s name.
Diplomatic reporting took note of the platform as well. U.S. briefs describe engagement with the Inter-Religious Council of Burundi as the table where the country’s major faiths gather, useful for social cohesion, election messaging, and human rights concerns. The wider picture also includes the Catholic bishops’ strong public statements during the crisis and their decision in late May 2015 to withdraw from election support structures. Some saw that move as a necessary line on credibility. Others worried it would shrink the Church’s leverage inside the process. Both views likely capture a piece of the moment.
CICB’s case work reads like a manual for refusing indifference. When politics hardened, the platform kept neighbors in the same room long enough to cool down. When young people were being pulled into militias, it offered alternatives that felt local and dignified. When health campaigns needed trusted messengers, clergy translated technical guidance into moral language people already recognized. None of this is flashy. It is civic maintenance repeated until fear has less room to grow. Impact was uneven and sometimes fragile, as you would expect. But the direction of travel seems right.
Sources (selection)
Faith to Action Network case study on CICB and the CRID program, crisis background, provinces covered, cultural tools, and baseline data: faithtoactionetwork.org
Gavi on engaging religious and local leaders to raise vaccination: gavi.org
U.S. State Department International Religious Freedom Report on the Inter-Religious Council of Burundi: state.gov
Catholic bishops’ guidance and the Church’s withdrawal from election support in May 2015: USCCB; Al Jazeera
