Rwandans take advantage of peace in Burundi

At the Saga Plage beach resort past the military barracks just outside of Bujumbura, Burundi’s beleaguered, embattled capital, a young student from KIST visiting her boyfriend tells me there is nothing like Burundi Primus. In fact, she says, there is nothing like Burundi.Since peace was wrested from violence last month in Burundi, its capital Bujumbura has seen some gradual changes. Although throughout the fighting the city has always kept its sense of self, there has been a new burst in tourism – especially to its popular beach fronts. This is where you can find Jenny, the KIST student, along with eight other Rwandans gathered around the beach front bar, passing around bottles of that cold Primus, Gin and feasting on chicken breasts and frog legs. It’s Tuesday, late afternoon, and they are in need of celebrating, “Work is over,” Claude, whose family is from Butare, “war is over, peace is here and it’s nice today.”Claude runs an envelope-printing business with his father, but the government has been weak in protecting the business, and now that peace has returned—along with an influx of tourists, mostly Rwandese, he has begun renting out SUVs on a daily rate. “The business is good, there is another Rwandan building a new hotel just down the road,” he says. Claude’s father left Rwanda in 1959, along with many others, but he has been living back and forth between here and Kigali many times. Now that peace has come to Burundi, he has intentions settling permanently. He is far from being the only one. A manager of the Sage Plage bar, a Frenchman named Jacques who has been living in Bujumbura for the last 18 years—including all 15 years of war—says that the resort has seen many new faces since fighting ended, the vast majority of them coming from north of the border. Rwandans have been coming to Burundi for years, its natural brother, but tourism for tourism’s sake has really picked up only in the last month. Rwandair now flies to Bujumbura every day, and its own national air carrier, Air Burundi, has launched its first services in over a year, the debut flights going to Kigali. Ethiopian, Kenyan, and Brussels airlines all link ‘Buj’—as the locals call it—to the rest of Africa and Europe, always through Kigali. There are now three different bus companies that directly connect Kigali and Butare to the capital. Ends