One stuffy Friday night in spring 2017, Thierry Hakizimana, a driver for a Catholic diocese in northern Burundi, stopped by a bar near his home after work to take the edge off. Around 9.30pm, reports say, three men herded him outside. Neither friends nor family heard from him that weekend. On the Monday, when Thierry didn’t show for work, his boss stopped by. Thierry’s house was empty and the doors were locked. His boss called Celine, Thierry’s sister, a quiet but tenaciously devout nun in Bujumbura, the country’s then-capital city. She left on a bus headed north to his small, low-slung city.

Celine called Thierry’s phone throughout the three-hour journey. No answer. She wondered why anybody would hurt him. Their family was Tutsi, a group accustomed to swift gruesome bloodletting, whether in Burundi or its northern neighbour Rwanda.

But Burundi’s recent violence was political, not ethnic. Celine knew Thierry was no fan of Pierre Nkurunziza, 12 years the country’s leader, who openly dreamed of returning it to a monarchy. Thierry wasn’t politically active. He suffered mental illness that often clipped his otherwise open, chatty character. In April 2015 Nkurunziza announced his run for an unconstitutional third term. Protests became an abortive coup and Burundian society unspooled into violent threads. Thierry stayed at home and focused on his favourite hobby: fixing old electronics.

By July, the coup quashed, Nkurunziza won his term uncontested. He empowered Burundi’s security apparatus and expanded the Imbonerakure, a ragtag youth militia whose name means “Those who see from afar” in Kirundi, the local language. The state hunted protesters, politicians and journalists. People vanished. Some returned, coated in scars like fat, pink slugs. Many didn’t.

Celine knew Thierry would stay quiet when sober. But, she feared, after a couple of beers he may easily have told the wrong person how cruel he thought 2015 had been. As Celine arrived in Thierry’s city a strange man answered Thierry’s phone. He told her he’d found it in his boss’ office, whose name he claimed not to know. She asked him where he lived: the man gave an address. Celine called the United Nations’ human rights office in Bujumbura. An official there confirmed the address sat beside a home belonging to the local chief of the SNR, the state’s intelligence agency.

A severely burnt survivor of the 2004 Gatumba refugee camp massacre © Christophe Calais

The UN discovered the names of the men who took Thierry. On the Thursday they told Celine the men had driven him to the Rwandan border and killed him there. His sources said the men cut off pieces of Thierry’s flesh and severed his head. Two of Celine’s other brothers fled the country. The UN passed her information to a local rights official, who began calling her incessantly. She received calls from other unknown numbers: she figured the local official had switched sides and given her details to the SNR.

Celine was alone in a distant city. The men who killed Thierry could be anywhere and she couldn’t even tell them in a crowd. She needed to get out. They were coming for her next. If they found her, nobody would come. And if they murdered her, nobody would face justice.

Bujumbura means “Place of the silver/bronze market”, though some believe “silver/bronze” is actually “sweet potato”. In 2013 the city’s market burned down. Sellers now hawk on the streetside beside its mangled frame. Rich locals buy homes on hills to look over the mess to Lake Tanganyika, around whose northern tip the city bends. Tanganyika is where Africa’s Great Rift plunges closest to the earth’s crust, meaning that, in at least two senses, Bujumbura sits at the edge of an abyss.

In 1922 Belgium inherited Burundi and Rwanda – then a single colonial possession – from Germany. It made Bujumbura its capital and built a centre-ville of art deco blocks and winding, palm-lined boulevards. The city coddled tourists and tempted Western diplomats into boozy retirement. They drank away nights at beach bars and blasted the resulting hangovers with cocaine-strength coffee, grown on local plantations that, when the monsoons steered clear, could pass for Tuscany.

Today’s Bujumbura is also laissez-faire, with a clutch of French cafés and open-air bars at which young locals howl at Premier League football stars. But you are more likely to see a mass grave than a sightseer. Tourism was estimated to add three per cent to an economy pushing up daisies in 2018. When I applied for a visa at my local Burundian embassy, the employee there let out a gasp. She disappeared into a back room, returning with a dust-covered ledger she blew clean like a fictional sage.

The Burundian state has erected entire monuments to apocrypha. South of Bujumbura a large boulder marks the spot where Henry Morton Stanley was believed to have met explorer David Livingstone in 1871. The actual meeting took place 100 miles south, in Ujiji, Tanzania. Further afield sits a stone pyramid that Burundi says is the source of the Nile. Rwanda claims, and most scientists agree, that the real source is in its own Nyungwe Forest.

I arrived at Bujumbura’s space-age airport, which looks like a sleeping stormtrooper, one early evening last November (I flew 40 minutes from Kigali, Rwanda’s capital: the bus journey is cheap and takes six hours, but Burundian police regularly stop vehicles and attack people at the border). The 15-minute ride to my hotel was a greatest hits of failed-state totems: flattened NGO billboards; burning trash; shelled-out homes; flatbeds full of young men in untucked fatigues. These features have barely changed in half a century.

Before Europeans arrived, Burundi operated under a hierarchical monarchy. As the embodiment of the nation, the king had no ethnicity. His courtesans were Tutsi and the peasantry Hutu, with some exceptions – though both groups looked alike and the concept of ethnicity was more caste-based, as in India. A rich Hutu could become Tutsi by virtue of his or her wealth or social status, and vice versa. Rwanda functioned similarly.

Belgium racialised them both. Its scientists measured noses and skulls and performed other racist quackery. They declared Tutsis, who comprised just 15 per cent of the population, to be the fairer-skinned rulers and Hutus their darker, wide-nosed serfs.

In 1962 Burundi and Rwanda won independence and split. They were doppelgänger of size, population density and demographics, bound by the ethnic atrocities that exploded in them both. “We will have to suffer a lot and die young,” announced Burundi Radio on 28 May 1972, after Tutsis butchered 200,000 or so Hutus in what Burundians call the “Ikiza” or “Scourge”. In 1993 soldiers executed Melchior Ndadaye, Burundi’s first democratically elected president, and kicked off a civil war that killed 300,000 people. The next year, assailants shot down a plane carrying the Hutu presidents of both states over Kigali. Almost nobody in Rwanda had a gun. And yet, during the three months of hysteria that ensued, Hutu gangs butchered up to a million Tutsis and moderate Hutus at a rate of one every nine seconds. They skewered children on sticks and dashed babies’ heads against rocks like melons.

Each fresh hell flushed hundreds of thousands of Rwandans and Burundians into Uganda, Tanzania and the Democratic Republic Of Congo. Rebel groups and génocidaires clustered in camps and towns and ensured the horror continued. Many victims had no choice but to move back into homes next to their former tormentors. “He who does not forget,” goes a Burundian proverb, “cannot live with others.”

Bujumbura hides these traumas in plain view. The red above and below its flag’s white saltire represents violent struggle. A plaintive bust of Ndadaye sits behind gates and thickets in the city centre. Its perpetually fresh-painted eyes haunt flâneurs and salarymen.

I changed Celine’s name for this story. If the state knew her real name she would be arrested, tortured, raped and likely killed. We met on my first morning in Bujumbura, at a shaded seminary beside the convent where she lives. She is slender, soft-spoken and wiped tears from behind pillbox sunglasses as we spoke about Thierry’s death.

Celine escaped Thierry’s city unhurt. She never buried him. It stalks her: “I can’t do anything. The feelings for my brother are still there.” (This is a common, final cruelty in a deeply religious nation: another person I met whose brother was murdered told me the army refused to release his body and showed up at the delayed funeral to threaten grievers.)

Burundi’s minister of public security, Alain Guillaume Bunyoni, visits the village of Ruhagarika, where 26 people were killed in an attempt, he claimed, to disrupt Nkurunziza’s constitutional reform, 12 May 2018 © STR

To ease the pain, Celine immerses herself in liturgy. She often hosts white European missionaries, she added, stressing the “white”. It makes her feel safer, even though she knows houses of God do not escape Burundi’s recent bloodshed. Some of the most frenzied killing of 1972 and 1994 took place within churches – often with the blessing of pastors.

In 2014 three Italian nuns were brutally murdered at a convent a short walk from Celine’s. The killer – or killers – raped two of the women, slit their throats, and decapitated the third. Radio Publique Africaine, a Bujumbura station whose motto was “The voice of the voiceless”, aired the confession of an intelligence agent. The agent said he helped murder the nuns because they witnessed the Imbonerakure militia arming at a former diocese, just across the Congolese border.

Celine would not discuss the 2014 killings. She was born around 30 years ago, one of seven siblings in the southern province of Bururi. Like 90 per cent of Burundians, her parents worked the land, beside a forest whose trees ancient Burundians believed connected heaven and earth. Thierry’s death devastated them, she told me, but they had few to turn to for comfort: many of their friends died in 2015.

Celine went into great detail about Thierry’s death. But on herself, religion, the genocide or the government, she refused to speak. These things were “political”, she told me, and she had long learned not to discuss politics.

None of the victims of state violence I met in Burundi allowed me to publish their name. Nkurunziza and his ruling party, the tongue-twisting National Council For The Defence Of Democracy-Forces For The Defence Of Democracy (CNDD-FDD), watch everybody. Modern tyrannies function through spyware, smartphones and CCTV. Nkurunziza’s budget is equivalent to that of Shropshire’s. But he rules a country of eleven million people, in a heart-shaped spur smaller that the Midlands: Burundi’s police state is a lot of men, everywhere. In 2010 Nkurunziza founded the Imbonerakure to help squash opposition at that year’s election. Today the militia is ever-present. At sunset, groups of Imbonerakure flock to the streets, erecting makeshift roadblocks and stopping cars at will. It creates a “sinister, unsettling atmosphere”, one diplomat told me. “They’re evolving to become an arm of the state security apparatus without even a modicum of accountability or transparency.”

Each morning one or two more men appeared at the gate of my small, browbeaten hotel in Bujumbura, wearing a patchwork of uniforms and plain clothes. By the time I checked out, there were enough for a football match. Those who followed me made few overtures to spycraft. But their presence wasn’t intended for me.

Ndondeza, a human rights watchdog, has recorded 62 forced disappearances and 89 killings since 2015. The troubles have accelerated since around the time of Thierry’s murder. I met people in deserted beach bars, hotel rooms and on the back seats of taxis. One day I embarked on an impromptu safari, conducting an interview while staring through binoculars at bloats of grey hippos that paddled down the Rusizi River to Congo. Another interviewee burst into tears when he recalled the mutilated body of his brother, at which point my translator dove to cover him as if he were a live grenade.

Others had given up on justice. “If you know the disease, then you have to cure it,” one man, whose brother was murdered in 2015, told me. “But I’ve been traumatised… there’s no sense in speaking.”

‘If you know the disease, you have to cure it. But I’ve been traumatised… there’s no sense in speaking’

Pierre Nkurunziza had been Burundi’s great hope. He was a mixed Tutsi-Hutu, whose father and five of six siblings were killed in the chaos of 1972. In 1995 Nkurunziza joined Hutu rebels in the civil war, having survived an assassination attempt. He excelled as a leader. When the war ended, in 2005, the CNDD-FDD chose Nkurunziza to bridge Burundi’s ethnic chasm.

The peace was all anybody really cared about. But Nkurunziza tightened control: the CNDD-FDD harassed opposition groups, hounded media and spoiled ballots. In 2010 Nkurunziza won a second term uncontested. Dissent simmered. Party officials christened the Imbonerakure to silence it.

Nkurunziza, an ordained minister, began telling people God had chosen him to lead the country. He moved from Bujumbura to Gitega, the historic seat of Burundi’s abolished monarchy 40 miles east and delivered jungle justice back to the capital. The bodies of opposition leaders began turning up beside the streets of Bujumbura’s pretty, cobblestoned suburbs. In 2014 Nkurunziza, a former PE lecturer and fitness evangelist who had coached two of Burundi’s best football clubs, banned jogging in Bujumbura: traditionally a way for groups to escape bedlam in relative safety, the president thought it a conspirators’ tool.

“In the evening you had these strange men wearing long coats, which is so unusual – I mean, who wears a long coat in Burundi? – and they held large sticks, weapons and they were roaming in the neighbourhood at night,” Ketty Nivyabandi, a writer and activist who was living in Kinindo, south of Bujumbura, told me. “Sometimes they would abduct people… We felt very, very afraid.”

Rwanda’s president, Paul Kagame, whose insurgency quelled its genocide two decades before, announced he would steamroll its constitution and run for office a third time. Nkurunziza pondered the same. But Kagame led an economic renaissance in Rwanda. Nkurunziza had somehow made peacetime Burundi poorer. His hamfisted underlings skimmed money everywhere, robbing citizens of what remained of the country’s economy. That October Nivyabandi took to Twitter: “Bubbles and bubbles of fear, simmering in our bellies, in our eyes, in our words, in our fist. I pray they do not burst.”

In 2015 Burundi’s constitutional court cleared a legal path for Nkurunziza’s third term. One of the judges claimed harassment and fled to Rwanda. It stirred opposition groups into action.

Patrice, who I met in a deserted Bujumbura hotel restaurant, worked for one of them – he wouldn’t tell me which. He saw Nkurunziza joining the ranks of leaders across Africa who clung to power for decades. He chose to act. “We were spurring change,” he told me. “We were fighting for freedom.”

Patrice sank a litre of lager before he stopped shaking enough to speak to me. He wore a red Hawaiian shirt, the sleeves of which billowed over his arms, brittle like deadwood and covered in crooked, painful-looking scars. He is from a “remote village”. He told me he was a driver, but little else about life before the unrest. After an hour he panicked and left.

In April 2015 Patrice helped organise the Halte Au Troisième Mandat (“Stop The Third Term”) movement against Nkurunziza. They descended on Bujumbura on the 25th. Protesters felled trees and set them on fire, cleaving the city into a burning, smoke-filled maze. Blocks of blue-shirted police ran at them like ill-disciplined centurions.

In May protesters tossed grenades and rocks at cops, who fired into the crowds. Nkurunziza called the demonstrators “enemies of the nation”. On 13 May a military coup ignited, spluttered and died within a day. The government stepped up violence, blacked out social media and firebombed Radio Publique Africaine’s Bujumbura office. By the end of the month the uprising had wilted.

Patrice returned to his village. But Nkurunziza, who retained power that July, again uncontested, ordered his men to hunt the protesters and coup plotters. Police, state intelligence and Imbonerakure dispersed across the country. Assassinations continued throughout the year. On 11 December Nkurunziza orchestrated a purge of the military in Bujumbura, during which 87 people died.

My fixer, Boniface, lived in the district at the time. I first met him at a hotel in which he worked, exchanging pleasantries and clipped Signal messages as he served me food, careful not to raise the suspicions of his colleagues at the bar. An activist in Kigali brokered our meetings via encrypted messaging apps the entire time. In Burundi honest conversations are not conducted in public.

The next day, in a cab chosen by our mutual friend across the border, Boniface told me about 2015. Police cable-tied and executed people on the streets. They raped women and children while fathers watched on helpless. They covered bodies in canvas before carrying them to mass graves. Soldiers called them Mujeri (“stray dogs”). Most people who lived there were Tutsi, like the majority of the opposition. “On that day I felt something like a revolution in me,” Boniface told me one day, as we drove past an Imbonerakure roadblock, “seeing people, civilians, being killed like goats…”

Nkurunziza’s men skimmed money everywhere, robbing what remained of the country’s economy

The next year continued on the same path. At 5am on 4 September 2016, Patrice heard a group of cops outside his front door. When he opened they rushed in and turned the house upside down looking for weapons. They even smashed his roof in. But they found nothing. The cops were about to leave. Then an old woman, a neighbour of Patrice, began telling them to arrest him. “He’s a killer,” she said. Three officers emerged from the crowd and tied his hands. They threw him in the boot and cranked the stereo up to full volume, driving round for hours. They stopped just once, beside a river. They opened the boot, hauled him out, threw him into the water and tossed him back in, soaked.

Around 9pm the car stopped and they dragged Patrice out again. The officers had parked beside a shipping container. They threw him inside and slammed the door. There were six others inside with him. Sometimes cops opened the door and led somebody out. Those people never returned.

After three days in the container cops took Patrice to a compound belonging to the SNR. Intelligence staff beat him with a clothes iron and melted plastic bags onto his skin. They put metal rods in a fire, then held them against his fingers. A man held with Patrice had several of his fingers cut off. On the fourth day an intelligence officer came to the compound. He took Patrice and put him on the back seat of his car, between two blood-soaked bodies. Patrice thought he was about to die. But as the car pulled out of the compound, the officer got a call: he was to kill a different prisoner. Cops dragged Patrice back to his cell. That night they barely stopped beating him. They stripped him naked, pistol-whipped him, hit him with wooden planks and spread chemical agent over his skin that burned like fire. They didn’t want anything from him. They just kept hitting him. That night they threw Patrice in a small cell, alone. Each day they took him out and beat him more. Three prisoners there died: after that, the cops stopped beating him.

After a month there they transferred him to Mpimba, Burundi’s largest prison, just outside Bujumbura. It was cramped and sometimes Patrice didn’t eat for two days. Prison officials kept constant watch. Talking or even greeting other prisoners was forbidden. A judge gave him a 30-year sentence for robbery, then reduced it to 18 months on appeal.

Patrice was freed a month before we met. He had hitherto remained silent about his ordeal. Police had killed his brother, who worked with the same opposition party, while he was in jail. They cut off his genitals before he died. Patrice hasn’t spoken to his parents. They became two of the 200,000 Burundians who fled during the violence; he doesn’t know where they are now. A friend hosts him in a home outside Bujumbura. He can’t find work. He stays quiet and barely moves. Friends won’t meet him: it would bring them too much trouble. Patrice’s hope is to leave Burundi for Rwanda or Uganda, but he can’t get documents from the government and doesn’t have money for bribes. He is trapped. “I’m still hiding myself,” he told me. “It’s very dangerous for me.”

Patrice’s story is not uncommon in Burundi. The state has stuffed its prisons far beyond capacity since 2015. Many have no release date. The violence forced politicians, lawyers and civil society into exile. The CNDD-FDD dismantled or outlawed almost all of the country’s opposition parties.

Victims of the Gatumba refugee camp massacre, 14 August 2004 © SIMON MAINA

In April it arrested 130 members of the CNL, the largest opposition group. A senior police chief threatened CNL members holding “clandestine nocturnal” meetings. “You will be attracting misfortune on your entire family,” Jerome Ntibibogora, commissioner in the eastern Muyinga province, said. “If you want to disrupt security, I’ll finish with you there. And if you’re with your wife and children, you’ll go together.”

“The situation is very hard… It’s a fight,” Aimé Magera, a Brussels-based CNL spokesman, told me. “In 2020 the CNDD will want to win by force. The population is not ready. It will react. There will be a war.”

“The country did not emerge from violence in 2015,” Fabien Banciryanino, an independent MP and the only critical voice in Burundi’s body politic, told me. “Rather, the violence changed forms.”

The ruling party decimated Burundi’s media, too. Many fled to Rwanda, whose own dictator stifles dissent. Those who remained lived in fear. Some have disappeared. In July 2015 a group of exiled journalists founded Radio Inzamba, named for a military trumpet “used to wake up the warriors”, writer Valery Muco told me. We met at Kigali’s public library, built to counter the Hutu monopoly on information that precipitated the 1994 genocide.

Radio Inzamba monitors hate speech in Burundi since Nkurunziza’s sham election victory. The president has become a master of dog whistles, Muco said, making veiled references to Tutsis as “dirty” and “dogs”. Nkurunziza often uses Tutsi-led Rwanda as a proxy for rhetoric against Tutsis generally, he added. “The hate messaging he is sending to the people every day,” Muco told me, “you’ll see there will be a change in their minds.”

Everybody I spoke to in Burundi believed the country was sliding back towards ethnic division. In April 2017 a chilling video showed more than 100 Imbonerakure in Ntega, a village near the Rwandan border, clapping and chanting about making “opponents pregnant so they can give birth to Imbonerakure”. It mirrored chants by Rwanda’s youth militia, the Interahamwe, shortly before the outbreak of the 1994 genocide. An official I met at the International Criminal Court (ICC) at The Hague told me Burundi’s ethnic tension functioned similarly to religious enmity in Lebanon, which bubbles to prominence only when political institutions fail.

The Imbonerakure is slipping out of the state’s control. It has terrorised Burundian refugees outside the country’s borders and is rumoured to have trafficked young women into sexual slavery in Kenya. Its members commit rape as a “weapon of war”, Susanne, a women’s rights activist told me. We met in Brussels’ Anderlecht district, where thousands of exiled Burundians now live. Susanne read from case files Burundians send her organisation. One 54-year-old woman couldn’t remember how many Imbonerakure raped her at a refugee camp. Another, in her forties, was raped by a policeman who then attacked her with his rifle butt and returned three days later to murder her husband. Seven policemen raped a three-year-old girl in 2016; when her father walked in, they killed him.

Susanne has received more than 40 of these cases since 2015. “We have to fight,” she told me, wiping away tears. “I have trained myself to be strong, to hear other people’s stories. Because we don’t have any other person to hear us.” She fears the Imbonerakure will find her in Belgium and stays home most nights.

Amid the chaos, Nkurunziza’s tinpot rule has deepened. In 2016 he banned motorcycles from Bujumbura, fearing a two-wheeled insurgency. In 2017 he banned women from drumming, a national tradition, without government approval. When the ICC announced it would investigate alleged crimes against humanity committed from 2015 to 2017, Burundi became the first country on earth to leave it.

Last March the CNDD-FDD named the 54-year-old Nkurunziza Burundi’s “eternal supreme guide”. In May bloodshed erupted around a referendum to allow him to rule the country until 2034 (even then, he wouldn’t make Africa’s top five: Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, of Equatorial Guinea, has been in power for almost 40 years).

Soon after, Nkurunziza announced he wouldn’t run in the next presidential election, in 2020. Few expect him to relinquish control. I made dozens of attempts to interview Nkurunziza for this story. Each time I was given the number of an aide or spokesperson who passed me to another, bobbing aimlessly round a bureaucratic carousel.

Later, in 2018, Burundi ordered the closure of the UN’s human rights office. It demanded foreign NGOs deposit funds in its national bank and hand over records of their Burundian employees’ ethnicity. “The situation for us is really, really dangerous,” Chantal van Cutsem, executive director of Lawyers Without Borders, told me. “You don’t know what they will do with this information and what it will lead to.”

Basics such as food and petrol are becoming hard to find in a region climate change is rapidly affecting

Van Cutsem’s staff left Burundi on 31 December 2018, as Nkurunziza moved the capital from Bujumbura to Gitega. Russian mercenaries now guard economic interests and train Burundi’s military. China has erected a £17 million presidential palace outside Bujumbura. In many ways, post-2015 Burundi better resembles a medieval fiefdom than a nation-state. And as its leader slumps even further into his throne, the situation could quickly worsen.

In March police arrested three teenage girls for scrawling on the president’s image in textbooks. The problem isn’t just Nkurunziza’s cult of personality, Nivyabandi told me. “You have a chain of people who need to keep proving their allegiance to the party,” she said. “And, for me, that’s even more frightening.”

In recent years, veins of rare earth metals have been discovered beneath Burundi’s soil. But the political turmoil has turned off all but one private foreign firm. One activist showed me documents proving that it pays a £307,000 “contribution to community development” that does not appear in the state budget. When asked to respond, a company spokesperson said the amount was simply part of their 2017 concession contract. Another activist told me that mining sites pollute drinking water in Lake Tanganyika. “Nothing is done correctly,” the activist told me. “The people don’t know anything.”

Even coffee, Burundi’s cash cow, makes less in a year than most mid-sized UK businesses. Basics such as food and petrol are becoming hard to find in a region climate change is rapidly affecting. Sanctions would likely hit the poorest Burundians worst. “Its people are so poor,” said one UN official. “It can’t get much worse.”

Only 20 countries have an embassy in Burundi. Nkurunziza has effectively threatened them and the wider international community into forfeiting human rights for regional stability. “They are lashing out and it’s becoming more and more unpredictable what they will do,” a Western diplomat told me. “And if you look at the last year or so, their threshold for doing that seems to be slowly going down.”

Burundi’s neighbours have done the same, hoping that a stable Burundi will entice back 400,000 or so refugees who have now fled since 2015. Nothing Western diplomats have done has changed the behaviour of the CNDD-FDD, one former government official explained: “There’s still a fair amount of impunity that is there. And that is very, very frustrating for the international community.”

“If 20 civilians died today the whole world would spend a whole week, or the next two weeks, talking about new strategies,” Gervais, an exiled human rights activist, told me.

Burundi is poor. It doesn’t have oil. It isn’t a breeding ground for Islamist terror and its migrants don’t land on Europe’s shores. These things might rouse the world’s governments into action. Torture, rape and the occasional murder do not. Thierry Vircoulon, of the International Crisis Group, concluded it more succinctly: “They don’t give a shit.”

Celine hasn’t stopped fighting to bring Thierry’s killers to justice. She knows her chances are slim. People still call her phone from anonymous numbers, telling her to stop looking into his case. In April somebody told her they had viewed a video of Thierry’s death. She is not sure the video exists; she thinks it was meant as a threat.

Thierry’s twin brother, Jonathan, has given up entirely. Those who should seek justice, he told me, “just make those who command do these barbaric acts”. One morning, six months after Thierry’s murder, Jonathan visited a store to buy a recharge card for his mobile phone. Suddenly, police cars surrounded him. Cops brought him to the nearest SNR office. Agents shouted at him and told him not to mention his brother’s disappearance.

Later that night they released Jonathan. But the episode terrified him. “The signs were there,” he told me. “I decided to leave my country.” Today Jonathan lives in a tiny one-room shanty in a major South African city. He is poor and barely speaks English. He was studying civil rights at the University Of Burundi when he left. “I am confused. My projects are gone,” he said. “Everything is stopped. I don’t know who I am.”

Jonathan fears for Celine. He knows about the Italian nuns and that despite Pierre Nkurunziza’s deep faith, religious leaders are not immune from his followers’ cruelty. “She can be killed from one moment to the next.”

Celine knows this too. But when I asked her about the threats to her life and the danger she lives with each day she sat unmoved. “For now, I’m trying to do things as normal,” she said, looking beyond our shaded spot to trees that swayed below the sun. Those praying for peace in Burundi are the same people who killed Thierry, she said.

She looked back at me. “When they come,” she said, “I will not avoid them.”

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