I have made some friends in my various trips to Burundi. One such friend is a Roman Catholic priest from Bukavu in South Kivu, just over the border in Congo. He is a cheerful, lively young man and endlessly curious about all sorts of theological and ethical matters and we often have good interesting conversations.
These past couple of weeks, however, the conversations have been about wars and rumours of war. About the conflict in Northern Kivu and the fall of Goma to the M23 rebel group. Although most of my friend’s family are safe, for the moment, in Bukavu, his younger brother was studying IT in a college in Goma and is now trapped there. He has had no direct contact with any of his family for nearly two weeks.
There are often Congolese people staying for a few days here. It is not far from the border and the guest house is generally quiet and safe. As the M23 group tightened its grip on Goma there have been a number of people passing through who come from either Bukavu or Goma. Most are trying to get back home, trying to get back to family, work, and businesses, hoping to rebuild lives. Bujumbura, however, has many Congolese families and many people have fled from the fighting in recent weeks, and are now staying permanently with relatives. Others are stuck in Congo, as the frontier is now closed, and Bukavu is also full of refugees, some staying with families, others sheltering in schools and churches.
This is a war which has little by way of justification apart from a naked grab for the power and wealth that comes from North Kivu’s reserves of minerals vital to today’s electronic society. Greed for wealth and power, and the illusions of security that these bring, are part of the human condition, but as Christians were are supposed to be “in Christ” and thus part of a new creation, a new version of humanity shaped not by the deeply conflicted striving for what others have but rather by the self emptying of God in Jesus Christ. St. Paul writing to the Philippians expressed this clearly: “Have this mind among you that was in Christ Jesus”.
That mind of Christ includes the refugees and migrants that are the subject of so much controversy and even violence in our own country. The people I have spoken to are educated and hard working, one running a series of small development NGOs, another a telecoms engineer and one Anglican Bishop. They are not some sort of “invasion” but people who want nothing more than to be “godly and quietly governed”, if at all possible, surrounded by their own families in the familiar world of language and culture of their own home places. Bishop Bahati from Bukavu told me of his 8 children and 17 grand-children all still in Bukavu. The prophet Jeremiah makes a powerful, blunt, and emphatic statement without any ifs or buts: “The refugee, the widow, the orphan you shall not oppress” (Jer 7:6), to remind us that we have only one set of duties towards these our sisters and brothers deprived of safety and security by conflict: to pray and work for peace, to pressurise our own political leaders to take courageous actions, and to welcome those fleeing the horrors of modern warfare, or the devastation caused by climate change, both caused, largely, by our own greed.
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