Jean-Baptiste Bagaza
Jean-Baptiste Bagaza was president of Burundi from November 1976, when he removed Micombero in a bloodless coup, to September 1987, when Buyoya removed him in another while he was at a francophone summit in Quebec. He was a Tutsi officer from the same Bururi hills as both of them. The eleven years were the ones in which the country was built and the church was persecuted. The building was real. There were the hydroelectric dams, the roads, the coffee washing stations, and the land reform of 1977 that abolished the last of the ubugererwa tenancy. There were the villagisation, the state companies, the constitution of 1981 and the single party UPRONA that ran everything, and the growth that made the World Bank call the country a model. The persecution was real too. He thought the Catholic church, which ran the schools and had a Hutu clergy, a state within the state. From 1979 he expelled the foreign missionaries, then the Burundian priests' seminaries, banned weekday masses, closed the catechism classes, nationalised the schools and, by 1986, had shut most of the churches and jailed the priests who would not stop. The country, which was Catholic, did not forgive it, and it was the reason given for the coup. On the ethnic question he said nothing. The massacres of 1972 were not spoken of, the Hutu were not counted. The army, the civil service and the university stayed Tutsi. That was the arrangement his successor inherited and which exploded a year after him. He was born in Rutovu, and trained at the Belgian military academy. He was Micombero's deputy chief of staff at twenty-five. After the coup he lived in Libya and Uganda, and came home in 1993 under the amnesty. He founded the PARENA party of Tutsi hardliners, was accused of plotting against Buyoya in 1997 and put under house arrest. He sat as a senator for life, as the constitution of 2005 lets former presidents do. He died in Brussels in May 2016. Nkurunziza, whom he had opposed, gave him a state funeral.
- Lived: 1946 CE – 2016 CE
- Nationality: Burundian
- Roles: president, army officer, politician
