His name translates to “God-given hope.” He comes from a nation where hope often gets lost.
But Dieudonne Kwizera is here, proud to be the first man to carry Burundi’s flag into an Olympics, the culmination of an eight-year personal crusade to get his small, troubled African nation included in the Olympic family.
“Sports really haven’t been a priority in my country,” Kwizera said. “But I think sports can help our country. The only time people hear about Burundi is when there is trouble–genocide, massacres, coups. But people can see something positive when we run.”
As he spoke on a bench in the Olympic Village on Wednesday morning, a song played over the speaker system: John Lennon’s “Imagine.”
It’s hard to imagine the experiences Kwizera and his teammates have had getting here, surviving the ethnic warfare and political upheaval that have engulfed Burundi and neighboring Rwanda. Hundreds of thousands have been slaughtered over the last three years as fighting has raged between the Hutus and Tutsis, rival tribes.
Kwizera, 29, has been spared much of the agony: He came to the U.S. in 1986. After attending high school in Minnesota and the University of Nebraska, he has split his time training in the United States, Japan and Italy. His parents still live on a farm with no electricity or telephones, where they grow corn and sweet potatoes. Kwizera still fondly recalls the first time he returned home and brought back photographs of snow.
“My mother couldn’t understand why everything was white,” he said. “She said, `These people sure have a lot of sugar over there.’ “
The experiences of Kwizera’s teammates haven’t been so sweet. Of Burundi’s 10-man and Rwanda’s six-man Olympic teams, nearly every athlete has been touched by tragedy.
“We have seen too much,” said Seraphin Mugabo of Rwanda.
Gilbert Tuhabonye of Burundi, a 21-year-old Tutsi, has seen the worst. On Oct., 21, 1993, he said his village, Kibimba, was invaded by Hutus. They ordered Tuhabonye and all the young villagers, nearly 200 in all, to gather in the town’s one-room schoolhouse. Then they doused the building and them with gasoline, torched it, and barricaded the doors.
Tuhabonye says he was the lone survivor, spared because he was at the bottom of a pile. Tuhabonye, after pretending he was dead, crawled out of the human funeral pyre when the Hutus left. Despite being severely burned, he ran 30 miles to safety. He resumed running track the next year and made it to Atlanta to run in the 800 meters. He still has scars on his back, right arm and right leg.
“He calls it `the accident,’ ” said Jim Minnihan, executive director of the La Grange Sports Authority in La Grange, Ga., a training center for Olympic athletes from underdeveloped nations. “He’s got a great spirit. Whenever I ask him something, he says, `No problem, Mr. Jim.’ His name means `Saved by God.’ He has forgiven what’s happened; he holds no bitterness. He says, `If somebody kills me, and somebody kills him, then the killing goes on and on. It has to stop somewhere.’ “
Minnihan first got involved with athletes from troubled lands as an attorney in Sycamore, Ill., where he started a project for 13 Bosnian basketball players. He came to La Grange a year ago. The training center welcomed three Burundian athletes in March and three Rwandans in May.
He is at the Olympics serving as a team leader for the Rwandan National Olympic Committee.
“Five of the Rwandan kids say they have lost their parents in the massacres,” said Minnihan.
Even elite athletes are not spared the pain. Charles Nkazamyampi of Burundi won the 800 meters at the 1992 African championships. In early 1994, he returned from a meet in France to discover his parents and brother had been killed.
“They burned his house to the ground,” said Kwizera. “And when he got back, all he saw were the bodies waiting to be buried.”
The last week in Atlanta has produced anxious moments for the Burundians. A week ago, the military deposed Hutu President Sylvestre Ntibantunganya and installed a Tutsi, Pierre Buyoya, as president. Many expect reprisals in the countryside by Hutu insurgents.
Kwizera has not spoken to his parents since he has been in Atlanta.
“I spoke to some relatives in the capital and they said everything is fine there, but I don’t have any information from the countryside,” Kwizera said. “My teammates are not worried. We’ve been living like this for the last three years, so it’s nothing new. Not a day goes by without hearing about 10, 20, 30 people murdered.”
Asked to compare the bloodshed in Burundi with that in Rwanda, Kwizera said: “Ours is like a fire that’s burning slowly. Rwanda was like an explosion.”
Two summers ago, an estimated 500,000 people, mostly Tutsis, were killed in a one-month killing spree in Rwanda.
Kwizera, who speaks six languages, considers himself an internationalist, so he gets perturbed when people ask his ethnic background. (He is a Tutsi, but his stock response is “I am Burundian.”) He said there is mixed ethnicity among Olympic team members.
“I rarely get into that with them,” said Minnihan. “All they want is peace. They’re sportsmen, not politicians.”
But Kwizera had to play his share of International Olympic Committee politics to get Burundi into the Olympics. In the late 1980s, Kwizera was considered a top 800-meter runner. Even though Burundi had no national Olympic committee, the IOC was going to allow Kwizera a chance to compete in Seoul in 1988. But his entry was blocked after protests from South Africa, whose athletes had been banned from competition.
“From that day on, I dedicated myself to bring Burundi into the IOC family,” he said.
It took nearly $17,000 of his own money and lots of persuasion. His break came during the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, when he found a sympathetic ear in Prince Albert of Monaco, an IOC member. Prince Albert lobbied on Burundi’s behalf, and in 1993, Kwizera learned that Burundi would be able to compete in Atlanta.
“That was the biggest victory I could ever bring to my country,” Kwizera said. “It was an honor.”
This week, one of his countrymen repaid him the honor.
Kwizera wasn’t supposed to be able to compete in these Olympics. A knee injury hampered his times in his best events, the 800- and 1,500-meter races. He didn’t even receive an athlete’s credential.
But Saturday night, teammate Venuste Niyongabo, who finished second in the 1,500 in last year’s world championships, came to him with shocking news. Niyongabo decided he was not going to run in the 1,500, though he was considered a legitimate medal contender.
He wanted Kwizera to run in his place.
“I didn’t think they would let me do it; my name wasn’t on the starting list by the deadline,” Kwizera said. “But about 5 p.m. on Sunday the officials decided to let me run. I came running back here to the village to find my shoes. I hadn’t even been training the last two weeks, just jogging a little bit.”
He still couldn’t believe it when he walked into the sold-out, 80,000-seat Olympic Stadium for his heat Monday morning.
“Until the gun when off, I still didn’t know if they were actually going to let me run,” Kwizera said. “I thought somebody was going to come onto the track and take me away. I mean, I didn’t even have the right credential.”
When it was over, he finished sixth in his heat with a time of 3 minutes 41.45 seconds. He failed to advance to the next round. But that didn’t matter.
“I was proud of myself,” Kwizera said. “I was finally an Olympian.”
