3. ENSURING THAT TODAY’S REFUGEES ARE NOT TOMORROW’S STATELESS: SOLUTIONS IN A REFUGEE CONTEXT Tanzania.16 Following the signing of a peace deal for Burundi in 2000 and the apparent stabilisation of the country, discussions began in the mid-2000s about the possibilities of seeking durable solutions for this group of refugees (referred to as the “old” caseload, as opposed to the “new” caseload of those who fled Burundi following a new outbreak of violence in the 1990s). At UNHCR’s October 2007 Executive Committee meeting in Geneva, Tanzania’s Minister of Home Affairs formally announced a willingness to naturalise those who wished to stay. The grant of naturalisation to such a large number of refugees was a somewhat unprecedented offer across the world, let alone in the Great Lakes region. Possibly somewhat surprisingly for the government of Tanzania (given that previous research had pointed to a strong sense of Burundian national identity amongst many of these refugees),17 79% opted for naturalisation – a total of 162,256 adults. Explicit in the rationale for this offer was a recognition that this particular group of refugees had both a problematic standing in Burundi and a high level of de facto integration in Tanzania. In just a few years following the signing of the Arusha Accords, more than half a million Burundians returned to the country. However, among these returns, particular concern was expressed about the situation of those known as sans reference, individuals who were born abroad and who were unaware of the specific village or commune that their parents were from. The lack of this information disrupted the tidy assumption that individuals must return to the precise area from which they, or their parents, had fled. It also created real problems in terms of access to land and to asserting belonging at the local level (as distinct from the national level, where their citizenship as Burundians was not contested). At the same time, on the Tanzania side, it was acknowledged that this population, due in large part to the accommodating policies of the Nyerere era which allowed them access to land and integration, had achieved a large degree of de facto integration. Thus both the weakness of their belonging in Burundi and the strength of their belonging in Tanzania in practice were explicitly used to justify the change of status in law. 16 17 IRRI, ‘I can’t be a citizen if I am still a refugee’: Challenges in the naturalisation process for Burundians in Tanzania, Citizenship and Displacement in the Great Lakes region, Working Paper 8, 2013. See, L. Malkki, Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania, University of Chicago Press 1995. 80