I arrived at a deserted Bujumbura airport a few months after the world found out that approximately 1 million people had been massacred in Rwanda and Burundi in a period of six months. There were no planes into Kigali so I had to fly to Bujumbura.
Only four people were on the plane to Bujumbura. There was no transportation of any sort from the airport to Bujumbura. I found myself walking to the hotel pushing a 1-meter box full of photographic equipment with my suitcase on top of it. Thank God the box had wheels.
The next day in a village outside Bujumbura I met a young man — he could not have been more than 18 — holding a rifle and standing next to a dead body, I presume he had shot the dead victim before I arrived.
He asked me “journalist?” and I said “yes”. He shook his head and smiled as if it was business as usual. He went away and returned with a few banana leaves and used them to cover the dead body on the ground and then he walked away.
The youth was wearing a faded black T-shirt, sandals and carried his rifle with pride. What continues to haunt me — nearly 20 years on — was his expression as if killing his fellow countrymen was a normal activity. This was a civil war, Hutu youths killing the Tutsi population.
Everywhere I went in Burundi and Rwanda, I met 17 and 18 year olds carrying weapons and telling me stories of acts of bravery – the killing of Tutsis. It became obvious that most of the killing in the Rwandan massacre was done by the young.
Of course I understood there was hatred between the Hutus and the Tutsi but there was more to the story than just ethnic cleansing, it was related to the availability of a pool of youths and poverty. This is not unique to Rwanda and Burundi. One just has to look at the role of youths in conflicts today in the Middle East, Pakistan and Afghanistan.
The fact was, and still is, that the 16-30 demographic is associated with risk-taking, especially among young men. The problem is magnified when a country is experiencing a “youth bulge”, which is when a country has more people of a productive age rather than a non-productive age. Put another way, the number of youths outnumber the older population of the country. Another fact is that much of the “youth bulge” phenomenon is found in developing countries where there is high youth unemployment causing alienation and a plethora of social problems.
There is excitement in some quarters among the Indonesian elites about the so-called demographic bonus Indonesia will start to receive with its “youth bulge”. There are approximately 70 million Indonesian children below 15 years of age and another 70 million Indonesian youths aged between 15 and 30 years.
This demographic bonus will only be a bonus if there is employment for all those entering the work force. For this there must be sound economic structures in place so that economic growth continues and attention is given to youths in the work force.
Today, youth job creation in Indonesia is not keeping pace with new entrants to the workforce. Economic growth is taking place but the distribution of this growth is not, and youths are being deprived of this growth.
According to the World Bank, 18 percent of young Indonesians are unemployed and actively seeking employment, compared to only 3 percent of adults. This is six times higher compared to the world average of two and a half times. Most concerning is that 53 percent of youths in the workforce find jobs in the informal sector. Most of them undertake unpaid family work.
Scholar Gunmar Heinsohm, an emeritus professor of social sciences at the University of Bremen, heads the Raphael-Lemkin Institute for Comparative Genocide Research, found in his research that if there is a large pool of young people who cannot find employment and earn a satisfactory income, the youth bulge will become a demographic bomb. Creating a large mass of frustrated youths that carries a high risk of being a potential source of social and political instability.
Heinsohm also found that a large proportion of adolescents entering the labor force and electorate, strain the seams of the economic and political systems. He insists that one basic measure of a country’s success in turning the youth bulge into a demographic dividend is the youth employment rate and he says that the record has not been good.
Heinsohm claims that history has shown that when there have been periods of social unrest lacking external influence — triggers such as rapid climatic change or other catastrophic changes of the environment — events such as genocide and other violent historical events can be explained as a result of the youth bulge. This includes European colonialism, 20th century Fascism and the Cold war.
Indonesia has also had its share of youth violence in the past — one case is the 1965 killings. Today youth violence is a common occurrence across Indonesia; however, it is labeled differently and wrapped in difference social-political blankets depending where it is taking place in Indonesia. Regardless, the fact remains that youths are involved and they do not have access to the economic growth taking place.
What if the current social and economical mess in Papua took place in West Java, the largest province with 43 million people, with a youth bulge of approximately of 10 million youths? Or for that matter the terrorist nest in Poso was in Garut? What sort of violence would we be seeing now?
The combined total population of Rwanda back in 1994 was approximately only 15 million people and approximately one million people were massacred. There are more youths in West Java now than there was in Rwanda and Burundi back in 1994.
Have any of the aspiring 2014 presidential candidates thought of this potential time bomb?
The writer, a former journalist, is secretary-general of the Indonesian Community for Democracy (KID). She was a recipient of the Nieman Fellowship for journalism at Harvard University — class of 1994.