Tony Jackson is Great Lakes policy adviser for International Alert, and author of a report on the divisions in Burundi's education system that led to disproportional power resting in the hands of Tutsis from the south of the country. On research, he found that the geographical factor was more important even than ethnic identity.

AN: What led you to decide that education in Burundi was a subject you should research?

TJ: We've worked as a group on Burundi since 1995. Because of the nature of our work, we've managed to become in very close contact with quite a large number of number of Burundians who ask themselves what the problems of the country are and how they can be resolved, including some that are on one side and others on the other side of the debate. There is general agreement among Burundians that the army needs to be changed if a long-term peace is to come. Its ethnic makeup and its makeup in geographical terms leads everyone to believe it's not an independent army but seems one-sided. The second major issue that people have brought up is justice.

AN: What did people say about justice?

TJ: The justice system is considered to be one-sided. In 1999 I was asked to do a survey of the justice system and we found that most lawyers are Tutsis and mostly from the south. This is geographical as well as an ethnic issue -- probably more geographical than ethnic. Everyone said: "We need a broader band of people who represent the nation as a whole as opposed to this smaller group." This is not to say that these people don't do a good job, it's just that they are seen as on one side, and justice is seen as being justice on one side. Whether it's true or false is different -- that's how it's perceived.

The third issue, that was more of a surprise to us, was education. Everyone said that education has to be opened up to more people.

AN: Why is education so important?

TJ: It was an army officer who explained to us: "Look, you're always pressing us to have an army which is more geographically and ethnically balanced, but to become an officer, you have to have secondary school education. We can't just take anyone who happens to be from another ethnic group or another geographical group because we want to have a more balanced army. To be in the army is a skill and you have to have a certain training. Therefore, the education system needs to be opened up. There need to be more schools in Hutu and northern areas, so we will then have a choice of more trained people to come into the army." We were intrigued by this, and that's what led us to look at education, and to try and ask the question "Is there a link between education and lasting peace?"

AN: Have you come to a conclusion?

TJ: In our opinion, there is a very close link. The Arusha peace process and other peace processes within Burundi will end up with signatures on pieces of paper and for a while that may work very well. But in the long term, if the ethnic and geographical imbalance in the country aren't addressed, then those problems will reoccur, and education's at the base of it. Education's how you become a lawyer, education's how you become an army officer education's how you take part in the administration of the country.

When I compared the census with statistics of where schools are, it became obvious to me that about two-thirds of the educational effort went into the bottom third of the country. So a third of the population were getting and had historically got around two-thirds of the educational cake. This includes Bujumbura City, which is very closely linked with the south, because families have moved from the south to work in the city.

AN: Do you have any comparisons for this educational divide?

TJ: It's very much in my opinion a Central African example of the old Oxbridge system in Britain, where you couldn't become a politician and particularly prime minister unless you'd been to either Oxford or Cambridge. It was only in the 60s that this began to change, and I was one of the first people affected by this. I went to an ordinary common or garden grammar school -- Chester City Grammar School -- where an effort was being made to send us to Oxford and Cambridge. The other thing that happened was that loads of new universities were opened to give more people a chance to study, including the famous Open University. We're not saying Burundi's just a negative area and we do it so much better in Britain. I've lived a similar system.

AN: How does this relate to other areas of life?

TJ: You can't separate education from other aspects in life. Somebody said to me: "It's better to be a Hutu from the south than a Tutsi in the north." This is not a hermetically sealed system where if you're a Hutu you can't come in. On the contrary, if you're near you can go to the same school as everybody else. So if you're a southern Hutu you get better education. Some of the main opposition leaders, including one of the top guerrilla leaders, are all from the same area as the president and former presidents from the south.

AN: So it's much more complex than just a division between ethnic groups, as it is often portrayed in the mainstream media?

TJ: The ethnic side clearly is an issue, if any of those people say it is, and in their heads it is. But actually in my opinion, and the more I looked at it, particularly in education, it became much more of a regional issue. It blends together, becomes a bit of each. One person claimed to me: "Tutsis in the north, we are Third World Tutsis." They have the worst of both worlds. Because they're Tutsis people think they're better off, but they're really poor. They don't have access in the north, like they have access in the south, to education and other opportunities, so they get treated badly by the Hutus that think they're better off, and they feel themselves as the bottom of the pile. This is all relative of course, there's also the Twa, the most forgotten group.

AN: How did this division between north and south come about in education?

TJ: There are reasons why the south is more interested in education. The land is much more degraded there. It's more pastoralist than agricultural land, so the opportunities were much less, therefore education gives you a headstart. Whereas in the north I heard cases of children about to take exams in the north, but because it was harvest season, they would pull their kids out. In a sense they were right -- if the harvest has to come in on that day you can't be knocking around while the food's in the field. So there are cultural, geographic, agricultural reasons for this, but the institutional fact is that in the end, education got spread further and faster and more south than north, also to do with Bujumbura City being the capital.

AN: Was there a colonial factor too?

TJ: I'm not a specialist in this, but I don't think that the colonial system had as much to do with it. It certainly did have a very heavy impact in Rwanda. People were given ID cards on which it was written Hutu or Tutsis by the Belgians in the late 20s or early 30s. That fixed in people's minds what they were, because it was written down on paper, whereas before you could actually move easily between being a Hutu or a Tutsi.