Africa After War: Paths to Forgiveness - Burundi's own Romeo and Juliet story

There's a simple reason why a luminous teenage girl named Anita and a strapping, square-jawed boy named Haruna shouldn't have ever fallen in love in this central African country: She's a Tutsi and he's a Hutu, and they come from opposite sides of an ethnic divide that has led to 300,000 deaths in the past 13 years.

Yet on a balmy afternoon last year, as they sipped orange sodas and smiled shyly at each other, they knew – with Romeo-and-Juliet certainty – they'd be together always. They also knew it wouldn't be easy.

After all, many of their own family members had been killed: Two of Anita's sisters were tied up and torched by Hutus, and six of Haruna's relatives were killed by Tutsis. One had a flaming tire put around his neck.

Burundi's ethnic killings are less well-known than those in neighboring Rwanda, with its 1994 genocide. But they were equally brutal.

The determination and idealism of two shy teenagers is emblematic of a kind of people-powered reconciliation now emerging in Burundi, and it's most evident here in the suburb of Kamenge, which is seen as a national model. Unlike in South Africa, this nation hasn't tried any formal, government-led reconciliation process. But there's plenty of exhaustion after 12 years of conflict – and indignation at the politicians seen as responsible for the war.

So, by tapping a tradition of forgiveness that enjoins enemies to "become brothers as before," grass-roots groups of Hutus and Tutsis have begun their own efforts. Many have had "reconciliation days" in which victims and perpetrators lay bare the events of the previous decade – including their own crimes. There's often a pledge to prevent recurring violence. Referring to several such events he has witnessed around this tiny nation, Stéphane Mora of the US-based Search For Common Ground observes simply, "There has been a very positive evolution over these few years."

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It was Burundi's version of working-class suburban bliss.

In the relative calm of the early 1990s, life was good in Anita and Haruna's neighborhood of Kamenge – a lower-middle-class suburb of the capital. Haruna remembers Anita as the cute kid sister of one of his Tutsi friends.

Then, in 1993, the country's first democratically elected president, a Hutu, was assassinated. In one of the world's poorest and most densely populated countries, power-hungry politicians stoked ethnic tensions – tensions originally fomented by Belgian colonizers in the 1920s and 30s.

Suddenly Kamenge was the city's most-violent suburb. Hutus setting foot in Tutsi areas faced near-certain death. And vice versa. Anita's family had to flee to a Tutsi-only zone. Soon the suburb settled into a de facto system of ethnic apartheid. Between 1993 and 2005, some 15,000 people died in Kamenge alone, says Marano Claudio, an Italian who lives in the area. Across the country, roughly 1 in 23 Burundians died during "the crisis."

By 2004, all sides were exhausted. Other nations, including South Africa, were demanding peace. Negotiations led to a power-sharing deal – and multiethnic elections in 2005.

In Kamenge, mistrust lingered – evidenced by the charred, ruined buildings lining its streets today. But Hutus and Tutsis started to rebuild, and that's when a cross-ethnic relationship bloomed.

Haruna had dropped out of high school and was driving a city bus, which Anita rode to school. He began eyeing her – and soon asked her out. She declined. He was, after all, 22, and she was just 16. "He's a big man," she recalls thinking, "and I'm just a little girl." Also, her friends warned her not to date a Hutu. Yet she admired his driving and his clothes and soon decided "no other boy was like him." In a teenage swoon, she even envisioned that "he would be the only boyfriend I would have for my whole life."

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