Fear of an imminent bloodbath has seized Burundi. The tiny central African nation contains the same combustible mix of Hutus and Tutsis as neighboring Rwanda; tribal violence there last year cost a million lives and displaced as many as 3 million people. Poor. largely agricultural and desperately overcrowed, Burundi has been in almost constant turmoil since the country’s first democratically elected president, Melchior Ndadye, a Hutu, was gunned down in an attempted military coup by Tutsi hard-liners in October 1993. At least 100,000 Tutsis and Hutus were butchered in subsequent massacres. Since then political assassinations, grenade attacks and tribal clashes have become commonplace. All that keeps Burundi from chaos is the uneasy standoff between the Hutu government led by President Sylvestre Ntibantunganya and the Tutsi army, whose top officers stand accused of organizing the 1993 putsch.
The latest spasm of tribal warefare began March 11, when a Hutu cabinet minister was shot to death on a Bujumbura street. A week later three Belgians–including a mother and her 4-year-old child–died when Hutu guerillas ambushed a convoy of off-duty soldiers on a road south of the capital.
On March 24 heavy fighting between Hutus and Tutsis in the mixed neighborhoods of Buyenzi and Bwiza left at least 160 people dead; 30,000 Hutus fled the capital to Zaire. At the weekend 55,000 Rwandan Hutu refugees left camps in north Burundi for shelter in Tanzania which promptly closed its border.
As the crisis deepens, moderates have been marginalized. The country’s newspapers, mostly run by extremists, are filled with death lists and incendiary rumors. (One report claimed that a U.S. submarine had arrived in Lake Tanganyika to prop up the Hutu government.) Some say the most powerful man in the country is former dictator Jean-Baptiste Bagaza, who reportedly bankrolls severa papers as well as the Tutsi neighborhood militias. “He is helping to pull Burundi apart,” says Venerand Bakevyumusaya, a Hutu cabinet minister. Bagaza denies the charge: “These people organized themselves spontaneously for self-defense and retaliation.”
In the muddy warrens of Kamenge, the Hutu militias-reportedly receiving arms from Rwandan Hutus-exert increasing control. On the porch of a radical Hutu newspaper, Major “Savimbi,” a hard-eyed man wearing a purple nylon jacket and a pistol in his belt, boasts that his force of 200 paramilitaries will repel any army attack on the neighborhood. “We have antitank weapons, mortars and machine guns,” he savs. Savimbi claims responsibility for organizing the March 24 ambush in which the Belgians died. “We regret the deaths of innocents,” he says. “But this is war.”
The Tutsi-dominated armv stokes ethnic tensions. Top military officers say they support power-sharing between the ethnic groups. But many lower-ranking officers and foot soldiers have reportedly collaborated with Tutsi militias. “The army seems loyal to established institutions, but the longer the crisis lasts, the more they retreat to their ethnic group,” says U.N. special representative Amedou Ould-Abdallah. Government officials accuse the military of prolonging the fighting. “How many guns have been seized? How many gang members have been arrested or killed?” asks Bakevyumusaya, the cabinet minister.
Will Burundi be another Rwanda? War between Tutsi and Hutu militias could create carnage on the same scale. “The real problem isn’t the power of extremists. It’s the weakness of moderates who are afraid to denounce violence,” says Pierre Buvoya, Burundi’s former military ruler, who launched democratic reforms. But it will take more than brave words to avoid a catastrophe.
