Word: hutu
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Nowhere is that more evident than in the northwestern provinces of Bubanza and Cibitoke, once two of Burundi's richest agricultural regions but now a wasteland. For the past six months, a guerrilla war between Hutu rebels infiltrating from neighboring Zaire and the Tutsi-led army has stripped the steep hill country of inhabitants. Not even aid workers dare enter for fear of attack. A visit last week to the area revealed rice fields and coffee plantations abandoned to forest. Entire villages have been pounded to ruins. Residents who have not taken to the hills or to camps in Zaire...
Those who remain report being attacked from all sides. Four months ago, Jean Ndabagendeje, 39, escaped from his mainly Hutu village after the army stormed into the area and ordered everyone to leave. But when he sought refuge with some 1,500 other Hutu near a Tutsi military encampment in Bubanza town, he was again attacked, this time by machete-wielding Hutu, who accused Ndabagendeje of betraying the Hutu cause...
Certainly no one has a monopoly on murder and ethnic cleansing in Burundi. As in Rwanda, majority Hutu and minority Tutsi have set upon each other periodically since the two countries gained independence from Belgium in the early 1960s. Neither group has shown much tolerance for the political ambitions of the other. Burundi's current crisis began in 1993, when Tutsi soldiers assassinated Melchior Ndadaye, a Hutu and the country's first democratically elected President, after he threatened to bring an end to 30 years of Tutsi domination. The killing triggered an orgy of revenge; some 50,000 Burundians died...
Elements of the Tutsi-dominated army not only routinely target civilians, diplomats say, but allow Tutsi civilian militias, armed with machetes and hammers, to "clean up" after the army's operations, killing some women and children and driving the rest into the hills. Hutu rebels, for their part, also target civilians--Tutsi and Hutu moderates alike. Neither side is apologetic. Lieut. Colonel Longin Minani, an army spokesman in the capital, explains the military clean-up operations this way: "If rebels use the population as a screen to protect themselves, am I supposed to fold my hands and do nothing? [Civilian...
...tide of violence is threatening to further destabilize a region already badly traumatized by the Rwandan civil war. Since 1993, 250,000 Burundians, mostly Hutu, have escaped into Zaire and Tanzania, adding to nearly 2 million Rwandan refugees camped in those countries and refusing to go home. Earlier this month those numbers increased sharply when Rwandan Hutu from the Mugano and Ntamba camps, who had sought refuge in Burundi from their own civil war, fled fighting in the area and made for the Tanzanian border. Some 20,000 managed to get across. With an additional 130,000 increasingly anxious Rwandan...