Word: tutsis
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...volatile ethnic mixture seems ready to explode at any time. Rwanda's next-door neighbor to the south is virtually a mirror image of that devastated country, threatened by the same passionate hatreds. As in Rwanda, Burundi's dense population is divided between two tribes, 85% Hutu and 15% Tutsi. As in Rwanda, Belgian colonialization hoisted the status of the Tutsi, who after independence slowly lost power to the majority Hutu. And as in Rwanda, the potential for ethnic violence has risen to the surface in the political vacuum left by the assassination of the Presidents of both countries last...
After gaining independence from Belgium in 1962, Burundi was run largely by Tutsi. But a series of deadly clashes with the Hutu forced the Tutsi-dominated government gradually to share power, even permitting election of the country's first Hutu President, Melchior Ndadaye, in June 1993. That process came to an abrupt halt in October when Ndadaye was murdered in a failed coup by renegade Tutsi troops, who feared the Hutu were grabbing too many civilian jobs and military posts for themselves. In a wave of ensuing reprisals, 100,000 Burundians were killed and 500,000 left their homes...
While Rwandans set about hacking one another to pieces in the frenzy of killing that followed the April assassinations, Burundi's Hutu and Tutsi parties struggled to agree on a new President. They might have succeeded if the Rwandan capital of Kigali had not fallen to the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan | Patriotic Front on July 4. The victory emboldened Burundi's Tutsi opposition to make more demands, creating a dangerous stalemate. "There is a government, but the whole structure is weak and barely functioning," says a Western diplomat in Bujumbura. "There are 27 ministers, 11 of whom are from the opposition...
...head off the new Rwandan government's plans for its own trials. U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali gave a three-member investigative commission up to four months to find out whether defeated Hutu officers -- most of them now encamped in Zaire -- should face an international tribunal. The Tutsi-controlled Kigali government agreed...
...crocodile and a lion attack him; the other shows the same man running away in fear from the lion and the crocodile, while a snake winds down the tree where he had sought refuge. "They are a souvenir of all the problems in Rwanda," she says. Augustin Makama, a Tutsi exile who has just returned from Uganda, does not entirely dismiss the reports of Tutsi reprisals in the countryside. Most of the stories are propaganda, he says -- and pauses. "Some, I don't know. What might someone do if he meets the man who killed his children...