Burundi Reported Calm After Thousands Fled Tribal Clash

Order has been restored after tribal massacres in Burundi that sent up to 10,000 refugees fleeing into neighboring Rwanda, diplomats said Friday.

It was not known how many people died in the conflict between the Tutsi and Hutu tribes. The official Burundian news agency ABP said the toll appeared to be very great but gave no numbers.

The Hutu is the majority tribe in Burundi, but the minority Tutsi controls the military and rules the country.

A Western diplomat in Burundi, a small, densely populated state of 5 million in central Africa, said a few military patrols were on the streets of the capital, Bujumbura, where a curfew was in force from 7 p.m. to 5 a.m. He said all appeared calm in the capital.

Europeans working in northern areas of the nation, where the bloodshed was reported, also said order had been restored, the diplomat added.

He also said there were wildly varying rumors about the casualty toll but that the killings seemed to have been isolated and not on the scale of tribal conflicts in 1972, when at least 100,000 Hutus were killed.

A Rwandan diplomat in Nairobi said the first of the refugees have already begun returning home.

Burundian Minister of External Relations Cyprien Mbonimpa met Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana in the Rwandan capital of Kigali on Friday to give an account of the ethnic unrest on the border.

According to an official statement, Habyarimana called for more cooperation on frontier security and said no one would be allowed to use Rwanda as a base for fomenting trouble in neighboring countries. ABP had earlier accused Burundian refugees of returning from abroad to stir up tribal enmity.

In Brussels, a group of exiled government opponents called the Hutu People’s Liberation Army said in a statement that more than 4,000 people, all of them from the Hutu tribe, were believed to have died at the hands of soldiers from the Tutsi tribe.

On Thursday, however, ABP had reported that it was Tutsis who were massacred.