Ancient Feud Caused Deaths of Tens of Thousands : Across Burundi, Tribal Slaughter Leaves an Eerie Void

A tribal blood bath in northern Burundi has left an eerie, near-empty land of scorched homesteads and abandoned villages.

All but a few of the people of this fertile and once thickly populated district of Central Africa have fled or been killed. Those that remain say the dead must number in the tens of thousands.

The victims include both tribes of Burundi’s ancient blood feud--the Tutsi, a dominant minority tribe that suffered in the first wave of mob killings at the hands of the oppressed Hutu majority, and the Hutu peasants, whose resistance was crushed by the Burundian army in five days of savage reprisals that ended Aug. 22.

A more accurate tally of the dead is still impossible.

Unknown numbers of Hutu are hiding in the bush and swamps, some creeping fearfully out to seek treatment for festering, week-old bayonet and bullet wounds.

About 45,000 people from Marangara and nearby districts reached safety as refugees in neighboring Rwanda.

A dirt road leads into Marangara, which now presents a landscape of burned houses, scorched hillsides and--in appalling contrast to the rest of this small, crowded country--virtually no people.

“There used to be over 500 people living on this hill,” Josephine Ntibarutaye said at her wrecked hamlet on Runda Hill. “Now we are only about 50.”

She sighed and turned to her surviving neighbors who were digging a shallow grave in a banana plantation for the bloated corpse of a Hutu man shot by the army.

“There are so many bodies all over this hillside,” she said. “Very often we bury 12 or 15 in the same grave.”

The Burundian government officially estimates that 5,000 people died in the violence. But local residents and refugees in Rwanda say the number of dead runs into the tens of thousands.

Interior Minister Aloys Kadoyi told Reuters during an inspection tour of northeastern Burundi on Friday that the killings had now ceased everywhere and the authorities were trying to persuade people to return home.

“There are no more killings,” Kadoyi said. He rejected suggestions that the army, which is almost wholly Tutsi, was responsible for most of the atrocities.

“The army had just one mission, which was to restore order,” he said.

Kadoyi and the government blame the blood bath on Burundian exiles who, they say, infiltrated from abroad and incited local Hutu to turn on their Tutsi neighbors.

The Tutsi make up only 15% of Burundi’s 5 million people, but they have dominated the Hutu peasants since pre-colonial days and have controlled the government and armed forces since independence from Belgium in 1962.

According to local people and doctors, most of those who died were Hutu massacred by the army.

“We admitted 76 injured people between Aug. 18 and 25, of whom only four or five were Tutsi,” Rolf Dupre, a West German doctor at Kiremba Hospital, said. “Most were wounded by bullets and bayonets, a few slashed by machetes.”

But each tribe has its tales of horror to tell.

Therese Barangizigi, a Tutsi who stood by the scorched ruin of her mud hut on Higiro Hill, said that she, her five children and some neighbors fled into the bush when they saw a large crowd of Hutu coming down the road. Her husband has not been seen since.

Joseph Nimubwona, a Tutsi whose home is also now a heap of ashes, said his father, too old and weak to flee, was caught by the Hutu, beaten, bound and thrown into a stream at the bottom of the valley. Nimubwona said he found his father’s body in the water four days later.

Across the small valley, Hutu villagers showed this correspondent the graves of five Hutu peasants they said were machine-gunned from an army helicopter Aug. 17.

Nimubwona, the Tutsi whose father was killed on the opposite hillside, confirmed that the five had been shot from a helicopter, which he said was chasing the crowd of Hutu who burned his home.

Local people in Marangara say the tribal blood bath began in neighboring Ntega with a Hutu uprising against the Tutsi.

The killing in Marangara erupted three days later, on Aug. 17, when a large crowd of Hutu rioted at the government’s district headquarters and groups set out in all directions to burn the houses of local Tutsi and kill any they could find.

“The people wanted to have Hutu leaders in the area. They wanted nothing more to do with the Tutsi administration,” a doctor at Kiremba said.

But army units backed by helicopters arrived within hours and launched five days of revenge killings in which Tutsi soldiers went from house to house killing Hutu men, women and children.