Burundi Battles Its Demons in Fight to Survive

Hollow-log drums throb. Dancers in togas churn up red-powdered dust. It is Sunday and 5,000 villagers press close as their young and inexperienced president steps forward to try to give them hope against the genocidal bloodshed spreading across this troubled nation once again.

Burundi is Rwanda’s blood brother, born from the same German-cum-Belgian coffee colony and living with the same Hutu-versus-Tutsi ethnic struggle.

With a population of slightly more than 5 million, Burundi may have lost more people in the last 10 months than the United States lost in 10 years of fighting in Vietnam.

And by all accounts, Burundi “is now on the edge of the knife,” to use a local colloquialism.

In the last two weeks, grenades have been thrown into crowds in the capital, Bujumbura. And in the outlying villages, Hutus who killed Tutsis during last year’s bloodletting are now being killed in reprisal, in the dark of night with machetes and guns.

After sunset, the streets of city and village alike are barren. Soldiers maintain checkpoints every few miles. Outsiders have been warned not to travel here. Relief workers call it one of the spookiest countries in the world and count the days until they can leave.

Over the weekend, a staff worker with the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees was shot to death in northern Burundi. The relief worker was in his home meeting with a local Hutu official.

Burundi--and the world--has seen this deadly cycle before. Most recently, tensions like those enveloping Burundi today created the tragedy still playing out in Rwanda.

“There are two fears in Burundi,” said Rob Denny, a Red Cross worker in Bujumbura. “One of them is each ethnic group’s fear of the other. And second is the fear of becoming another Rwanda. And these two fears have to stay in rough balance or the place will explode.”

The village of Bumba lies north of the capital in the highlands--an hour by road and then another hour over a rotting trail. This is steep mountain country of terraced farms, dark woods and ceaseless fear.

The big drums stop. The dancers step back.

Wearing a Western suit and tie, President Sylvestre Ntibantunganya addresses the crowd with the question everyone asks and no one can answer: “How long is the blood going to flow in this country?”

The crowd murmurs. Ntibantunganya, 38, is the third Hutu president since October. The army, dominated by Tutsis, killed the first in a coup attempt. The second died with the Rwandan president in April when their airplane crashed near the Rwandan capital, Kigali, setting off a frenzy of killing in that nation.

Now, Ntibantunganya holds in his hand a country that can be likened to a cup so completely laced with cracks that it seems only a matter of time until it crumbles.

Consider this: Hutus, who make up about 85% of the population, are apparently arming themselves with weapons confiscated in Zaire from Rwandan refugees. In the past, the Hutus, most of them farmers, had only blades as weapons and therefore were easy for the 22,000-member Tutsi army to subjugate. Now, analysts wonder how long it will be before the Hutus can be called an actual rebel army.

“Can you imagine a place where the chief support of the government is the rebels? It’s completely mad,” said Denny, the Red Cross worker.

Meanwhile, Tutsi youth extremists are roaming the streets, provoking violence and apparently trying to force their Tutsi army into taking control of the country. Among the extremist leaders is one man who wants to assume the position of king.

After the army coup attempt in October, Burundi turned on itself with a vengeance. Early estimates put the death toll at 100,000. More recently, relief agencies have revised their estimates of the slaughter to something more than 50,000. Most of them were Tutsis.

Since that rampage, the army has regained control and the killing has been reduced. So far this year, Amnesty International says, 2,000 have died.

But the deaths and violence are spreading again.

And on top of their generations-old hatred of each other, both ethnic groups are feeding ravenously on today’s grudges.

The Hutus are angry because the 1993 election that gave them control of the country for the first time in modern years was spoiled by the army coup attempt. The Tutsis are vengeful because the Hutus rose up and massacred Tutsi loved ones.

In addition, the recent civil war in Rwanda has destabilized this southern kin. About 200,000 Hutu refugees from Rwanda have fled across the border here, and some of their camps are located near refugee encampments of displaced Burundi Tutsis.

The president has asked for a team of U.N. human rights observers to discourage extremism, but there has been no Security Council approval.

Genocidal warfare has exploded here on epic scale at least twice previously since independence in 1962. And the violence has occurred despite a history of attempts by moderate leaders to bring the Hutus and Tutsis into accommodation.

In an interview over the weekend, Education Minister Liboire Ngendahayo grasped at a slender straw: “We think it is possible we can avoid the problem of Rwanda because here there is still dialogue between the parties.”

Indeed, Burundi does not lack for peacemakers. On Sunday, the Tutsi army guarded the Hutu president on his visit to Hutu-dominated Bumba. And the president has taken great pains in introducing Tutsis into his government.

“He’s trying to show that he can work with the Tutsi, and so should they,” an aide said.

Ntibantunganya’s hourlong speech hardly veered from the turmoil engulfing his country: “I have come here with a present. This is a speech about peace. . . .

“When the peace is troubled, the cost is enormous--people die, houses are burned, as you can see. . . . What do you gain when you start killing and shedding blood? Do you drink it? Do you make bricks for your houses from it? Who among us has gained from blood running in the streets?”

But when it came time for the audience to address the president, Burundi’s great divide was without any visible bridges. A Tutsi woman arose to say that she needs the army to protect her from rampaging Hutus. A Hutu man took his turn and said it is the Tutsi army that is running wild and killing Hutus.

“The thing that is most amazing,” one Western diplomat in Bujumbura said, “is that it has withstood all these provocations without even greater troubles. These people are really sick of it.”