COLUMN ONE : Damping the Flames in Burundi : Ethnic massacres could again engulf the polarized Tutsi and Hutu as they did in neighboring Rwanda. But a recent power-sharing deal has spurred hopes of peace and reconciliation.

In this land where the Nile has its uppermost headwaters, the brief, sudden African dusk had fallen on the rolling mountains, bathing them violet. On the breeze-swept veranda of his parish church and school, a Roman Catholic priest nursed a lukewarm beer and voiced his dread.

“We live in the fear of each day,” he confided. “When I consider history, and people’s hearts, I am truly afraid.”

Just that Friday, he explained, members of Burundi’s army had shot and killed seven people in cold blood as they traveled from Bujumbura, the capital at the northeastern tip of Lake Tanganyika, to the terraced slopes of Buhonga.

In July, he said, the parish school’s manager, a professor, two cooks and a driver were pulled from their car on a mountain road by soldiers, and slain just as pointlessly.

“Here, to meet the army is to meet death,” said the priest, whose 85,000 parishioners eke a living from small banana plantations and subsistence farming. “But there is no one you can complain to about it. We are Christians, so we are waiting for the Last Judgment.”

Others in this remote, landlocked wedge of Central Africa--bedeviled by ethnic hatred, a colonial past and now, even by geography--fear an apocalypse. In Burundi, “We are at the brink of the chasm,” said Tharcisse Nsavymana, president of Iteka, a human rights group.

Recent events in Rwanda, the country immediately to the north, have given pessimists much to worry about. In April and May, ethnically motivated massacres led to the liquidation of an estimated 500,000 Rwandans--perhaps twice as many as that.

“Since the catastrophe in Rwanda, the risk of a total conflagration in Burundi is on everybody’s minds,” Nsavymana said. “Not a day goes by without a murderous attack here or there.”

But not everyone in Burundi is rushing, lemming-like, toward collective suicide. After protracted haggling, politicians from 10 parties last month signed a power-sharing agreement crafted to placate the powerful, wealthy Tutsi minority without renouncing the Hutu majority’s democratic right to rule.

That pact, and the election of a consensus president in late September, may halt Burundi’s slippery slide into ethnic war.

Or they may not.

For the single mightiest institution--the 7,150-member Burundian army, air force and national police, in which Tutsis hold virtually all command posts, including the defense minister’s portfolio--possesses an effective right of veto, whatever politicians decide.

In October, 1993, in a still murky bid at a government takeover, renegade Tutsi soldiers arrested Melchior Ndadaye--predecessor of President Cyprian Ntayamira, who died in an April plane crash--and murdered him at the Muha army base south of the capital.

The attempted putsch and the assassination of Burundi’s first democratically elected and Hutu president since independence in 1962 sparked massacres of Tutsis by outraged Hutus across the country. Within days, a savage campaign of repression was launched by Tutsi soldiers, police and groups of young unemployed thugs regrouped as self-styled militias.

At least 50,000 people, Tutsis and Hutus, perished, Amnesty International estimates.

But the outside world, absorbed by Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin’s army assault on hard-line members of Parliament in Moscow’s White House, the quagmire faced by the United States in Somalia and other events that autumn, was not paying attention.

That the army and the police, or gendarmerie , is still firmly in Tutsi hands rules out any nationwide genocide of Burundi’s minority population on a Rwanda-like scale. But it makes any attempt at democracy-building in this country a ticklish, even risky endeavor, indeed.

“The army is untouchable; it doesn’t want to hear about Hutus in the army. This is the principal problem in Burundi,” said Emmanuel Mpfayukurera, 35, a Hutu elected to Parliament last year on the list fielded by the Hutu-dominated party that Ndadaye founded, the Front for Democracy in Burundi.

To understand how deep the ethnic divide has become, one must delve into the past of this tawny-colored, densely peopled land astride the crest dividing the watersheds of the Nile and the Congo.

Like Rwanda--where a blood bath erupted after the Rwandan head of state, along with Ntayamira, Burundi’s acting president, were killed in a plane hit by a rocket April 6--the ethnic mix in Burundi is 85% Hutu, 14% Tutsi and 1% Twa, or Pygmy.

The Tutsi-Hutu division--the legacy of colonial rule and longstanding Tutsi economic, social and intellectual dominance--gave this country a social order that Hutus like Mpfayukurera have no problem labeling “black apartheid.”

The Twa, Burundi’s diminutive, original inhabitants, were displaced starting in about the year 1000 by the Hutu, a stocky farming people of Bantu heritage. Beginning in the 16th Century, another migration occurred, that of the tall, pastoralist Tutsi from Ethiopia and Uganda.

Gradually, the Hutu became subjugated into a feudal system similar to that of Medieval Europe, with a loosely organized Tutsi aristocracy headed by a king. The Hutu relinquished their land and mortgaged their services to the Tutsi in return for cattle, the currency of wealth and social status.

The arrival of Europeans only consolidated Tutsi supremacy. Both Rwanda and Burundi were colonized in the 1890s by Germany. But Belgium easily defeated the small German detachments garrisoned here in World War I. After the war, the League of Nations mandated Burundi (then called Urundi) and Rwanda to Belgium.

The Belgians were only too happy to rule indirectly through Tutsi chiefs and princes, allowing them broad powers in return for tax revenue. Even Christian missions, granted a monopoly on education, made the ethnic differences worse. They virtually ignored Hutus, commonly considered dumb, if hard-working peasants, and concentrated on educating the “nobler” Tutsis.

That colonial past, and the Tutsi mastery of independent Burundi that ended only with the groundbreaking democratic elections of June, 1993, spawned a society as schizoid as the antebellum American South. Hutus make up the overwhelming majority of the country’s 5.8 million people. Yet one Hutu politician has calculated that Tutsis still hold all but 13 of the 228 judgeships.

In the army, Tutsi supremacy is so strong that a majority of soldiers--Tutsis--are believed to come from a single province, Bururi, home to three Tutsi heads of state. For decades, Tutsis also held the bulk of the government-issued licenses for foreign and large-scale domestic trade, making it easier for members of the minority to become rich. Most government functionaries are still Tutsis.

One reason for such preeminence was a longstanding policy of what Hutus term “intellectual genocide.” Until the 1990s, they say, Hutu children used to have the letter u inserted before their names on school rolls, while Tutsi youngsters were marked with an i. When the time came to choose children for higher education, those with the telltale u were systematically flunked or shunted into vocational or technical courses.

“The selection in education was intentionally such that there was no Hutu intelligentsia,” Labor Minister Venerend Bakevyumusaya says.

As a result, only 1,000 Hutus have made it through secondary education, he estimates.

In 1972, one of Africa’s fiercest ethnic wars drenched Burundi in blood after a large-scale Hutu revolt led to the deaths of more than 1,000 Tutsis. That summer, the Tutsi military junta then in power responded by hunting down and killing any Hutu with a formal education, a government job or a fair amount of money. In three months, an estimated 200,000 Hutus were butchered; tens of thousands more fled to Tanzania, Rwanda and Zaire.

In consequence, it is hard these days in Burundi to find a Hutu politician, Cabinet minister or other leader older than the mid-30s.

Africa, which mobilized on a continental scale to oppose racial discrimination in white-ruled South Africa, seemed largely indifferent to this black-on-black carnage.

The world’s attitude then, and its general paralysis when faced with this spring’s massacres in Rwanda, made a deep impression on Burundi’s current leaders.

In the words of one Bujumbura-based diplomat, Sylvestre Ntibantunganya--the 38-year-old Hutu politician who succeeded Ntayamira as acting president after the April plane crash--realizes with his entourage “that no foreign power is going to fly troops in here to save their skins. So they have to deal with the military and the minority.”

That acute sense of realpolitik has led the Front for Democracy in Burundi to voluntarily relinquish many of the fruits of its victory in the national elections held in June, 1993. Though the first democratic polling in Burundi’s history gave it 64 of the 81 seats in the National Assembly and a landslide presidential margin for Ndadaye, the Hutu-led party has agreed to embrace the former ruling Union for National Progress and other Tutsi-led parties as partners in government.

“We won the elections, but we practically have ceded power,” Mpfayukurera said. “We’re living with our head in the lion’s maw, and he can close his jaws at any time.”

Under the Sept. 10 power-sharing accord, the Front for Democracy ceded 45% of the ministerial posts to the Tutsi-led opposition. The premiership, for all intents and purposes, was also reserved for a Tutsi. Rival parties also agreed to create a seven-member state council to serve as a powerful check on the president.

Ntibantunganya, a former National Assembly chief, was confirmed Sept. 30 as Burundi’s president by a 68-1 vote of Parliament. As expected, the acting head of state was nominated as the consensus candidate by a committee made up of representatives of the country’s 13 political parties, two bishops, a businessman and a union leader. In the end, eight of the 13 parties endorsed him.

“We have to heal the wounds, to get people to tolerate each other, to settle their differences,” Ntibantunganya has said.

The young Hutu leader knows firsthand how hurtful the country’s ethnic discord can be. In last October’s attempted coup, his wife was murdered by rebel troops who had come to arrest him.

The give-and-take that led to Burundi’s power-sharing agreement and the broad support for Ntibantunganya’s candidacy make some optimistic that ethnic reconciliation is well under way.

“This is not Rwanda,” U.S. Embassy spokesman Gordon Duguid observed. “It’s a difficult situation, but the prospects for democracy are good if a majority of the people can resist the extremists. They’re the danger to the process.”

True, some Hutus have objected to the whole idea of power-sharing as a flouting of the bedrock notion of democracy, the majority’s right to rule. Meanwhile, opposing Tutsis accuse the Front for Democracy of masterminding the October, 1993, massacres. Some say that as many as 200,000 Tutsis were slaughtered, while thousands of others fled their homes and now live in camps guarded by the army.

“If we weren’t afraid, we wouldn’t be in the street,” said Christophe Hicintuka, 40, who marched recently through Bujumbura with hundreds of other Tutsi supporters of the hard-line Party for National Recovery, which rejected the power-sharing pact.

But most alarming is the fact that as the politicians negotiated, the killings in Burundi continued, and continue even now. Even as members of the Parliament debated Ntibantunganya’s election, grenades were tossed in Bujumbura’s southern suburbs.

“People are arming themselves all over the country,” said former President Pierre Buyoya, a Tutsi whose acceptance of multi-party democracy led to his resounding defeat by Ndadaye’s pro-Hutu party at the polls.

In the bazaar of the capital, one can reportedly buy a grenade these days for $1. Small bands of Hutu extremists are said to be operating in the countryside, staging hit-and-run attacks, then retreating into the dense equatorial forests. More than 200,000 Hutus crossed the border from Rwanda this summer after the civil war victory of the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front, further adding to Burundi’s instability.

Politicians, especially from the Hutu-led Front for Democracy, are in mortal danger. One deputy was shot and killed in August as he drove home. On Sept. 16, Norbert Ndihokubwayo, another Hutu member of the National Assembly, was fired on by two gunmen as he drove through Bujumbura. He was struck by five bullets, including one that pierced his jaw, but survived.

In Burundi’s own tragic version of ethnic cleansing, Hutus and Tutsis, who used to intermarry often enough in the past, were chased from each other’s neighborhoods starting last autumn. Their abandoned homes were torched and their possessions looted. The two peoples, who share a common culture and language, Kirundi, have never been more polarized.

But it is the army, and the politicians who have forged secret ties with it, who remain the X-factor, the unknown quantity, that will determine whether war or peace reigns. Just two days after the power-sharing formula was agreed to by most of Burundi’s leading politicians, on Sept. 12, Tutsi soldiers circled the working-class Hutu neighborhood at Kamenge a few miles from Parliament’s chambers.

Hutus who had armed themselves shot at the soldiers, residents admit. The army withdrew but returned after dawn with 10 armored cars and fired for hours on the flimsy shacks of dried mud where 80,000 Hutus live. The next day, the soldiers began house-to-house searches and manhunts.

By the army’s count, 60 civilians and two soldiers were killed. Kamenge residents say 150 of their neighbors died. Many, including the district’s Front leader, were skewered with bayonets, they say, making nonsense of the army’s claim that it was engaged in a firefight with armed Hutu extremists.

Dahlburg, The Times’ New Delhi Bureau chief, was recently on assignment in Burundi.