Burundi’s Weak and Strong Alike Fear for Future : Africa: Deep insecurity is pervasive as people watch for signs that a blood bath will return.

The “high government official” arrives in his shiny Mercedes, its smoked-glass windows sealed tight, high-decibel opera playing on the cassette deck.

It may seem utterly strange to careen down the potholed streets of this inflamed city to an aria of love amid the smell of fresh leather upholstery.

But people must hold themselves together even if their country tears itself apart. And if music and darkened windows provide a quarter-inch separation from Burundi’s violent pressures, then a Mercedes may not be a luxury but a way to cope.

“People are in a fragile psychological condition,” says the government official, by which he surely includes himself.

The man’s name and position cannot be revealed. Few will take that chance now. But still, people in Burundi feel the urge to talk. Maybe somebody will care. And if not, talking itself is a way to cope.

“Political power has to be supported by military power. Now, it’s not,” he says. “We cannot stay long in this situation. It’s only a matter of time, according to me. We are facing a civil war. I think it can blow up rapidly. It can start tomorrow--or next month. I don’t know. . . .”

Upon leaving him, you shake hands and smile. An unsettling thought: Will you ever see this man again, or will Burundi consume him as it has half a million of its people in the last generation?

For once again this tiny nation is in the news amid mounting tension and an outbreak of violence that could foretell another tragic blood bath.

While they wait to discover what they will do to themselves, Burundians hold on.

North of Bujumbura are jagged mountains, rain forests, banana groves and endless farming communes in one of the world’s most eye-pleasing and densely populated regions.

Three hours by winding road north from the capital, 200,000 refugees live in camps.

They are wards of the world--eating handout food, raising their families on charity medical care, sleeping under sheets of plastic emblazoned with the logos of relief agencies. And like the man in the Mercedes, they are afraid.

They are Hutus from neighboring Rwanda, themselves caught in the same death grip that is strangling Burundi--the hatred and suspicion between themselves and the Tutsi people.

For about 51,000 of them last week, Burundi’s building tension became unbearable. So they packed and began walking, reminding the world of the horrible Rwandan refugee migration of last summer.

On Sunday, however, most of them stopped. Their escape route had been blocked when Tanzania closed its border Friday, so about 30,000 halted their march and agreed to wait in a “regrouping” camp hurriedly established by the United Nations near the village of Gashoho, 40 miles from the border. A few thousand others agreed to return to their original camps. A few carried on toward Tanzania, determined to sneak past the border crossing.

“There is insecurity in the camps. People come to kill you,” said 31-year-old Nyandwi. He stood stationary on the road with his nursing wife and four children, frozen by Burundi’s fear, moving neither ahead nor back.

His shield was the crowd. They stood together, touching, their clothes the color of dishwater. The more they were questioned, the tighter they squeezed together.

Just an hour from where these refugees filled the road and hacked down the nearby forests for firewood, where they struggled to survive and peered into every shadow for their assassin, is one of many national police checkpoints--a rope across the road with soiled rags tied to it.

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This one is different. Turn on your lights, the police order. Your turn signals. Your windshield wipers. How about the light bulb for your license plate?

This is Burundi’s only highway safety check. The police carry on with absurd seriousness. Even in good times, highway safety seems like a farcical idea.

The army patrols this road and much of Burundi. President Sylvestre Ntibantunganya and his ministers now fan into villages and neighborhoods to crusade against extremists. Sometimes they are hissed, sometimes applauded.

They hold on, even if sometimes it seems that moderation is the riskiest of all ideas.

Poolside at a villa on the hills above Bujumbura, U.N. Special Representative Ahmendou Ould Abdallah copes as a counselor might. Let’s talk, he tells Burundians. If you talk, someone may listen instead of shooting.

“I never saw a dead body in my life until I came here . . . but here people are used to death. I don’t like to say it, but there is a familiarity with death.”

Particularly, he is worried that news accounts may themselves fan hysteria, so fragile is this nation.

“I think in the short run Burundi can hold together,” he said. “But with all this talk--’The war is coming!’ ‘The genocide is here!’--I’m afraid people will start saying, ‘Well, I’d better go kill my neighbor before he comes to kill me.’ That’s what I’m afraid of.”