BUJUMBURA : Mission to Africa
United Nations Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali will tour two of the most troubled countries of Africa this week, stopping in Burundi on Thursday and Rwanda on Friday. The two neighbors, German colonies before World I and Belgian trusteeships until independence in 1962, have been plagued for decades by enmity between the majority Hutu people and the minority Tutsis.
In the most horrifying episode, several hundred thousand Rwandans, mostly Tutsis, died at the hands of militant Hutus after the Hutu president was killed in April, 1994, in a mysterious plane crash. A Tutsi-led rebel army then defeated the largely Hutu government army, driving more than a million refugees into squalid camps in Zaire and Burundi.
The inability of European and African nations--except for a belated French expeditionary force--to stop the carnage angered the secretary general, who castigated their failure and lack of commitment at one of his news conferences in New York. He will be inspecting U.N. recovery efforts and pressing for conciliation.
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