Burundi Military Carries Out Bloodless Coup

The Tutsi-led army defied world leaders and carried out a successful coup Thursday, sealing this embattled country’s borders and installing an ethnic Tutsi to replace the Hutu president who is still under the protection of the U.S. ambassador here.

The putsch was apparently bloodless, but the deepening crisis, which further entrenched the Tutsi minority in power, clearly worsened chances for peaceful resolution of the bitter Tutsi-Hutu conflict that has claimed an estimated 150,000 lives since 1993.

Hundreds of uniformed soldiers and police swept into the tense capital about 2 p.m., installing roadblocks and ordering shops and markets to close at gunpoint. Most people quickly fled as troop trucks and armored cars patrolled empty streets and soldiers were posted on every corner.

Two hours later, Col. Firmin Sinzoyiheba, the defense minister, announced on national radio that the army had suspended the National Assembly and all political parties, had banned demonstrations and strikes and had closed all borders and airports. Phone lines were temporarily cut as well.

Sinzoyiheba said a former president, Pierre Buyoya, would take over as interim president from Sylvestre Ntibantunganya, who was given refuge with his wife, Pascasie, at the home of U.S. Ambassador Morris Hughes on Tuesday night.

Ntibantunganya was still at Hughes’ residence late Thursday, an embassy spokeswoman said, and had not formally resigned from office. He was said to spend his time phoning colleagues, planning strategy and eating lunch with Hughes.

In a 10-minute radio broadcast to the nation, Buyoya said coup leaders acted to stop “our people’s descent into hell.”

“We demand that the international community understand the purpose of our efforts,” he said. “What happened today was not a change of regime through ambition, glory or anything else. What happened today was an action of salvation.”

In Washington, the Clinton administration refused to recognize Buyoya as president. For the time being, at least, Washington continues to consider Ntibantunganya as Burundi’s legitimate ruler.

“We understand that the current president has not yet resigned,” State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns said. “We certainly do recognize him to be the president of the country. Now he will have to decide--and this is a choice that we cannot make for him-- . . . whether he will attempt to stay in office, whether he will resign from office.”

Later in the day, White House Press Secretary Mike McCurry condemned the coup and called on “all Burundian parties to halt the violence and engage immediately in concerted efforts to achieve lasting national reconciliation. We are discussing with African and other governments appropriate next steps,” McCurry said.

He said the U.S. would send Howard Wolpe, an advisor to the administration on Burundi and Rwanda, to the region to begin “urgent consultations” very soon.

Although Burns repeated that the U.S. government will not send ground troops to Burundi, he called on African nations to take the lead in creating a contingency force that could restore order, if the present crisis produces widespread genocide, as happened in neighboring Rwanda, where as many as 800,000 people were killed.

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But he flatly rejected suggestions that the United States, as the world’s remaining superpower, would have to play a military role, saying, “It is not possible for the United States to lead everywhere and in every situation. It does make sense and it is reasonable for some other countries in the world to stand up in situations like this and to lead.”

At the United Nations, Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali urged “all concerned to uphold the constitution and to bear in mind that the international community will on no account accept a change of government by force or other illegitimate means in Burundi,” U.N. spokeswoman Sylvana Foa said.

The Security Council has discussed the crisis informally, but officials said the council was unlikely to act until the situation becomes clearer.

Salim Salim, head of the Organization of African Unity, said, “Any attempt to take over power by illegal means will not be accepted by Africa and will be met by force.”

In Bujumbura, most Hutu members of the president’s Cabinet, as well as other Hutu political leaders and senior civil servants, also were in hiding Thursday at the homes of the German, French, Belgian, Egyptian and Chinese ambassadors, a senior Western envoy said, noting, “These people are targeted.”

More than a dozen Hutu political leaders, including Burundi’s foreign minister, Venerand Bakevyumusaya, and the president of the National Assembly, Leonce Ngendakumana, huddled in the ambassador’s garden. One official paced nervously with a shortwave radio close to his ear, others talked on cellular phones, while a few sat under a white umbrella and stared blankly into space.

In an interview, the foreign minister said he and the others had asked for refuge on Wednesday after learning that the president had requested help from the Americans. “It’s just a matter of simple prudence,” he said.

“All the responsible civil servants have moved,” he added.

Bakevyumusaya said the president decided to seek refuge Tuesday after the military chief of staff, Col. Jean Decamagu, told the president that the army could no longer guarantee his safety. This was shortly after the Hutu president was forced to flee from angry stone-throwing mourners at a funeral for more than 300 Tutsis who were massacred by Hutu extremists.

“If he didn’t do it [go into hiding], he would have been killed,” said Emmanuel Mtfayokurera, executive secretary of the president’s Frodebu Party who has also gone into hiding.

At the same time, the army began deploying Red Beret paratroopers and ranger commandos at the radio and television station, at power plants and other strategic facilities early this week, said Lt. Col. Longin K. Minani, a military spokesman. He said the soldiers were sent to protect the facilities rather than to seize them. He said, for example, that soldiers turned back about 2,000 members of a Tutsi militia who marched on the TV and radio station late Wednesday.

Bands of angry, chanting Tutsi youths and young men, many armed with axes or nail-studded clubs, have marched or run through the streets of Bujumbura each morning and afternoon in recent weeks in a growing display of power.

Some of the groups described themselves as sports clubs, but they bear an unnerving similarity to the Hutu interahamwe militias that carried out a three-month genocidal campaign against Tutsis and moderate Hutus in neighboring Rwanda in 1994.

“Exactly what is happening with young people here is what happened in Rwanda,” warned Mtfayokurera, one of many who sees frightening parallels to Rwanda, where the ethnic mix--85% Hutu, 14% Tutsi--is similar.

The Hutu majority controlled the government and the army against the largely defenseless Tutsi civilian population in Rwanda. But the minority Tutsis hold the reins of power in Burundi. Diplomats hope that the balance of terror, as one called it, may be different enough to prevent a similar explosion here.

At his office early Thursday, military spokesman Minani joked that “Americans have stolen our president” and insisted that the military had no plans for a coup. “If the military wanted to take over, it would have done it a long time ago,” he said.

Later, after the military did take over, he appeared in the lobby of a hotel here to tell journalists that the president had “stood in the army’s way” as it battled Hutu militias in the countryside. Minani said the army now expects to step up operations against the Hutu forces.

Although Buyoya was called an interim president in the coup announcement, the shape and duration of the new government was not announced. Buyoya, a former army major, previously seized power in an army-led coup in September 1987. His junta resisted calls for greater political participation by Hutus, and ethnic tensions erupted in massacres the following year.

But Buyoya became Burundi’s first president to allow democratic elections, and he stepped down in July 1993 after the country’s first elected Hutu president, Melchior Ndadaye, was sworn into office. Ndadaye was kidnapped and killed by Tutsi soldiers that October, however, an event that sparked the current fratricidal war.

Times staff writer Norman Kempster in Washington contributed to this report.