Burundi Falls Victim to Its Violent History

This is an ordinary day of doom on the Central African highlands. In this country, too small to find on many maps, the question gnaws at anyone with the capacity to reason with the unreasonable: Does the genocide start tonight, again?

Or will it just be more random gunfire and pervasive fear?

Another night to sleep in the hills in the rain under a banana leaf because you worry that someone will come in the dark and slip a machete through your mattress?

Choices in Burundi are meager, maddening.

This week, the tension became unbearable for Americans and Europeans. The embassies of the United States, France and Belgium evacuated their dependents. Other nations warned their citizens to flee.

And perhaps 40,000 refugees, who escaped here from neighboring Rwanda a year ago, up and bolted on Thursday again--this time toward Tanzania, ostensibly fearing for their lives.

Burundi’s generation-long cycle of ethnic bloodshed has taken another turn for the worse. Maybe the final corner before another calamity. Or maybe not.

Burundi buries the dead but not the question.

This is a land of misty green mountains, sky-blue lakes--the land of Hutus and Tutsis, peoples of Central Africa whose suspicions of one another have been intensified by generations of horror, overcrowding and political manipulation into a form of inhumanity measured by the digits in the death toll.

Almost exactly one year ago, across the border in Rwanda, a Hutu-led genocide resulted in the killing of 500,000 Tutsis. Another 1 million Hutus fled the country as Tutsis sought revenge. In the autumn of 1993, perhaps 50,000 Hutus and Tutsis perished in Burundi in a few weeks of slaughter, and many more were displaced within their own country. Back in 1972, 300,000 Hutus died here. A decade earlier, almost the entire population of educated Hutus was exterminated.

The killing and fleeing, of course, resolved nothing except to compound the scores yet to be settled. So at any moment today in Burundi, those same, ordinary-looking people walking down the colonnade in their bright dresses and button-down shirts, the boys on their overloaded bicycles, the students in the campus courtyard--all of them are inches from being cornered by fear with no choice but to dig up the AK-47s buried in a tomato garden. They then will turn to what they will call vengeance.

Just ask them.

“To defend ourselves doesn’t mean we shouldn’t prepare offensive missions. Our ambushes are part of our continued self-defense. As we are talking now we are laying in ambush against the army in the north. This is war.”

*

The man speaking is known only as “Maj. Savimbi,” namesake of another African rebel fighter, Angola’s Jonas Savimbi.

Maj. Savimbi’s eyes are wide and watery, his face waxy; under his nylon-running jacket is a .45-caliber automatic. He is a Hutu militia commander. And in the 200,000-population capital of Bujumbura, Hutus have been pushed to the furthest edge of the city, to the mud shantytown called Kamenge, their sanctuary where no Tutsi dare tread.

Not that the Hutus feel very safe, either. Many women and children have vanished into the mud-slick hills behind Kamenge to wait.

Savimbi and the young militia who follow him secretively down the alleys of Kamenge from one safehouse to another prepare for the attack they believe is coming.

Here in Burundi, the balance of terror is this: Hutus are 85% of the population, a working majority for the young, troubled government here. But Tutsis control the army, the police, the heavy weapons and the economy.

Which is stronger, people or firepower? How many will die finding out? Savimbi and his Hutu militia contend that the Tutsi army is determined to provoke one final incident in Bujumbura as an excuse to drive the last of the Hutus from the capital, giving the Tutsis a mono-ethnic urban fortress against the rest of the nation.

But Clement Nkurunziza sees the opposite. The intense Tutsi chairman of the student body at the University of Burundi insists that the Hutu militia are responsible for the trouble. They want to provoke the army and bring on a civil war to drive the Tutsis to extinction.

“The Hutu are fleeing to the hillsides where they can launch their attacks. . . . They are a law onto themselves,” he says.

He wears a striped dress shirt and creased gray slacks as 50 classmates gather around him to listen. The students have closed the university to emphasize their demands. What do Tutsi students demand? That the Hutu president stop blaming the Tutsi army for Burundi’s violence. “He will meet with us or we will take measures,” Nkurunziza says.

In Burundi, such talk is especially menacing. The country’s first democratically elected president, a Hutu, was killed in the 1993 coup attempt. His successor, also a Hutu, was killed last April in a suspicious airplane crash that also killed Rwanda’s Hutu president.

Scarce are the bystanders who can fairly judge between the Tutsi and Hutu versions of life here. A curfew seals the city at 7:30 nightly. The truth travels the twisted trail of rumor of shrill newspapers and political radio.

Ahmendou Ould Abdallah, the United Nations’ special representative here, calls the situation “manageable” for now but acknowledges that the government is weakened and “vulnerable.”

*

The current crisis arises from four events in the last 2 1/2 weeks undermining the moderate center of Burundi’s shaky government and emboldening extremists on both sides:

* On March 11, a Hutu government minister was assassinated. He was the highest-ranking official to be killed since the 1994 plane crash. Hutus felt their hold on government slipping.

* Eight days later, gunmen believed to be Hutus ambushed a Tutsi army sports team and shot three Belgian residents who blundered on the scene, a man, a woman and a 4-year-old girl. This was the first time in recent years that Europeans were intentionally slain in the strife.

* One week ago, fierce fighting broke out in two ethnically mixed neighborhoods near the town’s center. More than 160 people perished, and Hutus fled in the face of the Tutsi army.

* On Monday, 11 Rwandan refugees, all Hutus, were killed at a border camp in northern Burundi. Tutsis were suspected--perhaps raiders from Rwanda.

By Thursday, rumors of further danger sent hapless Hutu refugees fleeing by the thousands into the chilly seasonal rains, their pathetic bedrolls on their soggy, downcast heads. A year ago, they left Rwanda. Now they are apparently determined to escape Burundi for the next country down the road, Tanzania. Relief workers say the panic may stampede all 200,000 Rwandan Hutus now living in Burundi.

Or maybe it’s not panic. Maybe it’s an unfathomable ploy. These Hutus ran from their country after inflicting a horrible genocide on Tutsis, then losing a civil war to them. The great Hutu refugee exodus of a year ago, in which perhaps 35,000 died, brought the world’s sympathy and food.

Both are now in short supply. So no sooner had this latest march begun than doubters wondered if the Rwandan Hutu leaders who maintain iron-fisted control of these refugees were “capitalizing” on Burundi’s instability to make another international bid for sympathy and a bid to discredit the Tutsis.