Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, March 30, 1995 TAG: 9503300086
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: BUJUMBURA, BURUNDI LENGTH: Medium
Burundi is a nation on the run. Refugees fleeing violence outnumber residents in the capital - and its second-largest city is now a camp populated by Rwandans.
It is a country where might makes right. It is a land where the tragic lessons of neighboring Rwanda have been lost.
Life in the Central African country is ``a little like quicksand,'' said Frances Turner, head of the U.N. Children's Fund in Burundi.
``What appears to be, isn't. You have to anticipate not just the unexpected, but the unimag- inable.''
The unimag- inable includes the brutality of this mountainous, hauntingly beautiful land where neighbors set upon neighbors with machetes.
A recent UNICEF study of 2,769 of the more than 14,000 children made orphans by ethnic killings since October 1993 found 58 percent had been attacked personally. It said 77 percent of those children knew their attackers, and in nearly 81 percent of those cases, the assailant was a neighbor.
Killers act with impunity in Burundi. Ethnic violence between the majority Hutus and minority Tutsis promotes the ambitions of extremist political parties and individual politicians intent on taking power.
``People are never prosecuted for political crimes in Burundi,'' said U.N. special representative Ahmedou Ould Abdallah.
Revenge becomes the only avenue of retribution. Massacres by extremists on both sides breed more fear and feed ethnic hate and suspicion.
The lessons of the genocide of more than 500,000 people last year in Rwanda are lost on Burundi, because memories of its own past massacres erect an impenetrable barrier to reconciliation.
``It's seared into the soul of every Burundian. Every Hutu cannot forget 1972. Every Tutsi cannot forget 1993,'' said Turner.
More than 100,000 people were killed in 1972 in massacres that followed a failed Hutu coup attempt. An estimated 100,000 people were killed in 1993 after a failed coup attempt by elements of the overwhelmingly Tutsi military.
Because the balance of power is different, aid workers and U.N. officials don't expect killings on a Rwandan scale. But none rules out the possibility.
In the muddy warrens of the dirt roads that make up Bujumbura's impoverished neighborhoods, people are hacked or shot to death for no reason other than ethnic identity.
At Prince Regent Charles Hospital, a Hutu man slashed repeatedly with a machete cried as he talked about the killings of his wife and three children in the weekend violence that killed anywhere from 150 to 500 people.
Dr. Simba Muangwa said the man, Sylvestre Gahunga, 39, was one of only three people hospitalized with wounds suffered in the fighting.
``I've got a feeling that this time we didn't see as many patients from the violence because the attacks were very brutal. Most were killed, not injured,'' said Muangwa.
``There is no political will to stop this violence,'' said Muangwa. ``One group tries to increase its power, and the others try to reconquer what they have lost.''
Burundi's coalition government, forged under terms of a power-sharing agreement last year, is too fractious to govern. Since the beginning of the year, the main Tutsi opposition party has forced the resignations of both the speaker of the national assembly and the prime minister.
Diplomats contend the weekend fighting, which involved the army, underscored the inability of the Hutu president to control the overwhelmingly Tutsi military.
Burundi, they say, now is a country governed by thugs and gangs.
by CNB