Abstract

Burundi Bleeds

The article presents information on the political condition in Burundi. Rivers clogged by bodies with their hands bound, locked rooms crowded with the charred corpses of schoolboys, homes left eerily empty. These are some of the nightmarish images of life in Burundi since the October 21, 1993 assassination of newly elected President Melchior Ndadaye. The roads, observers say, are lined with armed camps of soldiers and civilians; burning villages illuminate the night. Estimates of the death toll far exceed those of the 1972 military rampage that left 150,000 civilians dead in two weeks and made close to a million people refugees. What hadn't changed was the army's economic stranglehold on the country. Following each military crackdown on civilians since the 1972 massacre, top officers expropriated much of the land left unoccupied by fleeing refugees. Members of the military clique, for years fortified by French and Belgian aid, also continued to hold influential positions in most state-run industries, a hierarchy threatened by Ndadaye's plan to recruit officers equally among Hutus and Tutsis and establish a merit-based system of economic appointments.