Hell Postponed: Burundi's Balance of Fear

By MARGUERITE MICHAELS/BUJUMBURA

Local people call their country "the Burundi cocktail." Its volatile ethnic mixture seems ready to explode at any time. Rwanda's next-door neighbor to the south is virtually a mirror image of that devastated country, threatened by the same passionate hatreds. As in Rwanda, Burundi's dense population is divided between two tribes, 85% Hutu and 15% Tutsi. As in Rwanda, Belgian colonialization hoisted the status of the Tutsi, who after independence slowly lost power to the majority Hutu. And as in Rwanda, the potential for ethnic violence has risen to the surface in the political vacuum left by the assassination of the Presidents of both countries last April. Now "every Hutu goes to sleep afraid he will be killed by a Tutsi," says Sicaire Ndikymana, a taxi driver in Bujumbura, the capital. "Every Tutsi goes to sleep afraid he will be killed by a Hutu."

After gaining independence from Belgium in 1962, Burundi was run largely by Tutsi. But a series of deadly clashes with the Hutu forced the Tutsi-dominated government gradually to share power, even permitting election of the country's first Hutu President, Melchior Ndadaye, in June 1993. That process came to an abrupt halt in October when Ndadaye was murdered in a failed coup by renegade Tutsi troops, who feared the Hutu were grabbing too many civilian jobs and military posts for themselves. In a wave of ensuing reprisals, 100,000 Burundians were killed and 500,000 left their homes to gather in safer encampments. The country's interim President, also a Hutu, died with Rwanda's leader.

While Rwandans set about hacking one another to pieces in the frenzy of killing that followed the April assassinations, Burundi's Hutu and Tutsi parties struggled to agree on a new President. They might have succeeded if the Rwandan capital of Kigali had not fallen to the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan | Patriotic Front on July 4. The victory emboldened Burundi's Tutsi opposition to make more demands, creating a dangerous stalemate. "There is a government, but the whole structure is weak and barely functioning," says a Western diplomat in Bujumbura. "There are 27 ministers, 11 of whom are from the opposition. There is an interim President afraid of his own shadow." The Tutsi-dominated military hovers in the background, alert for an opportunity to take power. And more than 230,000 Hutu refugees from Rwanda complicate any attempts to govern: an exodus from the French protected zone could add tens of thousands more.

As caretaker leader Sylvestre Ntibantunganya attempts to placate the Tutsi opposition and restless army, his perceived weakness has encouraged violence from extremists on both sides. Since the failed coup, neighborhoods in Bujumbura have split into ethnic enclaves where residents are forced to travel through enemy territory to go to work or shop. Buses had to be hired to move people around safely. Ethnic violence this month alone has left nearly 20 dead, including a United Nations staff member.

On Aug. 8, protesting the arrest of an opposition leader jailed for inciting riots, Tutsi youths in Bujumbura organized a general strike and set up barricades of burning tires to prevent people from going to work. Quiet returned to the city a few days later but was quickly broken when grenades were lobbed into crowds. Hutu extremist groups, newly armed with Rwandan weapons coming into Burundi from Zaire, have reorganized to mount counterattacks.

Last week the U.N. offered peacekeeping troops to prevent further fighting. Burundi's ruling Hutu party and the Tutsi-dominated army both refused. Meanwhile, the economy is sinking fast. All international aid to Burundi has been suspended until a new President is named. As a result, industrial production has dropped 20%; by the end of November, the government may not even be able to meet its payroll.

The only thing now holding the country together is a delicate equilibrium of fear. On one hand there is each ethnic group's terror of the other. Counterbalancing that is the fear that if either side gives in to its worst impulses, Burundi will detonate as Rwanda did. "It's a tense, threatening atmosphere," says Irish aid worker Orla Quinlan. "Every time someone is attacked or killed, you say that's it. That's the trigger that will blow Burundi apart."