A RECURRING NIGHTMARE

By Bruce W. Nelan

The spectacle was sickeningly familiar. Thousands of refugees, most of them Rwandan Hutu, clogged the rutted roads of central Africa last week. Thousands of men, women and children were on the move in Burundi, fleeing camps where they had sought asylum last year from the civil war in their homeland next door. Now, spurred by the dread of more ethnic killing, they trudged east toward Tanzania. As they passed other Hutu camps, more thousands gathered up their meager belongings to join the trek. About 40,000 refugees were stalled Saturday just outside Tanzania after the country closed its borders.

For months, sporadic tribal killing has been fracturing Burundi into tense ethnic cantonments, which many officials in the country and outside fear could explode into full-scale genocide. Fresh and ominous spasms of bloodshed erupted in the capital as well as the Majuri refugee camp near the town of Ngozi, where armed men killed 12 Rwandan Hutu and wounded 22 last Monday. That attack, presumably carried out by Tutsi militiamen, followed a week of ethnic cleansing in the capital, Bujumbura: bands of Tutsi swept through mixed neighborhoods, driving out members of the other tribal group, fighting with Hutu militia, shooting stragglers, burning houses and shops. Families were shot in the street and left to die; mothers came home to murdered children.

"Youths came with guns and took everything,'' says Ahmed Brown, a Hutu whose left eye is swollen from a blow with a club. He is still living in his old neighborhood but says, "I am so afraid. We have seen too many people gunned down.'' Bujumbura is now mainly Tutsi, its Hutu residents forced into a few ghettolike areas like the northern section of the city called Kamenge. Out in the countryside, Hutu gangs roam the hills around Tutsi encampments, preying on those who venture out.

Rumors spread quickly last week that the Tutsi-dominated army was about to attack Kamenge and seven major refugee camps that provide shelter to 200,000 Hutu from Rwanda. Tutsi paramilitary groups may have spread the rumors themselves to help speed their segregation plan. Everyone in Burundi is still in shock after the massacres in Rwanda last year, in which more than 500,000 Rwandans, mostly Tutsi, were slaughtered.

The latest outbreak of communal violence was touched off by a pair of assassinations last month that have put extremists into power on both sides. First a Hutu government minister, a respected moderate, was shot and killed. A few days later Hutu vigilantes took their revenge by kidnapping a moderate Tutsi politician, a former mayor of Bujumbura. His body was found crucified and eviscerated.

Officials in Burundi and the world outside have been watching anxiously to see if the Rwandan nightmare would repeat itself here. The ethnic makeup in Burundi is the same as in Rawanda: 80% Hutu, 15% Tutsi. The difference is that in Burundi, the minority Tutsi have always controlled the armed forces, while in Rwanda the majority had the weapons. After the assassination of two Presidents in 18 months, the current government is a shaky coalition of the two rival tribal groups. Moderates willing to compromise are dumped by their own faction, and, says a senior foreign-aid worker, "the country has been taken hostage by the hard-liners.''

In an interview with TIME last week, President Sylvestre Ntibantunganya, a Hutu, vowed to prevent more killing by disarming the Hutu and Tutsi militias, but conceded that extremist vigilantes had official sponsors on both sides. "These militias are not created out of thin air,'' he said. "They are essentially political, and there are politicians who fund and direct them.'' Diplomats doubted whether the Burundi government, which survives on sufferance of the two factions and is reshuffled regularly, would be able to disarm anyone.

Outsiders have been trying to keep the lid on mainly by reminding the government that the rest of the world is watching. Humanitarian assistance has been arriving steadily--including $77 million from the U.S. since October 1993--and so have high-level visitors like Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott. The U.N. has assigned a special representative to Burundi to help keep the governing coalition in place. Last week the Security Council warned that it would consider taking "appropriate measures to bring to justice'' those who commit genocide.

Though there was much hand wringing last year about the world's failure to stop the slaughter in Rwanda, intervention seems no more likely this time. The U.S. and other members of the Security Council have turned down Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali's proposal for a rapid-deployment force to be placed on call in Zaire. "That's crazy,'' says a Washington official. "No country is willing or able to put troops there.''

U.S. officials describe themselves as "pessimistic but not defeatist.'' Though violence is widespread, they say they hope it can be contained. They argue that genocide took place in Rwanda, where the Hutu were in full control, but in Burundi there is a rough balance of power: the Hutu have the numbers and the Tutsi the guns. Diplomats in Bujumbura tend to agree. "It's not genocide,'' says one. "It's a slow-burn civil war.''

--Reported by Sandra Burton/Washington and Andrew Purvis/Bujumbura