ABSTRACT
The civil war in Burundi, which began in 1993 but with many prior antecedents of violent confrontations, cost some 300,000 mostly civilian lives in a country of just over eight million; over one million have been displaced. Since Burundi’s independence from Belgian mandatory rule in 1961, the country has become synonymous with ethnic strife, in part because the tensions between the country’s long-dominant Tutsis (14 percent) and the Hutus (85 percent) are parallel to the strife in its erstwhile colonial partner territory, Rwanda, where genocidal strife between these identity groups occurred nearly simultaneously with Burundi’s own ethnic crisis.1 Indeed, the act of violence that was the precipitant of the Rwandan genocide in 1994 – the downing of an airplane on April 6 carrying the country’s president Juvenal Habyarimana – also killed the Burundi president, Cyrian Ntayamira, who along with ten others aboard the aircraft were returning to Kigali from peace talks held in Arusha, Tanzania. Ntayamira, a Hutu, had taken over the presidency of Burundi following the assassination of his predecessor, Mechior Ndadaye, who had been killed in a military coup by Tutsi military leaders in October 1993. Ndadaye’s killing precipitated Burundi’s slide into civil war, which saw 100,000 deaths in violence in its first 12 months.
