On the Run in Burundi

Four decades of Belgian colonial government fostered little development and a lot of ethnic animosity. In 1961, the first elected Prime Minister was assassinated; in 1965, another was killed. In 1972, as many as three hundred thousand Hutus were killed by the Tutsi-led army. (This “first genocide,” as it is sometimes called, passed almost without notice outside Burundi, but did incense Richard Nixon. “I’m tired of this business of letting Africans eat”—meaning kill—“a hundred thousand people and doing nothing about it,” he said to Henry Kissinger, who in turn noted that more people had been killed in three months in Burundi than had died in eight years of war in Vietnam.) That was followed by a coup in 1976, another in 1987, and another in 1993; after the President was assassinated in the last, as many as a hundred and fifty thousand Burundians were killed in a bout of violence that some consider a second genocide. A Hutu rebellion spurred a civil war that lasted from 1993 to 2005 and left another estimated three hundred thousand dead. In 1994, yet another President was killed when the plane in which he was flying with the Rwandan President was shot down, touching off the more famous genocide next door.