Burundi is "going to hell." That’s according to Samantha Power, the United States ambassador to the United Nations. Few observers would disagree. The country is witnessing daily mass killings, while its government rejects any outside intervention as it seeks to impose a violent, retributive and increasingly ethnicised grab for total power. Burundi's immediate future looks grim.
Many see the root of the current crisis in the controversial re-election of Burundi's current president, Pierre Nkurunziza, for a third term in office in July 2015. But it’s clear that the problem goes back much further: far beyond even the Arusha peace deal of 2000, and into the complex web of violence of the early 1970s and after.
In 1972, Burundi was subject to sustained and horrific bouts of ethnic massacres, which bore all the hallmarks of genocide. A Hutu uprising in the south of the country led to the mass killings of thousands of Tutsi and Hutu who refused to join the rebels. The Tutsi military government of the president, Michel Micombero, responded by launching a bout of ethnic-based slaughter against Hutus throughout the country. Tens of thousands of Burundians fled into neighbouring countries, including Rwanda, destabilising an already volatile situation there.
