BURUNDI's political crisis deepened yesterday after the main opposition party representing minority Tutsis called on the Hutu president to resign over his request for a regional security force to stop ethnic bloodshed.
Mr Charles Mukasi, leader of the Uprona party, made the call at a demonstration against the security assistance request made by President Sylvestre Ntibantunganya and Tutsi Prime Minister Antoine Nduwayo at an African summit last week.
The demonstration came a day after the Tutsi dominated army reported the latest ethnic slaughter of over 80 Tutsis in the north west by Hutu rebels.
At the demonstration by about 3,000 people in the capital, Bujumbura, Mr Mukasi, a Hutu who has taken a hard line to prove his credentials to Tutsis, said. "The president can no longer rule this country. We are calling on him to give up power.
More than 150,000 people have perished in the past three years in ethnic violence between Tutsis and Hutus. Some 50,000 people died in 1993 after renegade Tutsi soldiers killed President Melchior Ndadaye, a Hutu.
A Western backed regional peace plan was agreed in Tanzania on June 25th and will involve Ugandan and Tanzanian troops to help end ethnic violence.
Yesterday UN human rights investigators counted 62 corpses, including the charred bodies of 16 babies and children in one house, at the latest massacre site in a tea plantation and factory in Teza in northwest Burundi.
A total of 83 people were killed by Hutu rebels there, the army said. Most of the victims were Tutsis.
Peter Smerdori reports from Naimbi:
Burundian Hutu refugees fleeing into Zaire say they saw Rwandan government troops in Burundi's northwestern Cibitoke province, the UN refugee agency said yesterday.
The reported sightings of Rwandan troops in Burundi backed accusations this week from Burundian Hutu rebels that troops of Rwanda's Tutsi dominated army moved into Cibitoke last weekend. Both Rwandan and Burundian officials denied the charges.
Paul Stromberg, spokesman for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Rwanda's capital Kigali, said his agency had no independent confirmation of the refugee accounts.
He said refugees said they saw Rwanda Patriotic Army (RPA) troops and not uniformed members of Rwanda's former Hutu army, which operate as rebels in the region and had a leading role in the 1994 slaughter in Rwanda of up to one million Tutsis and moderate Hutus.
Senior Western diplomats in the region believe Rwandan troops cross into Cibitoke on border patrols. "The thinking is that if the RPA is in Cibitoke it is there to stop Hutus infiltrating into Rwanda rather than in direct support of Burundi's army," said a western aid agency official.
A total of 2,510 Burundian Hutu refugees fled from Cibitoke to southwestern Rwanda in four days up to last Sunday.
Burundian Defence Minister Firmin Sinzoyiheba said on Wednesday a major government army offensive had been launched in Cibitoke to flush out Burundian Hutu rebels infesting the area.
The Burundian Hutu rebel National Council for the Defence of Democracy said on Wednesday RPA troops arrived in Cibitoke last Saturday and were fighting alongside the Burundian army against rebel forces.
It was impossible to obtain independent witness accounts of the situation in Cibitoke because is the most dangerous province in Burundi and the last foreign aid workers left early in June.