THE Tutsi-led army in Burundi killed thousands of Hutu civilians between April and July, according to a United Nations report released yesterday. The report was drawn up by a team of five UN observers who went to Burundi on April 19th. They were based in Bujumbura but also went into rural areas.
They report that women, children and old people were brutally murdered in the ethnic violence which has left tens of thousands dead in the past three years.
The killings began when the country's first democratically- elected Hutu president was killed in a failed coup in October 1993. It is recovering from the latest unrest after a military coup ousted President Sylvestre Ntibantunganya less than two weeks ago and installed Major Pierre Buyoya, a Tutsi, as the new strongman.
On Friday Mr Pascal-Firmin Ndimira, appointed Prime Minister by Maj Buyoya, presented his new government, which has an equal number of Hutus and Tutsis, and promised to bring calm to the troubled country.
Maj Buyoya said his objective in forming a government was to avoid a slide into the all-out inter-ethnic bloodletting witnessed in neighbouring Rwanda during the 1994 civil war.
But the UN report warned of an increase in ethnic violence across the country, particularly in the south and centre, which up to now have been largely spared.
"The human rights situation has been characterised these past few months by heavy massacres of civilian populations, by selective murders, by forced disappearances and arbitrary arrests" it said.
One of the worst was the massacre of about 500 people by soldiers in Nyeshenza, Cibitoke province, on June 27th. Witnesses said another 1,200 people were killed by the army in Mushikano, Muramvya province, between May 13th and 17th.
Soldiers led several hundred men and youths towards a Pentecostal church in Nyeshenza, where they were massacred with guns and bayonets in retaliation for a Tutsi-led ambush of a tea convoy, the report says.
"The incidents and massacres are characterised most of the time by an attack by rebels on military positions, followed by retaliation on the part of the army on civilian populations suspected of collaborating with the aggressors."
But the report added that Hutu rebels were also responsible for massacres.
The report condemned the overcrowding in Burundi's prisons, and the serious judicial problems which resulted from the domination of the magistracy by Tutsis.