JUST over three years ago Burundi was hailed as a model of reconciliation and democracy for Africa. Now it stands on the verge of a double genocide attempt, after the killing of 150,000 people since 1993.
In 1993 power was handed over peacefully by a Tutsi military president, Pierre Boyoya, to a democratically elected Hutu, Melchior Ndadaye. (Hutus comprise 84 percent of the population and the Tutsis 14 per cent.) This handover was in the context of a constitution that had been carefully drafted over years of negotiations, with outside mediation from the international community.
A Tutsi was appointed prime minister. But within a few months, the new president was executed in October 1993 by a regiment of the Tutsi dominated army, along with the president of the National Assembly, Poncier Klaibwami. Soldiers sought the foreign minister Sylvestre Ntibantunganya, at his home, and when they failed to find him there they killed his wife and children.
This sparked a wave of massacres throughout Burundi, with Hutu extremists killing more than 80,000 Tutsis and the Tutsi dominated army killing about 100,000 civilians in reprisal. The power sharing arrangement did not last long.
The Burundian experiment ended with the savagery which the carefully constructed constitutional settlement of the previous year was specifically designed to preclude forever.
For there had been previous and even more brutal savageries, none more so than that of 1972, when more than 250,000 Hutus were killed by the Tutsi army. A witness of many of the atrocities of that time was a gentle American missionary evangelist, Eleanor Johnson.
The home of Eleanor Johnson and of her evangelist husband is in the northern outskirts of the capital, Bujumbura. The house is tiny, with just three rooms, and the living room partitioned by bookshelves packed with Bibles and other religious literature in English and French. They have a church there, a health clinic and a school for deaf and blind children.
But nowadays their entire property is swamped by more than 6,000 refugees who fled their homes on the hills around Bujumbura in the wake of an ethnic cleansing of those hills by the army.
She is 82 now, and when we visited her recently she was recovering from malaria and from an earlier bout of pneumonia, from which she had almost died. She spoke almost nonchalantly of her 46 years in Burundi and of how in 1972, when her family occupied property on the hills above Bujumbura, they witnessed the massacres.
"They loaded [the Hutus] on to trucks and packed them in tightly. You could just see their hands sticking out of the side. They drove them down the hills and killed them all on the verges of mass graves. We could see the bulldozers filling in the graves and we heard that one of the drivers of the bulldozers went out of his mind because of what he saw.
"The Hutus were so submissive. They just went passively, even though they knew what was going to happen to them. They had been indoctrinated to do as they were told and to accept that the Tutsis were their superiors.
"But it's different now, the Hutus won't accept that any more. But still the killing goes on. A few months ago they [the army] killed 87 Hutus just around here. My son saw them drive an old woman, a young woman and her child into our yard and bayonet them to death, right over there", she said, pointing to the area.
The casualness and frequency of massacres is illustrated by the following extracts from a US State Department report on human rights, in Burundi last year:
"In July, military forces removed approximately 30 male refugees from a UNHCR transit point in Kabarore, Ngozi province, without prior notification to UNHCR. The group never returned and a mass grave for a similar number of persons was found across the provincial border.
"Also in July, men in military uniforms gathered approximately 45 refugees, mostly women and children, into a deserted church in Cendajeru, Ngozi, threw a grenade into the church and fired on those who survived."
In June, according to UNHCR reports, military forces separated about 100 Rwandan Hutu refugees from their families near Kiri, in Kirundo province, removed them to another location and killed them.
"Local military authorities obstructed investigation of a mass grave of approximately 100 bodies which were subsequently discovered near the site of the killings ...
"In August gunmen attacked the Catholic Bishop of Mujinga at an altar while he offered Mass. When members of the congregation and clergy fled the church to the market, attackers armed with machetes killed 123. The bishop escaped."