Burundi on the Brink
When Faustin Kobagaya fled his northern Burundi home in March, sneaking through the night to the Rwandan border, he was running from what could soon become another violent chapter in his country’s fratricidal history.
As a 10-year-old in 1993, Mr. Kobagaya, a member of Burundi’s Tutsi minority, lost most of his extended family in a wave of ethnic violence that followed the assassination of the country’s first democratically elected president, Melchior Ndadaye. The murder of Ndadaye, a Hutu, unleashed a 12-year civil war in which an estimated 300,000 Burundians were killed. It also helped embolden anti-Tutsi extremists in Rwanda, who, only six months later, would begin to carry out Rwanda’s genocide in 1994.… Seguir leyendo »