U.S. Envoy Reports 150 Slain In Burundi Ambassador Says Victims Were Mostly Hutu Women And Children

At least 150 Hutus, mostly women and children, were massacred in a single village in northeastern Burundi by attackers who shot or bludgeoned them to death, the U.S. ambassador said Monday.

The killings took place between Wednesday and Friday in the village of Gasorwe, said Ambassador Robert Krueger. The death toll for the whole region could be as high as 450 in killings over the past two weeks.

The killings didn’t appear to be related to an exodus of Rwandan refugees last week from nearby camps. Both countries suffer from similar tensions between Hutus and Tutsis, but diplomats don’t expect violence on the scale of Rwanda’s ethnic massacres last year to erupt in Burundi.

Since independence in 1962, Burundi’s Hutus and Tutsis have slaughtered each other in their fight for control of the country. More than 100,000 people have been killed since a failed October 1993 coup attempt by members of the Tutsi-dominated army.

However, neither side is powerful enough to launch a large-scale massacre like the one blamed on Rwanda’s military last year that killed some 500,000 people, mostly Tutsis, and sent thousands of refugees into Burundi.

Krueger said he learned about the latest massacres Friday and visited the area Saturday, touring hospitals and talking with parents of children who had been beaten to death.

“I have no explanation for why people would beat children’s heads with clubs,” he said. “How can you explain something like that? But that is what I saw, children who had their heads beaten in.”

Even in a country that endures recurring explosions of ethnic violence - including fighting in the capital last year between Tutsi soldiers and Hutu civilians - the massacre reported by Krueger was unusually large.

The ambassador, who has publicized previous ethnic killings, was clearly horrified by what he saw.

“One child had been shot in the face and had lost an eye,” Krueger said, adding that he saw another child beaten so badly that his brain had been exposed.

Survivors in Gasorwe, about 70 miles northeast of the capital of Bujumbura, indicated the attackers wore army uniforms, according to Krueger.

“It began Wednesday morning and was still going on Friday,” he said. Ten people were killed Friday morning.

“The village is virtually empty of people,” the ambassador said. “Virtually every house was vacant. For several kilometers down the road I didn’t see a single person.”

In another massacre March 25 in the nearby village of Karosi, more than 100 people were killed, he said, and up to 200 other people had been killed in the area in the past two weeks.

Krueger declined to give further details, saying he had to talk with Burundian officials.

President Sylvestre Ntibantunganya told reporters Monday the army was there to protect the people, and denied it was attacking Hutus.

However, diplomats speaking on condition of anonymity said the president, who is a Hutu, has not been able to control the military.

Killers act with impunity in Burundi, where ethnic violence between the majority Hutus and the minority Tutsis promotes the ambitions of extremist political parties and leaders.