THERE is no war in the conventional sense being waged in Burundi. The opposing armies rarely confront each other. Instead, they fight each other"through proxies - the Hutu armies kill Tutsi civilians and the Tutsi forces kill Hutu civilians and both sides lie about the scale of the massacres.

Reliable information is difficult to come by. The Catholic bishops and the Vatican probably have the most reliable information through their network of parishes but they are not saying. This is probably because of the involvement of the Vatican itself and of some of the Burundian bishops in mediation efforts which they believe will be compromised by confronting the Tutsi army, particularly with the evidence of atrocities perpetrated by it.

I visited an Italian priest who was deeply critical of the church's "ambivalence" towards what is happening and what he regarded as the Pope's equivocation over atrocities committed by the army. He said, however, Archbishop Joachim Ruhuna of Gitega, who was killed along with two nuns on September 9th, had privately confronted the Tutsi army with evidence of its atrocities - the priest's implication was that this was why the archbishop was killed.

That explanation seems implausible. The archbishop was killed in an area where there has been large scale Hutu rebel activity. And there is little evidence that the killers knew the identity of their victims.

A fortnight ago I visited the site of the ambush about Is miles north of Gitega in central Burundi. To get there I had to travel with a military escort to Bugendana. This was where 367 Tutsi civilians were slaughtered on July 20th by Hutu rebels.

It was at the funeral of the victims of that massacre that the Hutu president, Sylvestre Ntibantunganya, was stoned. After the stoning incident, Ntibantunganya fled for refuge in the US embassy and this led to the military coup last July 25th in which Pierre Boyoya again assumed the presidency.

WITH reinforced military accompaniment, I, along with two other journalists, drove from Bugendana to the ambush site. The archbishop's car - a small four wheel drive - had crashed on to a ditch and been burnt out. The archbishop, a driver and two nuns, had been squeezed into the front and there were three women civilians in the back. The three women civilians and the driver escaped death - the latter three were held hostage by the rebels for a few days and then released unharmed. The archbishop and the two nuns in the front were killed.

The assault on the car appeared to have been haphazard.

The Italian priest said that several members of the archbishop's family had been killed by Hutus over the previous few years - like most senior clergy in Burundi the archbishop was a Tutsi.

There is a consensus among the UN personnel in Bujumbura - priests, diplomats and journalists - that the scale of killing in Burundi is currently in the region of 10,000 a month. The consensus extends to the prediction that hundreds of thousands of people are likely to be killed in Burundi in the coming months.

There seems to be only two possible ways this genocide can be avoided: Firstly, that Pierre Boyoya is able to curb the excesses of the army and encourage Hutu moderates into negotiation. Secondly, that there is intervention by an effective peace enforcement international force. Neither possibility seems likely.

Boyoya held a press conference in a posh hotel in Bujumbura last Friday week. He was seeking to convince the international community that he was meeting the demands of the neighbouring states, which had imposed sanctions for a restoration of the National Assembly and meaningful negotiations with the Hutu parties.

But there is no prospect of the opposition parties joining in negotiations. The main Hutu party, FRODEBU (the SDLP of Burundi), has largely thrown its lot in with the rebel army CNDD, led by the former minister for the interior, Leonard Nyangoma.

Boyoya appears to have been chosen by the army to head the military government because of an expectation that he would be acceptable to the international community and, perhaps, to Hutu moderates. But the imposition of sanctions has shown that Boyoya's credibility with the international community has in itself been insufficient to win international endorsement for the new regime, and Hutu moderates have been scornful of Boyoya's overtures.

Hence, Boyoyn's usefulness to the military may now be dubious and there is a possibility that he will soon be overthrown to be replaced by another former president and army officer, Jean Baptiste Bagaza.

Bagaza leads an extremist party, PARANA, and owns a newspaper, La Nation, which regularly orders attacks on Hutus.

The army itself seems to be preparing for a major onslaught. Thousands of new recruits have been taken on, mostly young teenage boys. There appears to be no shortage of weaponry. The Hutu rebels are supplied by arms from Zaire and the Tutsis are said to be armed with South African weapons.

Thus, internally there seems little hope of halting the slide towards apocalypse.

The UN secretary general, Boutros Boutros Ghali, has written to 87 countries seeking support for a military intervention in Burundi. He received five replies and only three of these (Ethiopia, Tanzania and Kenya) were vaguely positive.

The most realistic option is for a Belgian or French (or combined) military intervention under UN auspices and with logistical support from the United States. But this seems a remote possibility.

It appears that several hundred thousand people will have to be massacred in Burundi before the world steps in. {CORRECTION} 96092600005