BURUNDI: Declan Walsh found that people in Ruyigi, Burundi, are far from confident about the future
With a bed delicately balanced on his head, Ernest Izoza hurried anxiously along the road to Ruyigi. Nightfall was near, and so was the danger of attack. Two months earlier, rebels ransacked his village, he said. He had not spent one night there since.
Instead he scurried into Ruyigi to bed down in the town square. Alongside him slept his cattle and hundreds of other worried fugitives. Only now was he bringing his bed. "Nobody stays in the village any more," he said, pushing on through the dusk.
As the last light faded, peasants streamed into the hamlet, with its handful of shops, bank and large military barracks. In the background loomed a craggy cliff and a line of hills, now shrouded in cloud. Since February Hutu rebels had been terrorising the area from this spectacular perch. Sometimes they lobbed shells into the town, more often swept down to plunder the surrounding villages.
They raped as well as stole, said Marie Bugusu, prodding her goats forward with an umbrella. Three women and a 13-year-old girl were raped in the attack on her village only two kilometres away.
Several hundred found refuge in the Pentecostal church turned dormitory. Inside, women and children bedded down with plastic sheets and blankets on the cold concrete floor. The men slept on the grass outside, with their long-horned cattle and a clutch of government soldiers. A few small candles pierced the darkness, throwing giant shadows against the wall of children quietly lying down.
"At dawn they will return home to work the fields," Pastor Sebastian Basabosa said, marshalling them into place. "But tonight they are afraid." Days later Burundi's rival politicians were due to cement a peace accord at an elaborate ceremony in the capital, Bujumbura, 120 miles away. But here that didn't mean much. "We don't know about all that," Marceline Denzako, a mother of six, said. "All we want is peace."
Last Wednesday's ceremony certainly was an historic moment. For only the second time, a minority Tutsi ceded the presidency to a Hutu, Domitien Nzayizeye, whose ethnic group makes up 85 per cent of the population. It was a key step, agreed in a peace deal two years ago, designed to end a decade of war which has cost over 300,000 lives and nearly destroyed the tiny central African nation.
But the main Hutu rebel group, the Forces for the Defence of Democracy (FDD), is not participating. It signed a ceasefire last December but broke it only three months later. It was scuppered after the army blocked deliveries of free European Union food aid, designed to entice rebels into cantonment areas. And a promised contingent of African Union peacekeepers to guard the camps suffered fatal delays.
Since then the FDD regrouped, recruited and bought guns in preparation for a fresh round of combat. Child soldiers have been plucked from rural schools, and more than 1,000 new fighters signed up at rear bases in the refugee camps in nearby Tanzania. When they sneak across the border into Burundi, the first town they hit is Ruyigi.
Two weeks ago they launched over a dozen Katushya rockets, damaging four houses belonging to a western aid agency. Now only one, Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), remains.
"People are sleeping outside in the bush just so they don't get raped. It's amazing," Ellen Rymshaw of MSF said. On the wall above the dining table behind her, fresh plaster covered the hole left by the rocket blast.
Most of the peasants seeking refuge in Ruyigi are Tutsis, but their Hutu neighbours are also targeted. In January an army terror squad opened fire on a nearby hill named Mwegereza in retaliation for an FDD attack. Up to 89 people died and over 400 houses were burned. Some were shot; others clubbed or fatally stabbed.
According to a detailed Human Rights Watch investigation into the atrocity, witnesses said that even three weeks later, "the air was unbreathable, polluted by smoke and the stench of decomposing bodies".
Western aid workers were forbidden by the army from visiting the hill for "security reasons". At Ruyigi barracks, district commander Maj Mathias Ndikumana denied any wrongdoing: "I have conducted my own inquiries. Up to now we don't know who was responsible."
All sides commit atrocities but few are brought to book. Last September army soldiers massacred 173 civilians in Itaba commune. The two officers charged with the crime were found guilty of "failing to obey orders"; and have already been released.
Tutsi domination of the army - they make up 90 per cent of officer ranks - is the key grievance of the Hutu rebels. But by this stage in the war, both sides target civilians of both ethnicities.
Last week an Italian missionary, Father Flavio Festa, was ambushed as he transported five Hutu patients to hospital. The rebels robbed and stripped each passenger, including the sick.Then they torched his jeep. He asked them why. "They replied: 'Why doesn't the president give us something to eat?' "
The African Union is due to deploy over 3,000 soldiers - from South Africa, Ethiopia and Mozambique - by next August. But in the absence of a renewed ceasefire, it seems a fanciful idea. Instead analysts believe both sides are re-arming for a major clash in coming months. Bursting this swelling bubble will be a critical first test for newly installed President Ndayizeye.
Fear of a repeat of the Rwandan genocide of 1994, when over 500,000 people were killed, haunts the conflict. Burundi has had its own slayings, most notably of Hutus in 1972 and Tutsis in 1993. But now things are different: the politicians at least talk peace, under strong international pressure.
Many Burundians believe the war has become more about power than ethnicity. But out in the countryside, the old horrors still prey on people's minds.
One woman whispers she has heard rumours of machetes being distributed among Hutu extremists. "They say the races will attack each other again," she said. "It makes me very afraid."