ON Monday morning, I left Bujumbura, the capital of Burundi, and drove north thorough the countryside to the Rwandan border at Kantaru. There had been reports earlier that morning of fighting around the northern town of Kayanza and while we heard occasional bursts of distant gunfire, we saw no fighting.
But along the way, every single house appeared razed or otherwise destroyed and abandoned. That is beyond the villages. There were burnt out tracks and cars along the route, marking the location of ambushes. These locations were also marked by deep craters in the roads.
And from the Rwandan border to the capital, Kigali, we passed through Butare, where just over two years ago, unspeakable crimes, involving the murder and mutilation of thousands of civilians, took place as there did, of course, in Kigali itself.
And then on to Kigali airport to begin the flight home. It was at this airport on April 6th, 1994, that the perpetration of perhaps the most appalling crime the world has known since the second World War began the genocide of 800,000 people of the Tutsi clan in Rwanda. And the most shocking aspect of that crime was that those involved in its commission probably involved a majority of Hutus, who made up almost the remainder of the population of 7.6 million in Rwanda. It is estimated that only 100,000 of the original Tutsi population survived the genocide.
There is unlikely to be a genocide of that kind in Burundi the massacre of 800,000 people in the space of six weeks or so. But at present, there is a genocide going on there, with a number of crucial differences to what happened in Rwanda. First, it is a mutual genocide the Tutsis of the Hutus and the Hutus of the Tutsis (it was not that way in Rwanda). Second, it is a slower process. There are "only" about 100 people being killed, on average, each day in Burundi and although this is likely to rise to a few thousand a day within a month of so, according to several people I spoke to, it will not be of the convulsive nature that the Rwandan crisis became so quickly.
But there are similarities as well. The same two tribes are caught in this nightmare. There is the same pattern of mutilation and slaughter of entire populations (men, women and children). And, as in Rwanda, the rest of the world is standing by, largely impassively.
A Sabena jumbo jet is due to arrive at the deserted Bujumbura airport on Friday to take out most of the remaining Belgian nationals. The American nationals have already left and US marines have come in to assist in the evacuation of the remaining embassy staff when the time comes. There are sanctions, of course, sanctions on everything except arms quite unbelievably there is no arms embargo ow the Tutsi dominated army that is daily slaughtering the civilian Hutu population, and there is no arms embargo on the Hutu "rebels" who are, reciprocally, slaughtering Tutsi civilians.
But there are human rights monitors stationed in Bujumbura and these are paid for by the European Community. The total number of such monitors is five and they don't move outside Bujumbura because it is too dangerous. Nothing happens now in Bujumbura because it has been ethnically cleansed of Hutus. There are Hutus on the surrounding hills and they are being got rid of but it is too risky for the EU human rights monitors to venture out, even to there.
There are sanctions, of course. This means that there are no flights in or out of the country and the electricity grid doesn't work for the most part. But traffic in Bujumbura is still pretty dense and generators imported since last January, when there was a month long power failure, provide electricity for the government, the middle classes and the better hotels.
Burundi doesn't need sanctions to collapse as a country. It may take longer than Rwanda but Burundi is now locked into the inevitability of a cataclysm on a similar scale. Burundi is not unlike Rwanda both countries have land areas only slightly bigger than Munster and the populations of Rwanda and Burundi are 7.6 million and 6 million, respectively.
That inevitability arises from the mutual desperate fear that the Hutus and the Tutsis have of one another. The Tutsis, who form only 14 per cent of the population and who have held power for almost all of the period since Burundi became independent from Belgium in 1962, fear that what happened to the Tutsi population of Rwanda will soon happen to them. Indeed, there was a foretaste of genocide in 1993 after the then Hutu president, who had been elected a few months previously in the country's only democratic elections, was murdered by the Tutsi led army. About 20,000 Tutsis were massacred in reprisal in the space of a few days.
THE Hutus also fear genocide and they remember 1972 when nearly a quarter of a million Hutus were slaughtered by the Tutsi army. The Tutsis believe that their only guarantee against genocide is the maintenance of their control of the army and their control of the political system Col Boyoya, a Tutsi, seized power from a Hutu president in late July and the army has always been under Tutsi leadership.
The Hutus are no longer prepared to tolerate the denial of their democratic rights and the maintenance of Tutsi control of an army that has periodically perpetrated genocide against them. But most of all, both sides fear that if they don't get their retaliation in first, what happened to the Tutsis in Rwanda will happen to them. Moderation is seen as complicity in a coming slaughter.
The only, and last hope, is perhaps the man who seized power undemocratically 54 days ago, Pierre Boyoya. He had been president before, having taken power from a Tutsi predecessor in a military coup. But he then oversaw a transition to democracy and the handing over of power to a Hutu president, who had beaten him in fair elections in 1993. He may be able to edge Burundi back from the abyss but hardly anybody there is optimistic that he can do so. If he seems likely to hand back power to the Hutus, he seems certain to be overthrown by the army that installed him.
If he refuses to hand back power to the Hutus, the war now being waged throughout the country will intensify.
The outside world may not be able to stop the coming apocalypse in Burundi but it could try. As a bare minimum it could finance more human rights monitors. It could make it clear than anybody involved in the commission of genocide will have to face criminal prosecution in international courts of justice. And it could start assembling an army to intervene if and when it is propitious to do so, or if or when that becomes the least bad option.