BURUNDI PRESIDENT DEFENDS COUP : TUTSI LEADER SAYS NEW GOVERNMENT HAS ROOM FOR RIVAL HUTUS.Byline: Donald G. McNeil Jr. The New York New York, state, United States New York, Middle Atlantic state of the United States. It is bordered by Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Atlantic Ocean (E), New Jersey and Pennsylvania (S), Lakes Erie and Ontario and the Canadian province of Times A day after he took power in a so-far bloodless blood·less adj. 1. Deficient in or lacking blood. 2. Pale and anemic in color: smiled with bloodless lips. 3. coup, Burundi's new president told a skeptical world that he had seized power only to prevent more ethnic killings in a country where massacres seemed to be spiraling upward in recent weeks. The leader, Maj. Pierre Buyoya Major Pierre Buyoya (born 24 November 1949) is a Burundi politician who has ruled Burundi twice, from 1987 to 1993 and from 1996 to 2003. In September of 1987, Buyoya led a military coup against the Second Republic of Burundi, led by Jean-Baptiste Bagaza, and installed , a member of the minority Tutsi tribe who was president from 1987 to 1993, when he arranged for elections that put a Hutu into the presidency for the first time, said the Constitution would remain suspended. But he said he would soon form a government that would include ``all elements of society,'' and he seemed to leave open the possibility that Hutu guerrilla groups could join if they laid down their arms. But a spokesman for the main Hutu rebel group called Buyoya's promises ``contemptible'' and said it would step up its fighting. ``It will continue until the army in Burundi accepts its role as subordinate to an elective government,'' the Hutu, Innocent Nimpagaritse, of the National Council for the Defense of Democracy The National Council for the Defense of Democracy (French: Conseil National Pour la Défense de la Démocratie, or CNDD) is a former ethnic Hutu rebel group that now functions as a political party in Burundi. , said in Nairobi. Guerrillas from the majority Hutu tribe, fighting from bases in Zaire and getting clandestine help from several African nations, now control much of the countryside at night. In the past few years, massacres by both sides have taken some 150,000 lives, human rights officials estimate. Diplomats now worry that the coup could set off an explosion of violence like that that engulfed neighboring Rwanda in 1994. In London, Amnesty International Amnesty International (AI,) human-rights organization founded in 1961 by Englishman Peter Benenson; it campaigns internationally against the detention of prisoners of conscience, for the fair trial of political prisoners, to abolish the death penalty and torture of warned that ``widespread killings are almost inevitable'' because the Hutu will see the coup as removing the last vestiges of the share of power they won in the 1993 elections. Burundi, a Central African nation the size of Connecticut, is 85 percent Hutu and 14 percent Tutsi, but the Tutsi have always enjoyed the greatest share of military and political power. In 1993, just four months after the elections, the Hutu president, Melchior Ndadaye, was killed by Tutsi officers who objected to his plans to raise the number of Hutus in the army and the civil service. That abortive abortive /abor·tive/ (ah-bor´tiv) 1. incompletely developed. 2. abortifacient (1). 3. cutting short the course of a disease. a·bor·tive adj. 1. coup, which ignited reprisals REPRISALS, war. The forcibly taking a thing by one nation which belonged to another, in return or satisfaction for a injury committed by the latter on the former. Vatt. B., 2, ch. 18, s. 342; 1 Bl. Com. ch. 7. 2. in which more than 50,000 were killed, led to the shaky Hutu-Tutsi coalition government that was overthrown Thursday. The capital, Bujumbura, where almost all the residents are Tutsi, was calm again Friday. |
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