Burundi

WASHINGTON -- Chaos in the Democratic Republic of Congo and the aftermath of genocide in Rwanda have overshadowed the acute refugee crisis that still plagues tiny, war-torn Burundi. Decades of conflict in this east African nation have left hundreds of thousands homeless and divided a once-peaceful population along dangerous ethnic lines. Yet Burundi's plight largely has been forgotten as international outrage focuses on the war over diamonds and oil reserves in neighboring Congo. Burundi, which is about the size of Maryland, has been riven by inter-ethnic conflict since its independence in 1962 from a Belgian-administered U.N. trusteeship, a legacy of a colonial political strategy that polarized its two main ethnic groups.

On January 25, 2007 NICOLE DENISE, Survived by Daughter, Tricia S. McLaughlin, Father Ahmad Burundi (Kathy), Brothers Johnnie Hill and Shariff Burundi, Sister, Patrice Blackwell and a host of other family and friends. Friends may call the WYLIE FUNERAL HOME P.A OF BALTIMORE COUNTY, 9200 Liberty Road on Friday from 6-8 p.m. Services will be held Saturday at the Willard W. Allen Masonic Temple , 1307 Eutaw Place, 10:00 Wake10:30 am Funeral. Internment Following. Inquiries www.wyliefuneralhome.

So far, television of the West has not caught the agony of Burundi as it has that of Somalia and Bosnia. If it had, the problem would be on the front burner in Washington, instead of on none.The request of United Nations undersecretary James Jonah for only 100 peace-keepers -- for whatever they could do -- is not certain of being heeded by the over-extended U.N. The prime ministers of neighboring Rwanda, Tanzania and Zaire, deluged by some 600,000 refugees they cannot handle, have asked Organization of African Unity sanction for African intervention.

UNITED NATIONS - The Security Council unanimously approved a peacekeeping force of 8,300 soldiers and police for Haiti yesterday, the fifth U.N. mission to be sent to the beleaguered Caribbean country in a decade. Deployment will begin June 1 to replace the 3,600-strong U.S.-led multinational force now in the country, though it will take time for all the new troops, police and human-rights experts to arrive. The mission's initial mandate is for six months, but diplomats said they expected to extend it for as long as it takes to get Haiti back on its feet.

WASHINGTON -- A year after Rwanda's explosion of genocide, central Africa remains roiled by ethnic hatred, desperate economies and the plight of more than 2 million refugees.Now, rising political violence in Burundi raises the question: Can the genocide happen again?U.S. and United Nations officials, for their part, play down the prospect of a bloodbath in Burundi. "It's not going to happen," RTC insists Gordon Duguid, spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in Bujumbura, the Burundian capital.But human rights groups are more pessimistic.

London. -- It is always difficult to arrive in the middle of an argument. This is as true among nations as within a family. What should one say and to whom? It's probably better just to cross the road, find a bar and order a stiff drink. Perhaps we would lose this temptation if our media did a better job of reporting our world.Our ignorance of Burundi can be said to begin in 1965 when the first serious intercommunal violence erupted in that newly rTC independent central African country. Thousands of Hutus, including virtually every significant Hutu leader, were executed.

It wasn't important that they had no chance to win. The members of the Burundi national basketball team were just happy to be playing on a court with a roof over it and nets hanging from the rims."

BUJUMBURA, Burundi -- An eerie quiet prevailed yesterday on the muddy streets of Bwiza, its fire-blackened houses and gutted stores the only testimony to an attack that has revived a national mood of foreboding in Burundi.Bwiza and nearby Buyenzi were the capital's last two ethnically mixed districts where majority Hutus lived side by side with the minority Tutsis.Now there are no Hutus in either neighborhood.Last weekend, more than 200 Hutus were killed when armed gangs of Tutsis and Tutsi soldiers swept through Bwiza and Buyenzi, firebombing buildings and cars and shooting dozens of people.

BUHONGA, Burundi -- In this land where the Nile has its uppermost headwaters, the brief, sudden African dusk had fallen on the rolling mountains, bathing them violet. On the breeze-swept veranda of his parish church and school, a Roman Catholic priest nursed a lukewarm beer and voiced his dread."We live in the fear of each day," he confided. "When I consider history, and people's hearts, I am truly afraid."Just that Friday, he explained, members of Burundi's army had shot and killed seven people in cold blood as they traveled from Bujumbura, the capital at the northeastern tip of Lake Tanganyika, to the terraced slopes of Buhonga.

AT FIRST THE international response to the July 25 coup in which Tutsi Major Pierre Buyoya ousted the Hutu president of Burundi, Sylvestre Ntibantunganya, was tough talk.Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali's spokeswoman ,declared that "the international community will on no account accept a change of government in Burundi by force or other illegitimate means." And Kofi Annan, the U.N. Undersecretary General for Peacekeeping Operations, reportedly called for intervention that could "beat up on people if necessary" to try to stop the killing.

NAIROBI, Kenya - Beset by eight years of ethnic violence, Burundians attempt to write a new chapter in their bloody history today by ushering in a government that will eventually transfer power to the Hutu majority. During the past week, 700 South African soldiers have massed in Bujumbura, the capital of this central African nation, to protect about 150 political exiles returning to participate in a three-year transition to democracy. Former South African President Nelson Mandela brokered an agreement on the transitional government, and he will be joined by several other African leaders today in launching it. Current President Pierre Buyoya, an ethnic Tutsi, will serve as Burundi's leader for the next 18 months.

CIVIL WAR in Congo - seemingly hopeless, inextricably tied to ethnic strife in Rwanda and Burundi, made worse by invasion from five African neighbors - took a turn for the slightly better. A fuel barge under United Nations auspices journeyed 600 miles up the Congo River from government-held Mbandaka to rebel-held Kisangani, for the first time in three years. If security prevails, civil traffic on this immense river lifeline will resume. On the 41st anniversary of Congo's independence from Belgium, Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt visited Kinshasa.

WASHINGTON -- Chaos in the Democratic Republic of Congo and the aftermath of genocide in Rwanda have overshadowed the acute refugee crisis that still plagues tiny, war-torn Burundi. Decades of conflict in this east African nation have left hundreds of thousands homeless and divided a once-peaceful population along dangerous ethnic lines. Yet Burundi's plight largely has been forgotten as international outrage focuses on the war over diamonds and oil reserves in neighboring Congo. Burundi, which is about the size of Maryland, has been riven by inter-ethnic conflict since its independence in 1962 from a Belgian-administered U.N. trusteeship, a legacy of a colonial political strategy that polarized its two main ethnic groups.

BUSINESS IS bad for Haruna Baptakurera. Sheltered from a spitting rain by a thin roof of dried banana leaves, he looks down on the shimmering waters of Lake Tanganyika and shakes his head when he thinks of the future. "Sometimes," he said, folding his arms on the metal frame of his antique sewing machine, "I can sit here all day, and nobody comes." But business is not all that suffers here in Kabezi, a ramshackle camp on the lush slopes above Bujumbura, Burundi. Here, amid crude huts and the smoke of small cooking fires, 37,000 people pass their time digging food from the red soil, many wondering more about today than tomorrow.

BUJUMBURA, Burundi -- When Carl and Eleanor Johnson came here, the primary goal of the former Marylanders, as missionaries for the Protestant Brethren Assemblies, was to preach the gospel.Fifty years later, their assignment has moved beyond spreading the Word to serving as inadvertent hosts of a camp filled with 5,000 refugees who have fled the terror that threatens to tear this tiny central African nation apart.The camp sprang up six years ago, as frightened civilians fled to what used to be a missionary station in this picturesque capital.

Cardinal Raul Silva Henriquez, 91, an outspoken defender of human rights during Chile's military dictatorship, died Friday in Santiago, Chile. He had been suffering from Alzheimer's disease. The cardinal's defense of human rights made the church a prominent opponent of Gen. Augusto Pinochet's military regime, which seized power in 1973 and ruled until 1990. Helen Aberson Mayer, 91, who wrote the children's story that inspired the 1941 Walt Disney cartoon "Dumbo," died April 3 at her Manhattan home.

BUJUMBURA, Burundi -- This is an ordinary day of doom on the Central African highlands. In this country, too small to find on many maps, the question gnaws at anyone with the capacity to reason with the unreasonable: Does the genocide start tonight, again?Or will it just be more random gunfire and pervasive fear?Another night to sleep in the hills in the rain under a banana leaf because you worry that someone will come in the dark and slip a machete through your mattress?Choices in Burundi are meager, maddening.

Today in history: April 6In 1830, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints was organized by Joseph Smith in Fayette, N.Y.In 1862, the Civil War Battle of Shiloh began in Tennessee.In 1896, the first modern Olympic games formally opened in Athens, Greece.In 1909, explorers Robert E. Peary and Matthew A. Henson became the first men to reach the North Pole. The claim, disputed by skeptics, was upheld in 1989 by the Navigation Foundation.In 1971, Russian-born composer Igor Stravinsky died in New York City.

FIVE COUNTRIES form an arc beginning with equatorial Uganda in the east of Africa, running southwestward to the Atlantic, including little Rwanda and Burundi and giant Congo-Kinshasa (formerly Zaire) and Angola.Combined, they have about one-third the population of the United States on about two-fifths the land area.On the surface, little links them. They represent hundreds of ethnicities, various ideologies, four colonial heritages and three European languages.What they have in common is an alliance of rulers and an absence of U.S. influence.