The Ikiza: Mass Killings in Burundi
The Burundian army killed somewhere between 100,000 and 300,000 Hutu civilians between April and September 1972. Burundi and Rwanda share the same two main groups in roughly the same proportion — a Hutu majority of around 85 per cent and a Tutsi minority — and had opposite outcomes at independence. Rwanda's revolution of 1959 put the Hutu majority in power and drove Tutsi into exile; Burundi kept a Tutsi-dominated army and state, and after 1966 a republic under Michel Micombero, a Tutsi officer from the southern Bururi region. A Hutu-led rising began on 29 April 1972 in the south and killed perhaps a few thousand Tutsi civilians over several days. The reprisal was not a reprisal in any proportionate sense. It was organised from the centre, ran for months, and targeted the educated: every Hutu who was a civil servant, a teacher, a nurse, a priest, a university student, a secondary school pupil or an army officer was systematically identified and killed. Lists were used. Lorries collected people from schools. The intent was to destroy the class from which a future Hutu leadership could come, and it largely succeeded for a generation. Some 300,000 fled to Tanzania, Rwanda and Zaire. The killings were barely reported. Western governments and the OAU said almost nothing, and a UN mission returned a report that did not use the word. Burundi's own truth commission has since called it genocide. The refugee camps produced the movements that fought the 1993 civil war. The word ikiza means the scourge, and it is what Burundians call it.
- Year: 1972 CE
- Category: Social
