Michel Micombero
Michel Micombero abolished the Burundian monarchy at twenty-six and presided six years later over the killing of most of the country's educated Hutu. He was an army officer trained in Belgium who became prime minister in 1966, deposed the king that November, and declared a republic with himself as president. Burundi had been independent for four years and had already had two prime ministers assassinated. The categories were administered before they were fought over. Belgian rule governed through the Tutsi monarchy and issued identity documents recording the distinction, which turned a fluid social order into a fixed and inheritable one. Independence handed that machinery to whoever held the army. The state he ran was controlled by a narrow group: Tutsi officers from one province, in a country roughly eighty-five per cent Hutu. The genocide in Rwanda's mirror-image politics ran the other way, and each country's violence fed the other's fear. In April 1972 a Hutu-led rising in the south killed perhaps a few thousand Tutsi civilians. The army's response over the following months was systematic and targeted the educated: teachers, civil servants, nurses, university and secondary students, anyone with a government salary. Estimates of the dead run from a hundred thousand to three hundred thousand, and a comparable number fled to Tanzania. Almost nothing was done about it internationally. The killings are generally described by scholars as a genocide, and they removed a generation of potential Hutu leadership, which is a large part of why Burundian politics remained what it was for the next twenty-five years. He was deposed by his own army in 1976, went into exile in Somalia, studied economics, and died of a heart attack at forty-three.
- Lived: 1940 CE – 1983 CE
- Nationality: Burundian
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
