Down to Size

For a moment, it looked as if the cold war had reached flash point in Burundi. The tiny African nation had been the biggest base for Red Chinese subversion on the continent. Fortnight ago, when moderate Premier Pierre Ngendandumwe was installed to check Peking's rising influence, nobody doubted that the Chinese would respond. Then the Premier was gunned down on the steps of a Bujumbura hospital. But the man who was arrested was a local African employed as a stenotypist in the U.S. embassy. Immediately, the noisy cry echoed through Africa: "Imperialist plot!"

Actually, the crime may have been rooted in a blood feud between two warring tribes. In the hands of Burundi police was Gonsalve Muyenzi, 24, a Watutsi tribesman, a refugee from neighboring Rwanda, and thus a sworn enemy of Ngendandumwe, who happened to be a member of the Bahutu tribe. For centuries the Bahutu had served the towering Watutsi aristocrats (some measure 7 ft. or more) as cattle-tending serfs on the alpine slopes of the former Belgian colony Ruanda-Urundi. Independence, in 1962, established a tribal equality of sorts, but both Bahutu and Watutsi quickly sought more than that. A Belgian-backed coup gave the Bahutu control of the new Rwanda government, while Burundi remained under a Watutsi king, Mwami Mwambutsa IV.

The Bahutu-Watutsi quarrel reached its peak late in 1963, when Watutsi warriors raided Rwanda in bands called inyenzi (cockroaches). The irate Bahutu responded by chopping off the legs of thousands of Watutsis and floating the remains down the Ruzizi River.

Assassin Muyenzi may well have aimed to reverse matters and cut a Bahutu down to size. As Acting Premier Pie Masumbuko said: "No one in his right mind would think for a minute that the U.S. embassy was involved in the assassination. Some say the Chinese killed the Premier. I say no." With that the government arrested as accomplices former Premier Albin Nyamoya, a vehement Watutsi irredentist, and 23 other Watutsi tribesmen.

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