SPECTER OF GENOCIDE

By ANDREW PURVIS/BUJUMBURA

THE ARMY HELICOPTER CAME IN over the marketplace at noon one day last month. Machine-gun fire ripped from the sky, pounding into the dirt, ricocheting off roofs and sending hundreds of Hutu men, women and children scattering for cover under rickety stalls. Suzanne Nyahimana, 45, was hit almost immediately, her forearm shattered. Frantically rounding up her five children--her husband had been killed in fighting several months earlier--she fled with them from the northwestern Burundian village of Nyabitaka into the hills, eventually crossing the Rusizi River to a refugee camp in neighboring Zaire. "I will never go back," Nyahimana said last week of her homeland, waving the stump that is all that remains of her right arm. "There is nothing left."

That may not be far from the truth. For more than two years, the tiny central African nation of Burundi has been at war with itself. As in neighboring Rwanda, the country's minority Tutsi tribe, once the overlords of this former Belgian colony, are engaged in a deadly conflict with the once subservient but more populous Hutu. Human-rights workers report that clashes between the Tutsi-dominated army and Hutu rebels left some 15,000 dead last year, most of them civilians from both tribes caught between the warring parties. The killing continues: moderate government officials, students, foreign diplomats and aid workers have all been targeted. In recent months, as fighting intensified in parts of the north and around the capital of Bujumbura, even battle-hardened Western relief groups have been forced to withdraw.

The crisis has again caught the attention of the international community. Shamed by their failure to prevent the massacre of more than 500,000 people in Rwanda, senior officials--from United Nations Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali to U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Madeleine Albright--have sounded the alarm in recent weeks. But once again international action--if it ever comes-may be too late to save Burundi from self-destruction. "What is happening here is like a poison gas," warns U.N. senior political adviser Hani Abdel-Aziz in Bujumbura. "You don't feel it because you don't have 100,000 dead at once. But people are dying every single day."

Nowhere is that more evident than in the northwestern provinces of Bubanza and Cibitoke, once two of Burundi's richest agricultural regions but now a wasteland. For the past six months, a guerrilla war between Hutu rebels infiltrating from neighboring Zaire and the Tutsi-led army has stripped the steep hill country of inhabitants. Not even aid workers dare enter for fear of attack. A visit last week to the area revealed rice fields and coffee plantations abandoned to forest. Entire villages have been pounded to ruins. Residents who have not taken to the hills or to camps in Zaire are huddled together in a few garrison towns without food or medicine. "No one understands what is happening here," says Thomas Kabirige, a magistrate visiting his home area for the first time in two years. "It is desolation."

Those who remain report being attacked from all sides. Four months ago, Jean Ndabagendeje, 39, escaped from his mainly Hutu village after the army stormed into the area and ordered everyone to leave. But when he sought refuge with some 1,500 other Hutu near a Tutsi military encampment in Bubanza town, he was again attacked, this time by machete-wielding Hutu, who accused Ndabagendeje of betraying the Hutu cause.

Certainly no one has a monopoly on murder and ethnic cleansing in Burundi. As in Rwanda, majority Hutu and minority Tutsi have set upon each other periodically since the two countries gained independence from Belgium in the early 1960s. Neither group has shown much tolerance for the political ambitions of the other. Burundi's current crisis began in 1993, when Tutsi soldiers assassinated Melchior Ndadaye, a Hutu and the country's first democratically elected President, after he threatened to bring an end to 30 years of Tutsi domination. The killing triggered an orgy of revenge; some 50,000 Burundians died in 1993 alone. It also spawned a Hutu rebellion--and a Tutsi army crackdown--which continues to this day. Though a coalition government, composed of senior politicians from both ethnic groups, was formed under international pressure in 1994, its members remain hamstrung by tribal loyalties, unable and often unwilling to stop the bloodshed. Observes a Western diplomat in Bujumbura: "There is total impunity. Everyone still thinks that they can achieve their goals by violent means."

Elements of the Tutsi-dominated army not only routinely target civilians, diplomats say, but allow Tutsi civilian militias, armed with machetes and hammers, to "clean up" after the army's operations, killing some women and children and driving the rest into the hills. Hutu rebels, for their part, also target civilians--Tutsi and Hutu moderates alike. Neither side is apologetic. Lieut. Colonel Longin Minani, an army spokesman in the capital, explains the military clean-up operations this way: "If rebels use the population as a screen to protect themselves, am I supposed to fold my hands and do nothing? [Civilian deaths] are unfortunate but unavoidable."

The tide of violence is threatening to further destabilize a region already badly traumatized by the Rwandan civil war. Since 1993, 250,000 Burundians, mostly Hutu, have escaped into Zaire and Tanzania, adding to nearly 2 million Rwandan refugees camped in those countries and refusing to go home. Earlier this month those numbers increased sharply when Rwandan Hutu from the Mugano and Ntamba camps, who had sought refuge in Burundi from their own civil war, fled fighting in the area and made for the Tanzanian border. Some 20,000 managed to get across. With an additional 130,000 increasingly anxious Rwandan Hutu still in Burundi, another refugee crisis seems imminent.

Dismayed by the worsening situation and the potential for even greater carnage should the shaky coalition government collapse, the U.N.'s Boutros-Ghali has once again called for foreign intervention. Few observers would dispute that Burundi needs help. But the Secretary-General's proposal for a quick-reaction force based in Zaire or Tanzania that could intervene "in the event of a sudden deterioration of the situation" has so far met with only a lukewarm response. Western governments, wary of repeating the high-profile failure of the intervention in Somalia, are reluctant to commit foreign troops to a country with minimal strategic or commercial interests--and so far with few TV scenes of horror broadcast to prick the world's conscience. Western officials note, moreover, that the Burundian army and members of the coalition government oppose the idea. Even prominent Hutu moderates, including the country's President, Sylvestre Ntibantunganya, concede that foreign troops "will not solve our problems." Talking to Time from his mansion in Bujumbura last week, he asked, "What will they do? Who will they work with? Other problems need to be resolved first."

Different measures might indeed prove more practical. Western nations could help shut down a Zaire-based rebel radio station that is consistently urging the overthrow of the coalition government. More U.N. monitors, with adequate protection, could be sent to the country to report on human-rights abuses. Perhaps most important, the West could take meaningful steps to increase pressure on extremists still serving in the government and the army. These are not new ideas. Yet so far, due to a lack of support from member nations, the U.N. has managed only a minimal response. Last year Ntibantunganya requested 127 human-rights monitors for the country, but the U.N. found funding for only 10. In September the U.N. set up a special commission of inquiry to identify those responsible for Ndadaye's assassination and for the massacres that followed. But that task too is being delayed by lack of resources, commission members say. Moreover, even if the team were to name suspects, it would not have the means to detain them, since many almost surely retain key positions in the military and the coalition government.

U.S. leadership, so effective in engineering the current peace accord in Bosnia, has yet to play a significant role in Burundi. Although National Security Adviser Anthony Lake has voiced a keen interest in the region and regularly holds meetings on Burundi with senior Administration officials, and although U.N. envoy Albright visited the country on Jan. 20 to warn against any party's seizing power by force, such efforts have yet to produce noticeable results on the ground. Humanitarian considerations aside, Washington does have cause for concern. In 1994 the U.S. spent more than half a billion dollars to assist the victims of the Rwandan tragedy. Funds might better be spent this time in preventive action. More than two years of brutal civil war have demonstrated that talk alone is not enough. "We need practical measures if we are not going to plunge into the abyss," warned a U.N. official last week. That may prove an understatement. For many Burundians, the plunge has already begun.