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Article: Burundi bleeds. (assassination of President Melchior Ndadaye) (Editorial)
- Article from:
- The Nation
- Article date:
- January 17, 1994
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1994 The Nation Company L.P. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Rivers clogged by bodies with their hands bound, locked rooms crowded with the charred corpses of schoolboys, homes left eerily empty. These are some of the nightmarish images of life in Burundi since the October 21 assassination of newly elected President Melchior Ndadaye. The roads, observers say, are lined with armed camps of soldiers and civilians; burning villages illuminate the night. Estimates of the death toll far exceed those of the 1972 military rampage that left 150,000 civilians dead in two weeks and made close to a million people refugees.
Now there is talk of a "second coup," vigorously denied by the military, to replace Ndadaye's shaken ...