Burundi politics is still preoccupied with the maintenance of Tutsi supremacy and therefore necessarily the continued subjection of the Hutu. There would seem to be substantial evidence for this view. Government spending on “national security” has risen from 13.2 percent of the total budget in 1971 to 22.6 percent in 1974; it is now the largest single item, having passed education for the first time; despite considerable recruitment to the army since 1972 there are no Hutu soldiers at any level of real responsibility; the army’s tactical priority is the waging of small-scale guerrilla-type operations in the border areas.

One of the most perplexing features of the welter of events that led to the slaughter of 1972 has to do with the emergence, or the resurgence, of intra-Tutsi rivalries. These were particularly noticeable in the months immediately preceding the holocaust and involved among other things a struggle for power between the so-called Tutsi-Hima and the Tutsi-Banyaruguru. The following passage is excerpted from Father Rodegem’s article “Burundi: La Face Cachée de la Rébellion” (Intermédiaire, 15 June 1973) in which the author emphasizes the historical dimensions of the Hima-Banyaruguru conflict. One may or may not agree with the facts and interpretations presented by the author; however, the article suggests at least one possible explanation for the scale of the massacre: by systematically killing all educated Hutu elements, the Hima elites also destroyed the basis for a potential alliance between Hutu intellectuals and Tutsi-Banyaruguru.

Father Rodegem spent many years in Burundi and is intimately acquainted with the traditional aspects of Rundi culture. He is the author of Sagesse Kirundi (Tervueren: 1961) and “Ainsi Parlait Samandari: Analyse ethnolinguistique d’un phénomène de déviance dans une société à caractère empirique” (Anthropos, Vol. 69, 1974). The latter is a pioneering effort to penetrate the political culture of Burundi through techniques of analysis borrowed from ethnolinguistics.

There are few parallels to the human holocaust that took place in Burundi in 1972 in the wake of a tortuous competitive struggle between the country’s two major ethnic groups, the Hutu and the Tutsi. Scarcely noticed (let alone understood) by public opinion anywhere, the killings are conservatively estimated to have caused between 80,000 and 100,000 deaths. Approximately 3.5 percent of the country’s total population (3.5 million) were physically wiped out in a period of a few weeks. In comparative terms this is as if England had suffered a loss of 2 million or the United States about 8 million people. To speak of “selective genocide” in describing the outcome of such large-scale political violence seems scarcely an exaggeration.

Burundi society has become polarized along ethnic lines. In 1972 a series of increasingly violent confrontations erupted into an ethnic civil war. The two ethnic coalitions which faced each other were the Tutsi and the Hutu. The Tutsi are the socio-politically dominant minority in control in Burundi.

Having been drafted by the Constitutional Committee and ratified by the Supreme Council of the Republic, the following Constitution is hereby proclaimed by the President of the Republic as the constitutional law of the Republic of Burundi.