Burundi 1990-1994
In 1991 a constitution was approved that allowed for a president, parliament, and multi-ethnic government, and in 1993 Melchior Ndadaye, a Hutu of the Hutu-dominated FRODEBU Party, was elected president. He was Burundi's first Hutu president, which is significant since the largely Hutu country had previously been controlled by the minority Tutsis. But in October of the same year he was assassinated by members of the Tutsi-dominated armed forces, which led to civil war in Burundi. An estimated 300,000 people were killed and many more were forced to flea until FRODEBU regained control and Cyprien Ntaryamira was elected president in January of 1994. Only four months later, Ntayamira and Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarmira were killed when their plane was shot down near Kigali. This launched the begining of the brutal Rwandan genocide, and events of a similar scale did not occur in Burundi, it helped to exacerbate the violence. Sylvestre Ntibantuganya, also a Hutu became president on April 8, but this did little to help the situation, if anything, especially since Burndi had to deal with thousands of refugees from Rwanda, as well as armed Hutu and Tutsi insurgents in Burundi itself.
In 1996 Pierre Buyoya, a Tutsi who launched a 1987 coup against then-president Bagaza, again took power in a coup and brought FRODEBU into the new government, although both sides failed to agree on certain key issues.
