burundi: The Burundian civil war – 10 years on

Burundi has often been in the news of late – and the standard news by-line has finally been modified. Until very recently one spoke – and heard speak of – “…the tragic civil war which has claimed between 200,000 and 250,000 lives, most of them civilian…” In the last months, these figures have been adjusted to reflect the consequences of ongoing violence and one now reads that anything from 250,000 to 300,000 lives have been lost in the bloody civil war that has torn this tiny landlocked Central African country for 10 years now. To these 300,000 dead we now dare mention, add over a million displaced (550,000 of them refugees in Tanzania), countless wounded, maimed and traumatized and those others who have disappeared, and you can easily understand why not one of the nearly 7 million Burundians has been left unscathed by the “crisis” as it is euphemistically called.