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Why did the political use of the mass grave sweep across Africa
to begin with?
When the former African colonies were granted their freedom,
each new nation began life with a constitution that guaranteed civil
rights to its minorities.  Some of those minorities were white or Asian.
Most were black.  In the first few years of independence, the
constitution of virtually every free country was altered.  Altered to
remove the guarantees of liberty to minorities.  Altered to put all
power in the hands of one man at the top.  Altered to give unopposed
authority to the party the "chief executive" ruled, and to the friends and
kinsmen among whom he divvied up the country's wealth and power.
Needless to say, the minority populations who had been stripped of all
rights often objected.  Their protests were usually violent.  And they
were dealt with harshly.
Burundi was typical.  The country won independence in 1962.  In
1972, the Hutu attempted to rebel against a government dominated by
their rivals, the Tutsi.  During the Hutu uprising, 2,000 people were
killed.  President Michel Micombero declared martial law, mobilized
his army and his revolutionary youth brigades, then went on the attack
against Hutu of any kind, whether they'd taken part in the rebellion or
not.  Micombero's squads rounded up local administrators, chauffeurs,
clerks, skilled workers and (in the words of a Tutsi witness) "almost all
the Hutu intellectuals above the secondary school level," herded them
into jail cells and either shot them or beat them to death with clubs and
rifle butts.  4,000 were killed in the town of Bujumbura alone.  At the
Université Officielle, the President's armed forces and youth squads
showed up in classrooms, read off the names of Hutu students, and
took them away...to their deaths.
A third of the school's students were slaughtered.  Thousands of
Protestant pastors, teachers and school directors were murdered.
When the killing was over, 150,000 had died.94  In 1993 when a Hutu
was elected president, the Tutsi's went on the rampage again.  This
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