The UN Security Council Monday adopted a resolution aimed at paving the way for a truth commission and a special court to examine four decades of ethnic conflict in Burundi.
The central African country of 6 million has been torn by conflict between its majority Hutu and minority Tutsi ethnic groups virtually since independence from Belgium in 1962.
Hundreds of thousands died in a series of massacres, which received far less international attention than a 1994 genocide in neighboring, ethnically similar Rwanda in which 800.000 died.
The most recent decade of civil war, which killed some 300.000 people, ended in a peace agreement reached in Arusha, Tanzania, in 2000. Part of the deal was to promote national reconciliation through creation of a special court to judge war crimes and a separate truth commission.
South Africa got a truth commission under the chairmanship of bishop Desmond Tutu after relinquishing apartheid and white minority rule.
Kilde: www.worldbank.org
