Dear Editor,

In view of the latest reports, Bujumbura isn’t Burundi; if all the deaths caused by the government and its militias across the country were to be tallied, it is more likely that the macabre fruit of their "work” is closer to a thousand than the figure of 240 victims being given.

People should remember that the overwhelming majority of Burundian refugees in Rwanda, Tanzania, DR Congo, and Uganda are rural.

They wouldn’t be fleeing from those areas in their hundreds of thousand if they weren’t witnessing murders and serious mistreatment of neighbours.

Meantime, the UN - and the so-called ‘international community’ - are performing to form, as we expected them to do in the case of countries like ours where none of the major powers have overriding strategic interests; sitting on their hands and issuing gibberish. Which is not to say that the people of Burundi would be any safer did they have resources any of the big powers wanted. Then the calculation by the interested big power(s) would be about how to get control of such resources at least cost, even at the expense of the local population: a case of damned if you are endowed with lucrative amounts of natural resources, damned if you don’t! Our Burundian brethren are learning the lesson we did in 1994: Akimuhana kaza imvura yahise; only you will save yourselves, nobody else will.

Mwene Kalinda