Burundi, 1993 — military coup attempt

Event Summary

The dataset records an event coded as an attempted military coupi in Burundi on 3 July 1993 in the tense interval around the country's first democratic elections, which for the first time brought a Hutu, Melchior Ndadaye of the FRODEBU party, to the presidency, ending decades of domination by the Tutsi minority and the Tutsi controlled army. Ndadaye won the June 1993 presidential election and was to be inaugurated in July, and elements of the overwhelmingly Tutsi military, alarmed at the loss of their monopoly on power, were deeply hostile to the transition. A coup attempt or plot in early July 1993, around the moment of the transfer of power, arose from that military disaffection and was thwarted or came to nothing at that stage, allowing Ndadaye to take office.

But the reprieve was brief and tragic: in October 1993 Tutsi soldiers mounted a far more serious coup, seizing and assassinating Ndadaye along with other officials. His murder triggered massive ethnic massacres and plunged Burundi into a decade of civil war that killed hundreds of thousands, a catastrophe intertwined with the genocide that engulfed neighboring Rwanda months later.