Back in【B1】______, civil war broke out in Burundi. Many were killed in a【B2】______ of inter-ethnic violence. This month, Bur

Back in 1993, civil war broke out in the tiny central African republic of Burundi. Hundreds of thousands were killed in a decade of inter-ethnic violence between Hutus and Tutsis. Yet these atrocities were eclipsed by the genocide in neighbouring Rwanda.
    Earlier this month, Burundi held its first parliamentary elections since the civil war. The vote was won by a former rebel group from the Hutu ethnic majority. For most of the time since independence, Burundi has been ruled by individuals from the Tutsi minority. Next month the new government will be sworn in—and survivors of the political and ethnic violence now hope that they’ll finally get justice and security.
    It’s the dry season again in Burundi. The hillsides around the village of Mparamirundi are already changing from green to brown—and when the wind blows, the clouds of dust swirl through the streets.
    Outside her mud brick house, Domatilla—like every year—is laying out the bean pods harvested from her fields. She puts them in the sun to dry—then beats the pods to release the beans from their dry brown husks. As she works—Domatilla greets her passing neighbours.
    She points out Joseph—a slight man in his 30s. "He tried to kill me just over ten years ago", she tells me— wide eyed—as if even now she can’t believe it. "He beat me on the head with a club. And that is Vianney,"— she indicates an older man, smiling at us. "After they took my husband away, Vianney was the one that came to mock me." she says. "He asked me why I wasn’t cooking dinner for my husband that day. "
    Mparamirundi is like any other village in Burundi; a tiny country packed with more than seven million people—it’s a population that share some of the bitterest history in Africa. But Burundi’s horror is often overshadowed by the genocide in neighbouring Rwanda in 1994. By then the killings had already started in Burundi.
    It was at the end of the dry season in 1993—the first rains had come and Domatilla had safely stored her bean crop inside the house—when President Melchior Ndadaye was murdered. He was Burundi’s first elected Hutu president. Up to then members of the Tutsi minority had controlled the army and the government.
    Tutsi soldiers assassinated the new President shortly after he took up office. And revenge against the Tutsi minority exploded. The wave of killing quickly reached Mparamirundi. And it washed away Domatilla’s family—her husband and 12 other relatives were killed. "I heard they cut them down with machetes and then threw them in the river," she says, "I never saw their bodies."
    By "they" she means her Hutu neighbours. Across the country thousands of Tutsi were massacred in 1993. But the violence didn’t stop there. Up the street, another of Domatilla’s neighbours, Jean Claude, is repairing a car. Jean Claude was 11 at the time. But he remembers everything clearly. "After the killings of Tutsis," he says, "the Government army arrived in Mparamirundi, and they started killing Hutus."
    Jean Claude’s mother was stabbed to death by the soldiers. He never saw his father again and he doesn’t know how he died.
    As the Tutsi led army took revenge, young Hutu men streamed into the hills to join a new rebel group and Burundi spiralled into civil war. Up to 300,000 people were killed over the next ten years.
    But finally there is real cause for hope.
    Burundi has just held general elections—for the first time since the poll in 1993 ended in disaster. This vote was praised as peaceful and largely fair. A former Hutu rebel group won a majority of seats in the new national assembly and all sides have accepted the results.
    But the new government to be signed in next month now has to deal with Burundi’s bloody past. And that means finding justice for victims in villages like Mpamirundi.
    Many other countries coming out of war have had to wrestle with this same dilemma: how to account for past crimes while holding together a shaky peace deal.
    The problem for Burundi is that the killings go right back to independence. In the biggest of the massacres in 1972, 150,000 Hutus are estimated to have been slaughtered by the government army. The choice now is whether to try to bring justice to all those involved in more than 40 years of political violence. Or whether to search only for the ringleaders. Whether to concentrate on punishing the guilty—or on trying to reconcile divided populations.
    But many Burundians are sceptical of seeing any justice at all. Political and military leaders who faced each other during the civil war will now sit together in the new parliament and the new united army. Many fear these leaders have a shared interest in slowing down investigations into the crimes that all sides committed.
    Back in Mpamirundi, Domatilla is waiting for the wind to bring back the rains. She’s getting ready to plant again like every year. She says she’s waiting for justice. She wants those who killed her husband and relatives to be punished. But most of all she says—she wants them to recognise what they did and come to ask her for forgiveness. "Then I can really be sure they will never try to do the same thing again." She says, "And it’s only then—I can know my children will be safe."