UN General Assembly
1988

We note that awareness of ethnic origin, which is ages old in Burundi, is not a source of conflict that our oral pre'-colonial traditions were aware of. Under the political regime before colonization, the royal families that ruled used the two main tribes, the Hutus and the Tutsis, in guiding the affairs of state. The colonial regime, in its search for greater effectiveness of the indirect administration system, chose to deepen ethnic rifts by assigning to each tribe specific hierarchical roles. The system of modernizing the political regime eliminated the Hutus from the administration of the country. Mr. Jean Paul Harroy, the former Governor-General of Rwanda-Burundi in his book "Burundi", stated·.