Tanzania is already hosting about 300,000 Burundian refugees, and the latest influx will only compound their problems. The Hutu rebels civil war with the Tutsi-dominated army has already claimed about 200,000 lives since it began in 1993. An outbreak of cholera in the Kabezi regroupment camp near the capital, Bujumbura, is said to have claimed 47 lives in the past week. About 35,000 civilians are living in squalid conditions in the camp, mostly against their will, and more than 250,000 are being detained in a series of 50 camps in the Greater Bujumbura province. In all, about 800,00 people, or 12 percent of the population, are currently living in camps.
Reports circulate of young men disappearing.
The Tutsi-led government unexpectedly rounded up hundreds of thousands of mainly Hutu civilians into the camps in late September, ostensibly to protect them from fighting. More than 30 of the camps are inaccessible by road and have therefore not been visited by outsiders, and so conditions are only imaginable. 7 December '99 Former South African president Nelson Mandela will lead a new round of peace negotiations in Burundi in February hoping to bring an end to the debilitating civil war that has raged for six years. He hopes to bring all interested parties to the table, including those that have so far been excluded from talks, such as rebel Hutu groups. Mandela replaces former Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere, who died in October, having spent a year trying to bring the fighting between the Tutsi-dominated government and the Hutu rebels to an end.