Burundi held countrywide celebrations commemorating the 22nd anniversary of the assassination of President Melchoir Ndadaye on, the first Hutu President democratically elected and killed three months into office.
Burundi President Pierre Nkurunziza, senior officials and diplomats graced the celebrations in the country’s capital city of Bujumbura.
The commemoration anniversary started with a church service followed by laying flowers on his tomb on or on his memorials that are throughout the East African.
Archbishop Evariste Ngoyagoye expressed regret over the killing of the then newly elected President who won the landmark elections of 1993.
The President along with the first lady, top officials and the diplomats headed to the Palace of Democracy Martyrs where the late President Ndaday and his close collaborators were buried to lay flower wreaths on the graves after the attending the church service at Regina Mundi Cathedral.
Families of approximately 80 pupils who were burned alive in Kwibubu at Kibimba in central province of Gitega laid flowers at the Kwibubu Memorial during the solemn day.
Late President Melchior Ndadaye died on the 21st October 1993 102 days after he was sworn into the President’s Office. He was the first democratically elected president and the first Hutu president of the country. Melchoir’s reforms aimed at burying the ethnic divide did not sit well with the Tutsi dominated army, leading to his assassination in a failed military coup.
Though he moved to attempt to smooth the country’s bitter ethnic divide, his reforms irritated soldiers in the Tutsi-dominated army, and he was assassinated amidst a failed military coup in October 1993, after only three months in office. His assassination sparked an array of brutal tit-for-tat massacres between the Tutsi and Hutu ethnic groups, and ultimately sparked the decade-long Burundi Civil War. Late President Melchoir would be 62 this year having died at the age of 40.
