Dictionary of Genocide - D Ank Unlimited

“BURNING TIMES, THE”
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ultimately, his suicide on May 12, 1943. Prior to killing himself, he wrote letters condemning
all of the latter for their failure to act.
“Burning Times, The.” Euphemism employed by some scholars when referring to the
period of witch persecutions in Europe between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries.
The spread of the witch craze at the end of the fifteenth and throughout the sixteenth
century was in large part a response to two stimuli: a desire on the part of the Roman
Catholic Church to reestablish its control in light of the Protestant Reformation; and an
urgent need for the mass of the European population to explain a series of climatic
changes that led to famine, crop damage, and livestock losses across certain parts of the
continent. Women (and in some areas of northern Europe, significant numbers of men)
were frequently accused of witchcraft, of being in league with the Devil, and of possessing
secret conspiratorial knowledge designed to enslave humanity. For this, across the three
centuries in question, at least one hundred thousand heresy and other trials were conducted,
often at the direction of the Inquisition. Tens of thousands of innocent women
were executed, many by burning at the stake, others by hanging or drowning.
Approximate numbers of those killed have fluctuated wildly over the years, from a high
of 9 million posited in the 1970s to a more plausible recent figure of between forty thousand
and sixty thousand (of whom perhaps a quarter were men). Though most of the
killing took place in the sixteenth century, persecution, trials, and executions were still
relatively common even up to the middle of the eighteenth century; by this time, however,
public burning had diminished drastically as a preferred means of execution.
Burundi, Genocide in. Burundi, a small country in the Great Lakes region of central
Africa, is generally regarded as the “twin” of its neighbor, Rwanda. Like Rwanda,
Burundi has a population that is dominated by a large Hutu majority (85%), with a much
smaller Tutsi minority. At the time of independence from Belgium in 1962, the Tutsi,
who had been the traditional rulers before and during Belgian colonialism, retained their
ascendancy—largely by force of arms and a tightly controlled bureaucracy. In 1965 legislative
elections gave Hutu parties a resounding victory, winning twenty-three out of
thirty-three seats in the National Assembly. This victory was overthrown, however, when
the mwaami (king)—a Tutsi—appointed a Tutsi from the royal family as prime minister.
Soon thereafter, on October 19, 1965, an attempted coup was suppressed ruthlessly, but this
served only to intensify Hutu anger at their second-class status. Against this background,
an uprising of Hutu in the southern provinces of Burundi broke out in April 1972. This was
viewed as a final challenge for Hutu supremacy by many Tutsi leaders, in particular President
Michel Micombero (1940–1983), an army officer who had been installed as the result
of a military takeover in 1966. In what appears to have been a series of deliberate campaigns
against specific categories of Hutu—for example, Hutu in government employ, intellectuals
(which could include any Hutu with a university education, whether completed or in the
process of completion, secondary school students, and teachers), and the Hutu middle and
upper classes (the latter designation was based on wealth or Tutsi perceptions of wealth)—
a series of massacres were carried out. Estimates of the number killed between April and
October 1972 vary, but most settle at somewhere between 100,000 and 150,000. And the
killing did not end there. Subsequent large-scale massacres of Hutu by Tutsi government
forces took place in 1988, and massacres of Tutsi by Hutu forces occurred in 1993. Accompanying
all these savage deaths was the wholesale exodus of scores of thousands of refugees
to neighboring countries, leading to an intensifying destabilization of the region.