Burundi
Burundi is one of the five poorest nations in the world; it is densely populated, with between eight and nine million inhabitants.
Communal conflict, particularly between the Hutu and the Tutsi, has been recurrent since the country secured independence from Belgium in 1962. Fatalities in the 1972 and 1994 genocides (recognized as such by the International Commission of Inquiry for Burundi in 2002) numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Sporadic violence has continued since 2003.
There is no conclusive figure concerning the number of missing or unaccounted victims of the two genocides and the civil war even though there were no apparent attempts at the time to conceal the truth by burying victims in clandestine mass graves.
The Commission of Inquiry established by the UN Human Rights Council issued a report in September 2021 in which it cited continuing instances of enforced disappearance and called on the government of Burundi, with the support of the international community, to “establish an independent body with a mandate to investigate the cases of disappearance reported since April 2015, locate potential mass graves, and exhume and identify the remains.”
