But the main market, seen by diplomats as a barometer of ethnic hatred, remained virtually closed. The nearby bus station was also relatively deserted because few farmers dared travel to the troubled lakeside capital from the interior.
President Sylvestre Ntibantunganya, a Hutu, said Sunday that at least 150 people had been killed in a rampage by militiamen of the Tutsi minority Friday night in Bujumbura and 50,000 were fleeing the worst ethnic violence in Burundi in 18 months.
The UN High Commissioner for Refugees said Monday the exodus was slowing after 23,500 people arrived in Uvira in Zaire over the weekend.
Reports based on eyewitnesses put the death toll at 500, mainly Hutus.
Human rights groups fear Burundi will be swept by massacres similar to those in Rwanda where up to a million people were killed last year.
Like Rwanda, Burundi's population is about 85 percent Hutu and 15 percent Tutsi. The country has been racked by ethnic fighting since October 1993 when its first Hutu president and his top aides were assassinated in a failed coup attempt by members of the Tutsi-dominated army.
An estimated 100,000 people were slaughtered and 1 million fled their homes in fighting that followed. Since then, extremists of both ethnic groups have kept up their killing on a smaller scale.
The latest round of violence began March 19 when gunmen suspected of being Hutus killed three Belgians, including a 4-year-old child, and four Burundians in a highway ambush outside the capital. A Tutsi gang sought revenge by killing Hutus in the city's market the next day and the violence spiraled from there.
Much of the latest violence has involved Tutsi gangs seeking to rout Hutus from Tutsi neighborhoods.
Diplomats and aid agencies have said privately they believe that a battle for the Bujumbura Hutu stronghold of Kamenge, if it erupted in earnest, could trigger a full-scale tribal bloodbath. The International Committee of the Red Cross said Sunday Hutus were fleeing Kamenge after a week of ethnic clashes.
Kamenge, a poor but militarized district 5 kilometers north of the city center, is all that now stands between Tutsi militants and their aim of an ethnically pure "Tutsi town," as they refer to Bujumbura.
Tutsi gangs, government officials and witnesses allege the Tutsi-dominated military have already driven Hutus from the previously mixed suburbs of Bwiza, Kanyosha and Buyenzi.
There was little sign that the Hutus who had fled were heeding government appeals for them to return.
The mayor of Bujumbura told state-run radio Monday that he would visit a border crossing into Zaire at Katumba, closed by Zairean authorities to all but their own nationals Sunday, to urge frightened people to return to their homes.
The new refugees will strain shortages already reported in Zaire, where 1.2 million Rwandan refugees have been living since last year's violence.
(Reuters, AP)
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