Agencies/Bujumbura

The streets of Burundi’s capital Bujumbura were calm as life returned to normal yesterday, two days after nearly 90 people were killed in some of the worst violence in months of unrest.
The army said 87 people were killed — 79 “enemies” and eight soldiers, according to colonel Gaspard Baratuza — during and after coordinated assaults on three military installations early on Friday morning.
Several witnesses accused the security forces of extrajudicial killings in the hours following the attacks, describing officers breaking down doors in search of young men and shooting them at close range.
Some of the victims had their arms tied behind their backs, they said.
US rights group Human Rights Watch (HRW) called for a “serious and independent” enquiry to be carried out urgently into the latest violence.
“This is by far the most serious incident, with the highest number of victims, since the start of the crisis in April,” Carina Tertsakian, HRW’s researcher for Burundi, said in a statement.
“A serious, independent investigation is urgently needed to find out the exact circumstances in which these people were killed,” she said.
The government was quick to clear bodies from the streets, burying them in mass graves, with critics saying the move aimed to prevent further investigation of the deaths and to disguise the real number of people killed.
Friday’s fighting was the worst outbreak since a failed May coup, sparked by president Pierre Nkurunziza’s bid for a third term in office, which he later won in disputed elections in July.
Residents of Bujumbura have become used to routine shootings, assassinations and armed attacks during eight months of unrest, and despite the scale and severity of the most recent violence the city was calm.
UN figures released before Friday’s violence showed at least 240 people had been killed and more than 200,000 had fled abroad since May, raising fears of a return to civil war, a decade after the end of a 1993-2006 conflict between rebels from the Hutu majority and an army dominated by minority Tutsis. Some 300,000 people were killed in the war, which began a year before a genocide of mostly Tutsis in neighbouring Rwanda.
Burundi plans to slash public spending by 16% next year and expects foreign aid to almost halve as relations with donors have soured during recent political turmoil, according to a draft 2016 budget passed by the cabinet.
Western powers fear aid-dependent Burundi could slide back into civil war and some donors like Belgium have already suspended their financial support in protest at crimes and human rights violations committed by state security forces.
The draft budget passed by the cabinet on Friday showed state spending will drop to 1.2tn francs ($777mn) in 2016 from 1.5tn francs this year, while expected aid grants will decline 44% to 382.2bn francs.
The government also predicts domestic tax revenues will fall about 5% to 675.8bn francs.
Earlier this week the European Union, the biggest donor to Burundi, said it would partially suspend new aid due to government abuses in relation to rule of law, democratic principles and human rights in the nation of 10mn people.
The EU had been due to disburse about €450mn to Burundi over half a decade until 2020, but the bloc said it would suspend all new support except for humanitarian causes and projects where the population directly benefits.
 HRW criticised the Burundi police and local authorities for “removing dead bodies from the scene before any investigations could be carried out”.
It said the attacks on military sites were “serious” and the government had a “responsibility” to restore law and order.
“However, going out and shooting people in residential neighbourhoods appears entirely unjustified, and the members of the security forces responsible should be held to account,” it warned.
The US has ordered non-emergency US personnel and dependents to leave violence-torn Burundi and warned other Americans to get out “as soon as it is feasible to do so.”
“The US Department of State warns US citizens against all travel to Burundi and recommends that US citizens currently in Burundi depart as soon as it is feasible to do so,” it said in a statement.