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Crackdown on Burundi Rebels Forces 350,000 Hutu Into Camps

''We were brought here by force,'' a choir member, Sampson Bizimana, said. ''We are cold. There is disease. We don't have food.''

The camps, which number nearly 60, are the latest turn in the ethnic struggle between the elite Tutsi, who rule Burundi, and the majority Hutu, who do not.

The government calls them a last resort to end a series of guerrilla attacks on Bujumbura since this summer. By forcing people into the camps, officials say, they can deprive the Hutu rebels of their main source of food and shelter.

That may be, even if diplomats worry that the camps may eventually worsen the situation in Burundi, which is afflicted with a similar ethnic dynamic as its northern neighbor, Rwanda, where at least half a million people were killed in massacres in 1994.

But the camps are an unquestionable human disaster. Crowded into huts made of mud, metal sheeting and palm leaves, several dozen people have died of cholera and dysentery. There are reports of a fire in one camp that spread to 50 huts. A drunken soldier reportedly opened fire on a crowd last month, killing five civilians.

''It's odious because it's a policy that is presented as if it were for the security of the people,'' said Sylvestre Ntibantunganya, a Hutu and the president of Burundi from 1994 to 1996. ''In fact, the reality is that the people die in these camps.''

Foreign governments say they are horrified, but they worry that too much protest might hurt peace negotiations between the government and the rebels, which won a needed injection of hope this month when Nelson Mandela was appointed as mediator.

The need to close the camps is one reason for the peace process to continue, a diplomat said on condition of anonymity. ''And that's why Mandela has to keep the momentum going,'' the diplomat said.

Officials of aid organizations are engaged in a heated debate about whether they are encouraging the camps by providing food, blankets and medical care.

''The whole idea of limiting a large population to one area and not allowing them free access to their homes and land is a human rights violation, which we could never support,'' said Michele Quintaglie, a spokeswoman for the World Food Program, the United Nations agency that has supplied most of the food to the camps. ''On the other hand, what you can't do either, as an aid agency, is stand by and watch these people who are suffering from the decision of the government waste away.''

The group Doctors Without Borders said last month that it was leaving the camps because it felt it was helping the government sustain the camps more than it was helping sick people. Other aid groups criticized that decision as an abandonment of the camps' victims and have stayed on.

The World Food Program has also pulled out of the camps, but for safety's sake: On Oct. 12, two UN workers, one with the World Food Program and the other with Unicef, were executed in southeastern Burundi. The government identified several rebels as the killers, although many aid officials suspect the army itself.

In any case, the United Nations has put Burundi on its second-highest security alert, meaning that its staff cannot leave the capital. Now other aid groups are distributing the UN food in the camps.

Fear of widespread violence is common these days in Burundi, where there have been periodic explosions: In 1972 Tutsi extremists exterminated virtually a generation of educated Hutu. In 1993 Hutu slaughtered Tutsi in retaliation for the assassination of the country's first democratically elected president, Melchior Ndadaye, a Hutu. That killing started a civil war in which an estimated 200,000 people have died.

Hutu make up nearly 85 percent of the population, although Tutsi control the army, the government and business. The current government, headed by Major Pierre Buyoya, a Tutsi soldier, has been engaged in talks with the opposition and rebels for over a year, with little concrete progress toward elections and democracy.

This summer, Hutu rebels stepped up their attacks on Bujumbura - where most Hutu have been killed or driven out - and in September hit a rich Tutsi neighborhood. Cows began disappearing, possibly being killed by rebels for food. The attacks unsettled Major Buyoya's supporters, who demanded action.

On Sept. 19, soldiers began removing Hutu from their homes in the area around Bujumbura and putting them into camps on the top of hills, so the army could more easily patrol the roads and valleys for rebels who might attack the capital.

''There was much, much fear in the capital and in those neighborhoods that are particularly targeted,'' said Albert Nitunga, a driver who is Tutsi and who lives in a mixed neighborhood that the rebels have attacked several times.

''Ever since the regroupment camps have been created, we sleep soundly,'' he said.

Colonel Longin Minani, a spokesman for the army, noted that the government created camps in rural areas in 1996 and 1997, cutting down rebel attacks. Like the earlier camps - which were in place a year and a half - these camps will be broken up, he said, when the area becomes safer.

''Security-wise, I think it has proved to be efficient,'' he said.

The camps, unfenced but heavily guarded by armed soldiers, were constructed hastily from whatever materials were available.

Some people are allowed to leave the camps a few times a week to farm their land, but even then government soldiers stand over them in the fields, purportedly to protect against rebel attacks.

Hutu interviewed last week in three camps just outside Bujumbura complained about shortages of food, water and medicine and said that both the rebels and the army were stealing their crops and pieces of the homes they had left behind.