The coup that toppled this central African nation's fragile coalition government was needed to stop widespread killing between Hutus and Tutsis, the newly installed leader of Burundi said Friday.
"The change is not a classic coup," Pierre Buyoya, the 46-year-old Tutsi major said at his first news conference since the army deposed Hutu president Sylvestre Ntibantunganya on Thursday in an apparently bloodless takeover."It is an action to save a people in distress and stop repeated massacres and killings all over the country."
Life appeared to return to normal in the capital Friday, where soldiers removed roadblocks and people went about their business.
However, the Hutu leader of Burundi's largest political party - the senior coalition partner in the overthrown Tutsi-Hutu government - rejected Buyoya's claims and called for the rapid deployment of an international force to restore peace and security and to protect Hutus.
Jean Minani, in a statement from exile in Nairobi, Kenya, also called on members of his Hutu Sahawaya-FRODEBU Party to "forcefully reject" Buyoya's "return by the barrel of the gun."
"Do not fall into the trap laid by the putschists in giving into violence that could be deadly, and do not give them any pretext for savage, barbarous and bloody repression," he said.
Western leaders have condemned the coup, fearing it could bring on ethnic warfare on the scale of neighboring Rwanda's genocide, but have said nothing about sending troops to restore Ntibantunganya.
Buyoya (pronounced boo-YO-yah), who twice has assumed power through military means, said the intention of the coup leaders, believed to belong to the moderate wing of the Tutsi-dominated, 12,000-strong military, was to restore democracy. He said he did not know how long that would take.
"Our intention is to get back to democracy very soon. That could take 12 or 18 months, we cannot speculate," he said.
Buyoya, who overthrew Jean-Baptiste Bagaza in a 1987 coup, paved the way for Burundi's first free elections. He was defeated in June 1993 by Melchior Ndadaye, who became the nation's first Hutu president. Ndadaye was killed four months later by Tutsi paratroopers in a failed coup.
Since late 1993, at least 150,000 people, most of them civilians, have died in spiraling violence as majority Hutus, outraged by being robbed of their chance at power, have steadily taken up arms against the Tutsi military.