BURUNDI'S Tutsi-dominated army has killed at least 22 Hutu rebels after they attacked a refugee camp north of Bujumbura, an army spokesman said yesterday.
He said the rebels killed one civilian and wounded three others in the Monday attack on a camp of 1,200 internally displaced people in Rugazi, about 30, km north of the capital, Bujumbura, in Bubanza province.
Government troops killed 12 rebels in an ensuing fire fight and, later found the bodies of at least 1O others.
Also on Monday, the spokesman said rebels ambushed a military vehicle in Kabezi region, south of the capital, and attacked an army position in nearby Ruziba, but there were no casualties.
More than 150,000 people have been killed in the war since 1993.
Meanwhile, the head of a UN refugee agency said in Bujumbura that an aid convoy under military escort would try to reach more than 5,000 displaced people "in Burundi's violent north-west region of Cibitoke next week.
Mr Hitoshi Mise, head of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in Burundi, said the operation would be joined by the UN Children's Emergency Fund (Unicef) and the World Food Programme (WFP).
It will be the first outside assistance in Cibitoke since the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) pulled out in June after its three Swiss staff were killed in an ambush. "It will be a one-day job", said Mr Mise.
Cibitoke is a battle zone between rebels of the Hutu majority and the army, which is dominated by Tutsis.
In Yaounde, the capital of Cameroon, President Pasteur Bizimungu of Rwanda called for a new UN secretary general and said Dr Boutros Boutros-Ghali had betrayed his country's million dead.
A day after an Organisation of African Unity summit united officially to back the Egyptian's attempt for a second term in office despite US hostility, Rwanda publicly opposed the endorsement of the UN chief who pulled his peacekeeping troops out of Rwanda before the 1994 genocide.
"He has betrayed those people who have been massacred and he has betrayed the African people", Mr Bizimungu said.