The U.N. Security Council adopted a resolution on Monday aimed at paving the way for a truth commission and a special court to examine four decades of ethnic conflict in Burundi. The central African country of 6 million has been torn by conflict between its majority Hutu and minority Tutsi ethnic groups virtually since independence from Belgium in 1962, according to Reuters. Hundreds of thousands died in a series of massacres, which received far less international attention than a 1994 genocide in neighboring, ethnically similar Rwanda in which 800,000 died. The most recent decade of civil war, which killed some 300,000 people, ended in a peace agreement reached in Arusha, Tanzania, in 2000. Part of the deal was to promote national reconciliation through creation of a special court to judge war crimes and a separate truth commission. Under a U.N. plan drafted by a special assessment mission earlier this year and approved by Burundi last week, Burundi and the United Nations would work together to set up the two bodies under guidelines to be determined in negotiations between Secretary-General Kofi Annan and Burundi's government. --More 2336 Local Time 2036 GMT
