Burundi has been torn by sporadic conflict between the majority Hutu and minority Tutsi ethnic groups virtually since independence from Belgium in 1962. In 1993, it plunged into all-out civil war in which some 300,000 people were killed and a million displaced.

Ethnic tensions explain in part but not entirely the animosity in Burundi's 12-year civil war. Prior to independence, colonisers favoured Tutsis and exaggerated ethnic differences. In reality, there has been extensive intermarriage between Hutus and Tutsis.

"The conflict was over power, and power means access to resources, which are extremely limited in Burundi," said Catherine-Lune Grayson, Burundi spokeswoman for the U.N. refugee body, UNHCR.

German rulers merged the Tutsi kingdom of Burundi and Rwanda into a single country called Rwanda-Urundi in 1899. Belgium took over after World War One, separated the countries and merged Burundi with Congo, which later became Zaire and is now Democratic Republic of Congo.

Tutsis have controlled the government and military most of the time since independence in 1962. The civil war erupted in 1993 when Tutsi extremists assassinated Melchior Ndadaye, elected the country's first Hutu president in its first free elections.

As conflict raged between Hutu rebel groups and the Tutsi-dominated army and allied militias, tens of thousands of civilians were killed and hundreds of thousands more forced from their homes. Many fled to neighbouring Tanzania, Congo and Rwanda. Rights groups say all sides in the war recruited children as porters and fighters.

Conflict began to wind down after a 2000 peace accord, and successful elections in 2005 have raised hopes the country is finally on the road to lasting peace.

A former powerful rebel group, the Forces for the Defence of Democracy (FDD), won parliamentary elections in the summer of 2005. Despite its origins as a Hutu group fighting the mainly Tutsi army during the civil war, it says its first priority is to bring reconciliation.

In presidential elections in August, FDD leader Pierre Nkurunziza, a former physical education teacher whose narrow escape from rampaging Tutsi soldiers turned him into a guerrilla fighter in 1995, was elected president under a U.N.-led Hutu-Tutsi power-sharing plan.

The FDD claims to have rapidly recruited Tutsis since becoming a political party. But in a blow to reconciliation efforts, the main opposition Hutu party, Burundi Democracy Front (FRODEBU), pulled out of the new national unity government in March 2006, accusing Nkurunziza's coalition of authoritarianism and failing to abide by the constitutional agreement on power-sharing.

Although Nkurunziza gave Hutus 60 percent of cabinet posts and 40 percent to Tutsis as stipulated in the constitution, FRODEBU said most of the Hutu posts went to FDD members.

The government and the United Nations have agreed to set up a truth and reconciliation commission to probe the causes of Burundis ethnic tensions and compile a list of people suspected of genocide and war crimes. The suspects will be tried in a new war crimes court.

The FDD says one of its main challenges is to bring security, and that has meant negotiating with the last active rebel force, the Forces for National Liberation (FNL), a Hutu group and up to now a bitter rival of the FDD. Diplomats say lasting peace cannot be achieved unless the FNL lays down their arms for good.

In September 2006, the government and FNL signed a full ceasefire that was years in the making, effectively removing the last barrier to stability.

But the FNL remained the only insurgent group not to join Nkurunziza's unity government, insisting that the current Burundi army be dismantled and that government positions be given to FNL members before the peace agreement be fully implemented.

The FNL pulled out of a truce monitoring team in July 2007 after objecting to some parts of the agreement and saying they feared arrest upon returning home from exile.

Renewed violence broke out in April 2008, killing over 100 and displacing thousands.

In May 2008, rebels dropped their demands for an amnesty and senior officials returned to Bujumbura to begin implementing the deleayed peace agreement - although the group's leader stayed behind in exile in Tanzania.

A few days later, the government and the FNL jointly declared an end to hostilities.

Rights advocates say Burundian security forces have tortured and killed suspected members of the FNL, which itself has long been accused of attacking civilians, particularly in the hills around the capital Bujumbura.

The United Nations' peacekeeping operation in Burundi completed its mandate at the end of 2006, although the world body pledged continued support through a new U.N. Integrated Office in Burundi (BINUB) charged with helping demobilise former combatants and reform the security sector.
Optimism over the ceasefire has been overshadowed by a steadily darkening political climate under Nkurunziza's government, accused by watchdogs of corruption and a crackdown on the opposition.

In August 2006, police arrested former President Domitien Ndayizeye and six others, saying they had strong evidence they were plotting to assassinate Nkurunziza and overthrow the government. The suspects said the allegations had been invented to squash dissent.

Diplomats worried that the coup saga could destabilise Burundi at a time the government was coming under pressure over its record on democracy and freedom of expression following a spate of arrests of activists and journalists since May 2006.

In December 2006, Belgium-based think tank International Crisis Group said an increasingly authoritarian goverment risked triggering violent unrest and eroding the gains of peace.

But in January 2007, Ndayizeye walked free from jail to the glee of his supporters after he and four others were acquitted of plotting a coup.

The court said the evidence against them - from one person - was not enough to sustain a conviction. Two remaining defendants were given prison sentences after confessing to the plot, under what one said was torture. A government minister acknowledged some torture occured.

In July 2007, opposition parties FRODEBU and UPRONA began boycotting parliament amid accusations of human rights abuses and high-level graft. In November 2007, Nkurunuziza named a new cabinet in a bid to break the deadlock.

As of April 2008, some 338,000 Burundians who fled ethnic violence were still in exile, mostly in neighbouring Tanzania (315,000), Congo (17,600) and Rwanda (2,800), according to UNHCR. The U.N. refugee body had organised the voluntary repatriation of more then 300,000 refugees over the past half decade.

The war also uprooted hundreds of thousands of people within Burundi's borders. In the second half of the 1990s, tens of thousands - predominantly Hutus - were forced into camps by the government, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre.

Numbers of internally displaced peaked in 1999 at over 800,000 or 12 percent of the population. About 100,000 had yet to return home in 2006, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre.

The United States announced in mid-October 2006 it planned to take in about 10,000 Burundian refugees - many of whom fled as far back as 1972 - from Tanzania.

The challenges for returnees are enormous. They face the same problems as other Burundians, including grinding poverty, severe food shortages, lack of clean water, malnutrition and disease. Many also come home to discover their land has been occupied by former neighbours or even the government.

Experts say the land problem may be the most explosive challenge facing Nkurunziza's government. Burundi, slightly smaller than the Netherlands, is one of Africa's most densely populated countries and has one of the world's highest birth rates. Ninety percent of Burundians are farmers.

"We'll kill each other if the government doesn't take care of this issue," Gerald Niyungeko, an administrator dealing with land disputes in the southern district of Rumonge, told Reuters in September 2005.

Elders in one village in Rumonge district said 90 percent of the village's land was under dispute, or would be when the previous owners came home.

About 198,000 Burundian refugees who fled massacres in 1972 are still in exile in Tanzania. Far more people lost their land in that bout of violence and reprisal killings than in the last civil war.

As of November 2007, the World Food Programme was providing food assistance to some 1.2 million Burundians, including many former refugees. Poor harvests, crop disease, extreme poverty and serious flooding have all taken a toll on food security.

Worst-hit areas are in the north, the country's breadbasket and home to tens of thousands of returnees.

Burundi, ranked 169th of 177 countries on the U.N. Development Programme's Human Development Index in 2006, was already dependent on aid before the civil war. Since then, its roads have been washed away by rains and its schools and hospitals have fallen into disrepair.

At a donor conference in Bujumbura in May 2007, donors pledged $665 million to Burundi's three-year economic recovery plan.

In 2005, the government introduced free primary education and announced a $29 million programme to build 391 new schools and enrol 5,000 more teachers. It said it hoped churches and international nongovernmental organisations would help it deal with the influx of extra school children.

Burundi has undertaken to demobilise 20,000 of its 70,000 soldiers and rebel fighters. Almost 17,000 had so far returned to civilian life by mid-2006, according to UNHCR. Some 3,000 former child soldiers had also been demobilised with help from international organisations like the U.N. Children's Fund.

In a country where an estimated 300,000 guns are still in circulation, and where more than 55 percent of people live on less than $1 a day, violent crime rates are sky-high. There are frequent reports of armed men attacking villages and feeding centres in search of food.

Medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) has estimated that almost a million Burundians are cut off from health care due to the prohibitive cost of treatment in a country with an average of five doctors per 100,000 people.

Since 2002, the cash-strapped government has implemented what is known as a cost-recovery policy in the health sector, meaning that patients have to pay the full cost. The policy has the backing of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

A recent MSF study showed that 81 percent of patients were forced to go into debt or sell some of their harvest, land or livestock to pay for treatment.

A September 2006 report by Human Rights Watch and the Burundi Association for the Protection of Human Rights and Detained Persons said hundreds of patients are forcibly held in Burundi's hospitals - sometimes for months - over unpaid bills and many have to sell prized land or cattle to leave.

More positively, Burundi has made progress in tackling malaria and HIV/AIDS, the country's two biggest killers.

The health ministry recorded 1.9 million malaria cases in 2005, down from 3.1 million in 2000. It attributes the decline to funding from the Global Fund for AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, which has helped Burundi scale up treatments using artemisinin-based combination drugs known as ACTs.

Burundi's HIV/AIDS rates vary drastically, from 2 percent in 2004 among pregnant women in the southern town of Kiremba to 13 percent in one suburb of Bujumbura, according to the health ministry. UNAIDS says 3.3 percent of the adult population was HIV-positive in 2005.

In 2004, the government committed itself to providing universal access to lifesaving antiretroviral (ARV) drugs with funding from the Global Fund. Its target was to get 12,000 people on ARVs by the end of 2005 and 25,000 a year later. As of October 2005, only about 4,000 were receiving ARV treatments, according to MSF.