Pierre Nkurunziza is a born-again Christian, a former sports lecturer and, on August 26th, was due to be sworn in as president of Burundi. That the election which brought him to power-Burundi's first since 1993-ended peacefully was a surprise to many. But now Mr Nkurunziza faces the more daunting challenge of rebuilding a country torn apart by a civil war that pitted his Hutu rebels against a Tutsi army, and killed 300,000 people, most of them Hutu. No country will be paying closer attention to his progress than neighbouring Rwanda, which is riven by the same ethnic fault line between a large Hutu majority and a Tutsi minority. In 1994 Hutu militias there murdered about 800,000 Tutsis. Yet in recent years the two tiny countries have tried completely opposite ways to bring an end to their ethnic feuding.
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