Gunmen Clash With Troops in Hutu Suburb In Burundi

CLASHES between troops and gunmen in Burundi's capital, Bujumbura, resumed for a second straight day yesterday, and residents started leaving under military supervision.

Witnesses said shooting in the northern suburb of Kamenge, which broke out on Monday night and continued until midnight Tuesday, resumed at dawn yesterday.

Troop reinforcements were seen moving toward Kamenge and armored vehicles ringed the suburb, a hotbed of Hutu extremists opposed to the Army dominated by Burundi's Tutsi minority. The witnesses said civilian residents were leaving Kamenge under Army supervision, but there were no new casualty reports available. They said a number of houses had been set ablaze.

Burundi has the same ethnic makeup as neighboring Rwanda, where more than 500,000 people, mostly minority Tutsis, have died in massacres since April that have been blamed largely on Hutus. Drought persists in parched Malawi

MOST southern African countries have recovered from the drought two years ago that was the worst the region has known this century, but in Malawi, the land-locked nation that slices through Mozambique, a lack of normal seasonal rains has extended the hardship.

Women line up for hours at the few working water holes, and the state electricity supplier has warned of power cuts if the nation's largest river, the Shire, falls too low.

Under longtime dictator H. Kamuzu Banda, who fell from power in May in the nation's first democratic election, Malawi remained an impoverished country lacking any significant infrastructure.

The new government, led by businessman Bakili Muluzi, has promised widespread development but inherited a national budget dependent on foreign aid. It now calls for further aid to combat the drought.

Food production in the south this year has met 17 percent of the total needed, regional officials say, and the country needs 450,000 metric tons (495,000 tons) more food than it can produce in the next eight months to feed its people. Foreign donors had pledged 130,000 metric tons so far.