Jean-Baptiste Bagaza, the deposed president of Burundi who invested heavily in infrastructure but persecuted Catholics and did little to make his small, poor and ethnically fractured country a stable democracy, died on Wednesday morning at a hospital in Brussels. He was 69.
The death was confirmed by Pierre Nkurunziza, Burundi’s current president. No cause of death was provided.
The rule of Mr. Bagaza — who seized power in a 1976 coup and was ousted, also in a coup, in 1987 — reflected the political instability that has characterized Burundi, a landlocked but densely populated central African nation, for much of its modern history.
Burundi today is in crisis. Violence has skyrocketed, with reports of mass killings and torture of political dissidents, after Mr. Nkurunziza’s decision in April last year to seek a third term, despite huge protests and international condemnation.
Mr. Nkurunziza maintains that because he was first elected in 2005 by lawmakers, his first term should not count toward the two-term limit specified in the Constitution.
A former colony of Germany and Belgium, Burundi achieved independence in 1962. An Army officer, Michel Micombero, seized power in 1966 and declared the country a republic, ending a short-lived constitutional monarchy. Longstanding tensions between ethnic Hutus and Tutsis culminated in a Hutu uprising that was brutally crushed in the early 1970s, when at least 100,000 Hutus were killed. Mr. Bagaza was an army logistics officer at the time, but the extent or nature of his involvement in the violence, if any, was never made clear.
In November 1976, Mr. Bagaza, by then a lieutenant colonel and deputy chief of staff of the army, deposed Mr. Micombero in a bloodless coup. Like his predecessor, Colonel Bagaza was a Tutsi, though he made appeals to national unity and included two Hutus in his first cabinet. The military, however, remained firmly under the control of the Tutsis, even though they represented no more than 15 percent of the population.
Mr. Bagaza’s investments in infrastructure contributed to the development of an economy that remains largely reliant on its exports of coffee, tea and sugar.
“Before his time there were hardly any easily passable roads,” Nigel Watt, the author of “Burundi: The Biography of a Small African Country” (2008), said in a phone interview. Mr. Bagaza had roads built connecting Bujumbura, the capital, to the interior; invested in electricity and drinking water; developed a port on Lake Tanganyika, linking Burundi’s economy with that of neighboring Tanzania; and, at a time of Cold War tensions, managed to secure aid from both the West and the Soviet bloc, as well as China and the Arab states.
Mr. Bagaza was credited with land reforms, the abolition of a hated poll tax and the promulgation of a new Constitution in 1981. But his human rights record was poor.
In 1980, The New York Times noted that Mr. Bagaza was building a presidential palace on the highest hill in Bujumbura with economic help from North Korea, and that mistrust and paranoia pervaded the country, with many Hutus who had fled to Tanzania during the genocide still fearful of return. Many continued to feel like second-class citizens, with limited access to education and to jobs in government.
Mr. Bagaza’s undoing may have resulted from his eccentricities. He ruthlessly pursued the Roman Catholic Church — in a country where more than 60 percent of the population is Catholic — by imprisoning priests, reducing the number of foreign missionaries and seizing or closing church-run broadcasters, schools and seminaries. (He accused church leaders of trying to interfere in politics.) He restricted the opening hours of bars, and even tried to stop Burundians from spending their time and money on traditional betrothal and mourning ceremonies, along with weddings and funerals.
“In attacking Christian churches, he made both political and spiritual enemies,” Robert C. Krueger, a former American ambassador to Burundi, wrote in his 2007 book on the country, “From Bloodshed to Hope in Burundi: Our Embassy Years During Genocide.” “That was too much even for Burundi.”
In September 1987, Mr. Bagaza was overthrown while attending a conference of French-speaking nations in Quebec.
Burundi’s fortunes did not improve significantly, however. Under his successor, Pierre Buyoya, there were new waves of ethnic violence. The country’s first democratically elected president and first Hutu president, Melchior Ndadaye, was overthrown in 1993 after only three months in power, and large numbers of Tutsis were killed in what has been labeled a second genocide. (Mr. Ndadaye’s successor was assassinated in a plane crash in April 1994, while traveling with the president of Rwanda, an event that precipitated the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Rwandans, mostly Tutsis and moderate Hutus.)
Some Burundians suspected Mr. Bagaza — who was variously exiled in Libya and Uganda — of taking part in the coup against Mr. Ndadaye, but he denied it. After returning to Burundi, he attempted a political comeback as the leader of a hard-line Tutsi-led party, Parena, but was thwarted when his longtime rival Mr. Buyoya returned to power in a 1996 coup. As part of a 2005 peace process that ended a 12-year civil war and resulted in the election of Mr. Nkurunziza, former presidents, including Mr. Bagaza, were named senators for life. He stepped down as the head of Parena in 2014.
Born in Rutovu, in what is now southern Burundi, on Aug. 26, 1946, Mr. Bagaza attended Belgian military schools before joining Burundi’s army. He is survived by his wife, Fausta, and four daughters.