antiterror police officers and 20 military advisors to assist Kinigi's government and train a Burundian force to assume responsibility for its security. The UN Security Council ultimately declined to send a peacekeeping force to Burundi. Aftermath Academic analysis Historian Alison Des Forges wrote that while the putschists never issued a manifesto, "it is clear they aimed to destroy the democratic government". She also wrote that "it may have been more of a self-interested coup by soldiers who happened to be Tutsi than a coup to safeguard the interests of the Tutsi as a group". Political scientist Filip Reyntjens described the coup as "the most successful failed military take-over" in African history, and largely attributed its failure to popular domestic resistance. Journalists Zdenek Červenka and Colin Legum stated that "In military terms, the coup was a success. The predominantly Tutsi army still [held] effective power. However, in political terms, the actions by the military extremists was an abysmal failure since it failed in their major objective of displacing the democratically elected government." According to Lemarchand, the coup was a "watershed event" which "destroyed a nascent interethnic consensus" and "undid in a few hours what a democratic transition begun five years earlier had so painstakingly tried to accomplish". Reyntjens concurred and wrote that it led to the reemergence of ethnicity as "the single most important factor of political life". Academic Alexandre Hatungimana wrote that the killing of Ndadaye "opened a constitutional void that neither the army, divided on the military coup, nor the political parties of the opposition, weakened by their defeat in the election, nor civil society, paralyzed by the violence that took hold of nearly all the hilltops in the country, were able to fill." Economist Léonce Ndikumana argued that, "Unlike earlier ethnic conflicts [...] the crisis that followed the October 1993 military coup has been longer, bloodier, and has affected the entire country." Ethnic violence The ethnic violence following the coup lasted to the end of the year. Initial estimates of the death toll ranged from 25,000 to 500,000. A joint study conducted by the United Nations Population Fund and the Burundian government in 2002 estimated the number of people killed from 21 October to 31 December 1993 to be 116,059, with at least 100,000 deaths occurring in late October. It remains unclear what proportion of these victims were Tutsi and what proportion were Hutu. The question of whether