Rural. Violence was less intensive in the Cibitoke and Bubanza Provinces in the northwest and Cankuzo Province in the east. Only the provinces of Makamba and Bururi completely avoided the violence. Hutu peasants were primarily involved, though in some instances FRODEBU members in provincial and communal governments engaged in anti-Tutsi violence. In Butzei, one FRODEBU administrator was reported to have arranged for over three dozen Tutsi civil servants to be burnt. In several instances Tutsis engaged in reprisals. The retaliatory violence was particularly acute in the provinces of Karuzi, Gitega, and Ruyigi. On 24 October in Ruyigi town, Tutsis murdered 78 Hutu civil servants who were seeking refuge at a bishop's compound. The Tutsi-dominated army also engaged in reprisal killings. One of the few exceptions to this was in Karuzi Province, where the local commander, Major Martin Nkurikiye, went unarmed with two FRODEBU parliamentarians into villages to try to convince armed Hutus to stand down. The army protected Tutsis by resettling them in fortified villages. Minister of Health Jean Minani—who was in Rwanda at the time—accused the army of committing genocide. In November the Permanent Francophone Council condemned the killings. Initial estimates of the death toll from the ethnic violence 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. Aftermath In 1997, the Burundian government passed a law which penalised genocide and crimes against humanity. Later that year, the government charged hundreds of persons accused of responsibility in the killings of Tutsis, with 44 being sentenced to death. In 2014 the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was established to investigate crimes committed during ethnic violence since independence in 1962. Assessment of the violence as genocide In May 1994, a UN preliminary fact-finding commission determined that the massacres of Tutsis were not part of "any premeditated plan for the extermination of the Tutsi ethnic group by the Hutu". Conversely, the following year the International Commission of Inquiry for Burundi concluded that the killings constituted "an effort to completely destroy the Tutsi ethnic group. Tutsis were not simply killed in a spurt of violence, but systematically hunted...evidence is sufficient to