On this date in 1965, 24 Burundians were shot following mass trials in the stormy aftermath of an attempted coup.

Burundi met post-colonial independence deprived by an assassin’s bullet of the popular, unifying figure who might have kept ethnic conflict under control, and many years of living dangerously ensued as Hutu and Tutsi grappled for power.

On October 18, 1965, a group of Hutu officers attempted a coup d’etat against Burundi’s monarchy — and failed.

the events of October 1965 carried momentous consequences. The mutineers took a huge gamble and lost … power became the exclusive monopoly of Tutsi elements.

… In the capital, virtually every Hutu leader was apprehended.

-Rene Lamarchand, Burundi: Ethnic Conflict and Genocide

While the putschists were unsurprisingly executed, the Tutsi-authored backlash cast a much wider net, ultimately claiming up to 5,000 lives. (It was only a dress rehearsal for a similar scenario — Hutu rebellion triggering massive Tutsi crackdown — that resulted in a full-on genocide in 1972.)

Various executions peppered the weeks after the intended coup; this date’s was one of the last of the particularly noteworthy. The New York Times (Dec. 21, 1965) described those “executed in the Central African kingdom Wednesday after mass trials” as “Joseph Bamina,* a former Burundi Premier … [and] 23 others included two prominent political leaders.”

Burundi did not live happily ever after.

* Lamarchand calls Bamina one of the “hard-core Hutu opposition.”

On this day..

• 1975: Lex Aronson, aid worker
• 1896: Patrick Coughlin, shot in the mountains
• 1950: Shooting on Seoul's Execution Hill
• 1882: Myles Joyce, Maamtrasna murder miscarriage
• 1889: Abushiri, German East Africa rebel
• 1865: William Corbett and Patrick Fleming
• 1941: The massacre at Skede in Liepaja
• 1882: James Gilmore, the first hanged in Deadwood
• 1655: Henry Manning, Protectorate spy
• 1983: John Eldon Smith, mafioso Willy Loman
• 1914: Regiment Mixte de Tirailleurs decimated
• 401 B.C.E.: Clearchus of Sparta