Melchior Ndadaye was a Burundian banker and politician who became the first democratically elected and first Hutu president of Burundi after winning the landmark 1993 election. Though he attempted to smooth the country's bitter ethnic divide, his reforms antagonised soldiers in the Tutsi-dominated army, and he was assassinated amidst a failed military coup in October 1993, after only three months in office. His assassination sparked an array of brutal tit-for-tat massacres between the Tutsi and Hutu ethnic groups, and ultimately led to the decade-long Burundi Civil War.
