A divide between "Latvian" and "Russian" parties broadly matches the country's ethnic split.
The war in Burundi is particularly ominous to the outside world because it shares the same explosive ethnic split that led to the killings of at least 500,000 Tutsi in neighboring Rwanda in 1994, and Burundi has its own history of big ethnic massacres.
The crisis is unprecedented in the history of the divided east Mediterranean island of 1.1 million people, which suffered a war with Turkey and ethnic split in 1974 in which a quarter of its population was displaced.
The ethnic splits are one of many delicate issues for the Western coalition.
Their primaries and caucuses have revealed labor splits, racial and ethnic splits, gender splits, age and class splits, and a rivalry that is getting nastier by the day.
Chad's crisis has often been seen as an extension of the conflict in Darfur, but those who study the region argue that in some ways the reverse is true, and that the fates of Chad and Darfur, which share a long, porous border and many of the same ethnic splits and political problems, have long been intertwined.
Unless they can vote for a president and a government with broad legitimacy, greater factionalism and ethnic splits will result and these are potentially more dangerous to stability even than the Taliban.Mr Karzai and senior Afghan politicians bear the greatest responsibility for what happens next.
Both Rwanda and Burundi have similar ethnic-splits — roughly 85percentt Hutu and 15percentTutsisi — and each experienced genocides in the 1990s.
Despite the return of many refugees to their prewar homes, Bosnia remains divided along its ethnic fault lines: split into two semi-autonomous halves by the Dayton peace accords, governed at all levels by unwieldy combinations of Muslim, Serb and Croat nationalists, and utterly reliant on international aid and oversight.
David Balding, Imperial College London: Genes don't respect national borders as many legitimate citizens are migrants or direct descendants of migrants, and many national borders split ethnic groups.
David Balding, a population geneticist at Imperial College London, notes that "genes don't respect national borders, as many legitimate citizens are migrants or direct descendants of migrants, and many national borders split ethnic groups".
