Habyarimana’s original sin: How the 5 July 1973 coup planted the seeds of catastrophe

By morning, Grégoire Kayibanda, the country’s first president after independence, was a prisoner in his own land, along with family members, politicians and officers, most from the centre and south. Rwanda’s First Republic was dead, strangled quietly by the man sworn to defend it.

The timing deepened the treachery. Just four days earlier, on Independence Day, Kayibanda had addressed the nation for the last time, unaware that his own Minister of Defence, a man he had personally elevated and trusted, was finalising plans to remove him. Many Rwandans saw the coup for what it was: not a rescue, but a betrayal from within.

The takeover faced no resistance. Habyarimana moved armoured cars and National Guard infantry against an unarmed civilian government, surrounded the presidential palace, occupied the National Assembly and seized the national radio, from which his proclamation suspended the constitution and banned all political parties. By midday it was over. A nation of millions learned from a radio broadcast that soldiers now owned the state.

He blamed “enemies of peace” and dressed up his seizure of power as a moral revolution. The record shows the opposite: a northern military faction settling a regional power struggle with southern elites.

The coup was bloodless only in its first hours. Fifty-six people, mostly former leaders, were killed by the security services between 1974 and 1977. Kayibanda himself died in detention in 1976, probably of starvation. Habyarimana then created the MRND as the sole legal party and reinforced the quota system restricting Tutsi access to schools and public employment, feeding the machinery of exclusion.

He clung to power for 21 years, until his plane was shot down on 6 April 1994. By then, the regime born on 5 July 1973 had laid much of the groundwork for the Genocide against the Tutsi.

Fifty-three years later, that night deserves to be remembered honestly: a soldier betrayed his president, silenced a nation’s politics and set Rwanda on a path whose cost is still being counted.