The present article demonstrates how, from being a zealous apostle of this ideology, he became the principal architect of its implementation.
It all began with a seizure of power marked by the elimination of the entire political class of the regime he had just overthrown in a coup d’état in 1973.
The Foundational Crime of the Habyarimana Regime
Between 1959 and 1964, first under Belgian tutelage and then under the PARMEHUTU regime, half of the Tutsi living in Rwanda at the time were either killed, driven into exile, or confined to camps in highly inhospitable in the southeast of the country.
The role of Habyarimana and the young army—whose full command was entrusted to him by Belgian officers from June 1963—was decisive in these PARMEHUTU crimes. It was in recognition of his prowess as a ruthless exterminator that, in 1965, Kayibanda set his sights on Habyarimana. He appointed him Minister of Defense, expressing ostentatious confidence in a man he regarded as a pure product of the “1959 Revolution.” He could not have been more mistaken.
In reality, the man he viewed as an apolitical soldier in his service was secretly nurturing deep ambitions for the highest office. As early as 1966, the likelihood of a coup d’état by Habyarimana was already being noted in certain confidential diplomatic reports. Kayibanda’s blindness regarding his loyal guardian persisted until April 1973. It was only in the midst of the anti-Tutsi violence of 1973 that Kayibanda realized that Habyarimana—who had fully supported it—had in fact appropriated these violences. He turned them into the foundation of a plan to create a situation of generalized insecurity and to push to the brink the North–South schism within PARMEHUTU. This brink had been growing particularly since 1968.
Between April 1973 and July 1973, when Habyarimana overthrew the regime, it was too late for Kayibanda to organize any effective response. Ultimately, on the night of July 4 to 5, Habyarimana brought down the regime like ripe fruit and swept up, almost effortlessly, the leading figures of the First Republic, who had gathered that evening at Kayibanda’s residence.
Habyarimana then ordered the arrest—and later the execution—of a large part of the PARMEHUTU elite, applying to them a central lesson he had learned from them and now turned against them: the physical elimination of any major political rival, real or potential. Under the guise of a supposedly “renewed republic of the Hutu majority” that Habyarimana intended to establish, the pioneers of the “1959 Revolution” and their associates were, in his eyes, competitors to be eliminated outright.
Imposing Implausible Facts as Truth Through Repetition
After the coup d’état and the massacre that followed, Habyarimana demonstrated a formidable ability to have “alternative truths” that suited his plans accepted as reality.
This was first evident, as discussed in a previous article, in the way he recast his academic failure as a circumstance that had providentially led him toward his calling to serve his people—as if it were a divine mission.
Despite the importance of clarifying the circumstances surrounding his seizure of power through a coup, Habyarimana never provided the explanations he repeatedly promised regarding what he portrayed as a spontaneous and patriotic action by the armed forces “to save the country from rotten disorder that was about to degenerate into catastrophe.” Instead, he considered the matter closed with a series of implausible and contradictory accounts of his whereabouts on the night of July 4–5, 1973, the night of the coup.
This did not prevent Habyarimana from quickly establishing himself as the new “father of the nation,” whose praises were sung tirelessly by the population, while excerpts of his speeches were mechanically repeated several times a day before every radio news broadcast.
To the claim of an improvised, bloodless seizure of power, Habyarimana regularly added the hypocrisy of praising those he had coldly killed after his putsch. The height of this cynical posture was reached in 1982, during the ceremonies marking the twentieth anniversary of Rwanda’s independence, when he showered his own victims with praise, describing them as “martyrs, children of the nation who sacrificed their lives in the just liberation of our people.”
Lies, Cynicism, and Manipulation in Building the Legitimacy of A New “Father of the Nation”
After the 1973 coup d’état and the elimination of the deposed political class, Habyarimana chose either to deny the facts or to distort them in order to rid himself of his image as an illegitimate criminal. To this end, he developed a comprehensive personal communication strategy aimed at imposing—through repeated falsehoods—the image of a man of peace and unity, a good family man, and a devout, practicing Catholic. In broef, this was the image of a man who, a priori, could not have committed any crime.
With this objective in mind, and drawing on his formidable skills as a manipulator, Habyarimana presented himself as the legitimate guardian of the legacy of the “1959 Revolution,” despite having eliminated its pioneers. Thus, in 1978, the new constitution he promulgated celebrated in its preamble “the work of liberation undertaken by the 1959 Revolution.” To affirm his fidelity to PARMEHUTU—which he had nonetheless dissolved—he republished its manifesto in 1984.
With the same capacity—or at the very least the same intent—to preserve the image of an irreproachable leader, Habyarimana did not hesitate to assert the implausible: that he had known nothing about the fate of these PARMEHUTU “heroes,” whose praises he publicly sang, yet whom he had coldly made assassinated. The scenario of a single officer—Major Lizinde—allegedly deciding, without the knowledge of the political and military hierarchy, to eliminate more than fifty leading figures, was scarcely credible, bordering on the absurd. Such a narrative convinced no one with even minimal critical sense, especially given Habyarimana’s well-known total control over all the machinery of the state, particularly the security apparatus.
However, whether or not the story was believable mattered little. Under the rule of this master manipulator, what mattered was that it was pronounced by a judge—and that those who believed otherwise remained silent.
As for the image of a practicing Catholic, it was merely a façade, at odds with Habyarimana’s true nature. He had not hesitated to commit the grave sin of multiple homicide in pursuit of his political interests. This same ostensibly devout man, a self-proclaimed apostle of peace and unity, had in fact established a regime of near-apartheid to control or exclude the Tutsi. It was this same false apostle of peace who galvanized his militias and encouraged the boundless violence that would later characterize them during the genocide against the Tutsi.
This professed Catholicism, though far removed from the reality of the man, proved effective in appealing to a population that was itself largely practicing Catholic, and in securing the crucial support of the powerful archbishop representing the Catholic Church, as well as that of the Christian Democratic International.
At the same time, in a display of remarkable political balancing, Habyarimana exploited to his advantage the beliefs and mental frameworks of those from his native region of Bushiru, where misfortune was believed to befall anyone who failed to observe the cult of Nyabingi. This nominally practicing Catholic took steps to project the image of a man deeply rooted in Bushiru, which he sought to make the core of his base of unconditional loyalists. In this context, he elevated Mbonabaryi—his Catholic baptismal godfather and, according to well-informed sources, also his sponsor in the Nyabingi cult. Mbonabaryi was his maternal uncle, the brother of his mother Nyirazuba, and the senior male descendant of King Nyamakwa III Nditunze, the last official priest of the Nyabingi cult.
Around Mbonabaryi, Habyarimana embedded within the formal structures of governance the parallel, covert, and all-powerful role of the Akazu, a politico-mafia network of grim notoriety.
Through all these manoeuvres, Habyarimana sought to establish himself as the supreme leader of a “new republic of the Hutu majority,” presented as a continuation of the first. He manoeuvred so as to concentrate in his own person supreme political and military authority, the role of protector of the country’s Catholic identity, and that of guardian of the traditional spiritual power of his region.
All these strategies and manipulations made him a figure both respected by his loyalists and feared by his dismayed opponents, because of his official as well as occult powers. It was through this system that he was able to commit—or to have committed—various crimes aimed at consolidating his power, while preserving the ability to deny them or later attribute them to shadowy intermediaries.
A Deceptive Image of a Powerless and Encircled Leader as a Means of Evading Responsibility for His Crimes
Through the MRND party-state and the army, of which he was the undisputed leader, Habyarimana exercised total control over the executive, legislative, and judicial branches, as well as over defense, security, and intelligence. His contemporaries described him as a man who controlled even the transfer of a corporal from one unit to another.
To secure the loyalty of a close circle of indispensable supporters, he allowed members of the Akazu to enrich themselves and to dominate various specific sectors—political, security-related, economic, and others. Within this system, these loyalists, in exchange for the leader’s trust and for the power and wealth he granted them, carried out on his behalf all the crimes deemed necessary to protect his regime.
Among these, the most notorious crime prior to 1990 was the assassination of Colonel Mayuya, described—rightly or wrongly—by public opinion as “the only credible potential candidate to replace the head of state.” For a head of state whose only protection from justice lay in his office, eliminating any plausible presidential contender was a matter of life and death.
The implausible narrative put forward by the regime suggested that an invisible hand had orchestrated the assassination of one of the army’s finest officers, who also belonged to the President’s inner circle; that this same invisible hand had then pursued, captured, and killed the assassin; and finally, that it had controlled the judiciary to the extent of having such a grave case quietly buried, following a token prosecution of three officers who were swiftly released.
As with this crime and others that were never solved, the responsibility of the head of state—who exercised total control over all political and security institutions—remains, by default, the only serious hypothesis.
Habyarimana Charts the Final Stretch Toward the Crime of Crimes
Since 1973, Habyarimana and his fellow coup plotters lived in fear that one day they would be held accountable for their many crimes, particularly the assassination of the elite of the First Republic. To guard against this possibility, they placed the country under the control of the MRND, a party-state whose statutes allowed no dissenting voice.
Yet even in this climate of terror, while the widows and orphans of the personalities assassinated after the coup were fearful and silent, they did not forget. The regime closely monitored their reactions, and the Lizinde/Kanyarengwe affair opened Habyarimana’s eyes to a troubling reality: it was not impossible that ambitious insiders might one day overthrow him and force him to answer for all the regime’s crimes—regardless of their own involvement, just as he himself had done to his predecessor.
The regime then gambled everything on shifting responsibility for these crimes onto its own executors of dirty work, notably Major Théoneste Lizinde and a number of alleged accomplices. This stratagem failed miserably in 1985. It is no coincidence that shortly thereafter, in 1986, the regime radicalized its stance on the refugee issue, deliberately pushing refugees toward armed return as their only option.
The plan was to revive a doctrine dating back to the PARMEHUTU era: to unite all Hutu—including those who had themselves been victims of the regime—in a war of “legitimate self-defense” against a common Tutsi enemy, accused in mirror fashion of seeking to exterminate the Hutu. The aim of this machiavellian calculation was to divert attention away from the crimes of the 1973 coup and redirect it toward a phenomenon of far greater magnitude—the genocide against the Tutsi.
Moreover, the regime planned to implicate Hutu victims of the 1973 putsch in the genocide, thereby stripping them of both the desire and the moral authority to revisit the assassinations linked to the coup. In this way, the grave crime of eliminating the pioneers of the “Hutu majority republic” would be reduced to a mere footnote in history.
When the RPF launched its offensive in October 1990, it is highly significant that leading figures of the regime openly expressed satisfaction that their plan had worked, and that the war finally provided the long-sought opportunity to set the genocidal plan in motion.
From that point onward, to ensure the plan’s success, Habyarimana personally involved himself in creating the conditions for a “popular” mass crime in which all Hutu—especially those from the South who had been victims of his regime—would be drawn into the extermination of the Tutsi.
He began by directing a sweeping media campaign portraying the Tutsi as the enemy. Through the macabre staging of the night of October 4–5, followed by his incendiary speech on the morning of October 5, Habyarimana triggered a wave of arrests involving thousands of people, the majority of them Tutsi, accused of being accomplices of the enemy. To remove any ambiguity about the nature of the conflict, he ordered the army to draft and disseminate a report defining the enemy as “the Tutsi, both inside and outside the country.”During the same period, close collaborators of Habyarimana established the genocidal militias for which he publicly claimed paternity and expressed admiration. These militias were trained and equipped by soldiers under his command in preparation for action.
To transform genocide into a mass participatory crime, Habyarimana—directly or through close associates—oversaw the creation of, and provided unwavering support to, the media outlets that fueled it, including the notorious Kangura and RTLM.
In addition, he orchestrated manoeuvres aimed at fostering the Hutu Power movement within opposition parties, as well as the defection of influential figures from the South, whom he succeeded in drawing—through corruption—from opposition ranks into the MRND/CDR/Hutu Power camp. These individuals, effectively “bought” through Akazu networks, would later swing the entire South into the genocidal movement, turning that region into a stronghold of mass participation in the genocide.
Operationally, this entire macabre program was coordinated by a sinister core of death squads led by members of the Akazu, including Habyarimana’s brothers-in-law. Remaining true to his nature as a consummate dissembler, liar, and manipulator, Habyarimana cynically claimed ignorance of the mass crimes carried out by these squads—crimes that were nonetheless visible to all.
Having crimes committed by loyal collaborators, while presenting himself as a president besieged by a criminal clique led by his own in-laws, proved remarkably effective—though only for a time. By 1993 in particular, it had become increasingly evident that from the outset Habyarimana had not only directed the regime’s crimes from the shadows, but had also received regular reports on the situation, including denunciations from national and international human rights organizations.
Habyarimana was an all-powerful president—neither weak, nor encircled, nor blind—but the instigator of his regime’s crimes. After his assassination by his own collaborators and disciples, they unleashed the genocidal machinery of which he had been the architect.
Conclusion
An analysis of the events that led to the genocide against the Tutsi—particularly since Habyarimana’s seizure of power and the crimes that characterized his regime—reveals an unambiguous truth: the instigator of the crimes that inexorably led to the genocide had a name, and it was Habyarimana—, a man haunted by the fear that one day justice would catch up with him.
To remove this sword of Damocles, he conceived a plan consistent with his thinking and methods: the crime of crimes, intended to dilute and erase the crimes upon which his regime had been built and through which he had ruled.
Only those who are blind or acting in bad faith can deny Habyarimana’s central role as the chief planner of the genocide—the ultimate political crime, conceived to escape the consequences of his own prior crimes.
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