On 6 April 1994, the plane carrying the president of Rwanda, Juvénal Habyarimana, and the president of Burundi, Cyprien Ntaryamira, both of Hutu ethnicity, was hit by two rockets when it was landing in Kigali. Nobody was saved. That attack began, a few hours later, the Rwandan genocide and the bloody and indiscriminate massacres carried out by the majority of the Hutu population against the Tutsi minority, held responsible for the attack.
In Rwanda in the space of 100 days, from 7 April to mid-July 1994, at least 800 thousand Tutsi people were killed, there were tens of thousands of rapes and children enlisted as soldiers. More than 30,000 so-called moderate Hutus who refused to participate in the massacre or who hid and defended Tutsi people were also killed. The violence also spread to Burundi, where ethnic tensions were similar.
Before the attack
Rwanda and Burundi are two small landlocked nations in the Great Lakes region of east-central Africa. Their stories are very linked: controlled by the Germans until the end of the First World War, they then became a colony of Belgium which in 1924 obtained a mandate from the League of Nations – the forerunner of the United Nations – to administer the two territories, which were called as a single entity, Rwanda-Urundi. The situation remained more or less the same after 1945 – when the League of Nations was replaced by the United Nations – and until independence from Belgium in 1962, when Rwanda and Burundi separated.
In both Burundi and Rwanda the prevailing ethnic group is that of the Hutu, traditionally farmers; then there are the Tutsis, breeders. The latter, evangelized in religious missions and educated, saw their position strengthened during the colonial administration and the belief of an alleged superiority over the rest of the population, fueled not only by the alliance with the colonists. In 1931 Belgium had, among other things, imposed an identity card indicating ethnic belonging.
A series of theories also contributed to the divisions – in line with the racist ideas very popular at the time in Europe – which spread the idea of a distinct racial origin between the two ethnic groups: the Tutsis were described by the colonizers as the natural leaders, while the Hutu as a population destined “by nature” to remain subjugated. These studies, obviously false, had a significant influence on local political history from then on.
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From 1959 to 1962 Rwanda went through a very troubled period, the so-called “social revolution”, during which most of the Tutsi were forced into exile in neighboring countries or were killed in a series of ethnic clashes that began immediately after the independence. In the nineties the Tutsi exiles began to arm themselves and organize themselves in the Rwandan Patriotic Front (FPR), supported by Uganda, and the regime of President Juvénal Habyarimana, in power since 1973, began to enter into crisis: not only because Habyarimana had introduced very unpopular measures due to the continually worsening economic situation, but also because in exchange for French economic aid he had accepted the creation of other parties which soon proved to be very critical of him. To all this it must be added that the actions of the FPR led by Paul Kagame, who has been president of Rwanda since 2000, became increasingly insistent and effective.
Habyarimana, nel 1975 (Keystone/Getty Images)
Habyarimana therefore had no choice but to give in and negotiate the so-called Arusha Accords with the FPR. Thus, starting from April 1993, a process began which had as its objective the formation of a government of national unity which included the FPR. Many democratic Hutu leaders supported the peace process, which was criticized and hindered instead by Hutu extremists, who in the meantime had strengthened and organized themselves in both Rwanda and Burundi.
After independence, the Tutsis remained in government in Burundi for many years and only in 1993 was the country’s first Hutu president, Melchior Ndadaye, elected: both he and his successor, Cyprien Ntaryamira, were however killed within a few months. Ntaryamira died together with the president of Rwanda Habyarimana on 6 April 1994 while the two were on board a plane that was returning from a summit of heads of state in Tanzania and which was shot down by a rocket. The episode began the Rwandan genocide, which ended in July when the Tutsi militias united in the FPR, and led by Paul Kagame, deposed the Hutu government and put an end to the massacre. Kagame became the country’s provisional president, was elected in 2003 and re-elected in 2010 and 2017.
Since the end of the genocide, Kagame has been considered a kind of “savior” of the country, even if his government has gradually become more dictatorial, and today Rwanda is one of the most authoritarian countries in Africa.
Immediately afterwards
Immediately after the death of the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi the situation worsened, but it was immediately clear that everything had been planned for some time: there were precise lists indicating who to kill and who not to kill, there were warehouses full of weapons and the Hutu extremists seemed just waiting for an order.
Most of the adult Hutu population (about 85 percent of the country, while the Tutsis were 15 percent) participated in or witnessed the massacres, which occurred house to house. The genocidaires also organized themselves into groups, to hunt down one by one the Tutsis who were hiding or who had barricaded themselves in their homes.
The Rwanda Genocide Memorial in Kigali, April 2014 (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
After the shooting down of the plane in Rwanda, the main Hutu movement accused the Tutsi political leader Paul Kagame of the attack, but according to others – and according to the FPR itself – it was the Hutu movements themselves who attempted the lives of the presidents, critical with Habyarimana’s overtures towards the Tutsi minority. Subsequent investigations have not reached any conclusions: some support the first thesis and others the second. The result is that even today it is not clear how things went.
At the center of the criticism and unclear things that happened during the 1994 massacres is not only the issue of the plane: there is also the disinterested attitude of the international community, the inaction of the UN, as well as the collaborative conduct of some Western countries towards one of the parties involved, such as France towards the Hutu.