Juvénal Habyarimana
From Freepedia
Juvénal Habyarimana (March 8, 1937 - April 6, 1994) was president of Rwanda from 1973 until his death in a plane crash in 1994, which marked the beginning of the Rwandan genocide.
On July 5, 1973, while serving as defense minister, he seized power by overthrowing his cousin Grégoire Kayibanda and ousted the then-ruling Party of the Hutu Emancipation Movement (PARMEHUTU). Habyarimana was the leader of the Mouvement Républicain Nationale pour la Démocratie et le Développement party. During his 20 year rule, he favored the Hutus, the ethnic majority in Rwanda to which he himself belonged and that had ruled Rwanda since 1959. He also supported the Hutu majority in neighboring Burundi in their struggle against the Tutsi government there.
In the early 1990s a rebellion against Habyarimana's Rwandan government began when rebels from the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a force of mostly Tutsi Rwandan expatriates who had defected en masse from the Ugandan army, crossed the border from Uganda.
On April 6, 1994, Habyarimana's private Falcon 50 jet crashed near Kigali Airport, killing both Habyarimana and Cyprien Ntaryamira, the Hutu president of Burundi. The circumstances of the crash were suspicious. At the time, the Hutu Power media claimed the plane had been shot down on orders from RPF leader Paul Kagame. Others, including the RPF, accused militant Hutus from within Habyarimana's party of orchestrating the crash in order to provoke anti-Tutsi outrage while simultaneously seizing power.
Following the death of Habyarimana, the paranoia and suspicion surrounding the crash blew the lid off decades of complex ethnic, social and political hatreds. It ignited a murderous spree by extremists from the majority Hutus against rival Tutsis and those Hutus who had opposed the government. Within four months, about a million Rwandans were massacred in the Rwandan genocide, mostly Tutsis and moderate Hutus.
Habyarimana is survived by his wife, Agathe Habyarimana, who was evacuated by French troops shortly after his death. She has been described as extremely influential in Rwandan politics and has also been accused of complicity in the genocide.
