The genocide perpetrated against the Tutsi in Rwanda, 30 years ago, between April and July 1994, was the result of the individual involvement of the political and military authorities led by the President of the Republic, Maj Gen Juvénal Habyarimana, and his closest circle, centered around his wife Agathe Kanziga.
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The armed conflict initiated by the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) on October 1, 1990, to liberate the country from a notorious criminal regime served as a pretext for Habyarimana's band of dignitaries to prepare and execute a plan for the systematic and total extermination of all the Tutsi in Rwanda and the liquidation of the Hutu opposed to the genocidal plan.
The implementation of this plan to eliminate the Tutsi was no secret to anyone since the then Rwandan government officials mentioned it openly. The Western embassies and chancelleries present in Kigali mentioned it to their respective governments, in particular the French diplomats, even though they were very close to the Habyarimana regime. Habyarimana's responsibility in the preparation of the genocide lies in the fact that he himself planned its conception and supported it in all sectors of civil, political, and military life between 1990 and 1994. The existence of this genocidal plan was already reported in 1990 by Western embassies.
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Here are three examples. On October 13, 1990, Col René Galinié, the Defence Attaché at the French Embassy in Rwanda, sent to his superiors in France a confidential dispatch, endorsed by Amb Georges Martres, in which he noted the seriousness of the genocide that had begun in Kibilira, in Ngororero District, in the following terms: "Hutu peasants organized by the MRND have intensified the search for suspected Tutsis in the hills. Massacres have been reported in the Kibilira region to the north-west of Gitarama. As has already been reported, the risk of this confrontation becoming widespread seems to be a reality.”
On October 15, 1990, the French ambassador to Rwanda, Georges Martres, sent a telegram to the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces, Admiral Lanxade, who was also President Mitterrand's private chief of staff, in which Martres used the expression "genocide" to describe the killings that were taking place in Rwanda on the authorisation of President Habyarimana.
An extract from the telegram read: "The Rwandan population of Tutsi origin believes that the military coup de main failed in its psychological consequences because it did not achieve results quickly enough to prevent the mobilisation of the Hutus against the prospect of the return of the former monarchy. It is still counting on a military victory, thanks to the support of men and resources from the diaspora, and this military victory, however partial, will enable it to escape the genocide".
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In 1998, when Amb Martres was questioned by the French parliamentary committee led by MP Paul Quilès, he gave a fuller explanation of this genocidal plan, revealing that Col Laurent Serubuga, the then Deputy Chief of Staff of the Rwandan army, who was Habyarimana's number two, had told him that the Rwandan authorities were ready to eliminate the Tutsi: "The genocide was foreseeable from that period (1990). Some Hutus had even dared to hint at it. Colonel Serubuga, Deputy Chief of Staff of the Rwandan army, was delighted with the RPF attack, which would serve as justification for the massacres of the Tutsis. Genocide was a daily haunting for the Tutsis. From the beginning of October 1990, several thousand people were imprisoned in Kigali, most of them because they belonged to the Tutsi minority or because they had sympathies or shared interests with the Tutsis".
Four days later, on October 19, 1990, Col Galinié sent a new diplomatic dispatch to France in which he mentioned the existence of a more widespread plan to kill the Tutsi throughout Rwandan territory.
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He wrote in these terms: "There is a possibility of serious atrocities being unleashed against the Tutsi population in the interior, which would be either spontaneous or directly encouraged by the most hard-line members of the current regime, thus playing their own game."
A document dated November 19, 1990 from the head of the intelligence service at the sub-prefecture of Ngororero gives details of these pogroms:
- Commune of Kibilira: 352 people killed, including 345 Tutsi and 7 Hutu. 45 Tutsi were injured, 423 houses were burnt down, and 124 were destroyed. 387 cows and 173 small livestock were slaughtered. 3,365 Tutsi took refuge in the parish of Muhororo;
- Commune of Satinsyi: 20 Tutsi killed, 8 injured. 7 houses burnt down, 92 destroyed. 112 cows slaughtered. 915 Tutsi left their properties;
- Commune of Ramba: There were no deaths, but 7 houses were burnt down and 17 others destroyed. Also, 17 cows were butchered. 200 Tutsi left their properties.
These figures provided by the intelligence service cannot be scrupulously relied upon, as the Habyarimana regime used various tricks to minimise the number of people killed and property destroyed in order not to reveal their intensity and to protect the perpetrators of these horrors. Nonetheless, these figures show that the Tutsi of Ngororero were cruelly persecuted.
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None of his murderers has ever been brought to justice. The first and most senior person responsible for this de facto impunity is the President of the Republic, Habyarimana, the supreme head of the Rwandan judiciary at the time.
Another striking fact that shows Habyarimana's responsibility in the genocidal plan from the outset in October 1990 was the hunt for Tutsi civilians that began on the night of October 4 to 5, 1990. To this end, Habyarimana's regime staged an RPF attack by firing into the city of Kigali. Afterward, gendarmes, soldiers, mayors, sector councilors, and intelligence officers searched homes and arrested many people, mostly the Tutsi. Around 10,000 people were arrested. None of them had committed any offence: they were simply the Tutsi accused of being accomplices of Inkotanyi or the Hutu suspected of colluding with the Tutsi.
For example, the late Abbé Modeste Mungwarareba, then director of the minor seminary of Karubanda (Butare) and professor of chemistry at the National University of Rwanda, was one of those detained in Butare prison. He gave information about what happened to him, notably in an interview with the French newspaper La Croix on July 4, 1994.
He said: "In 1990, at the start of the war, I was arrested and detained. I spent six months in prison without knowing why I was being held. They claimed that I had had relations with the RPF because I am Tutsi. But I knew nothing about the RPF.”
On October 18, 1990, Justice Minister Théoneste Mujyanama held a press conference on the arrest and detention of what he called the "Ibyitso" (accomplices). To justify the large number of the Tutsi arrested and detained, he stated that "the fact that they belong to the same ethnic group as those who attacked the country places them in the category of those who should be under more suspicion than others1". The mounting of accusations on ethnic grounds has been a source of denial of justice against many people.
We cannot talk about Habyarimana's role in the preparation of the genocide without mentioning the terrible speech he gave on November 17, 1992 at a meeting of his supporters at Ruhengeri Stadium, in which he clearly announced the genocide by asking the Secretary General of MRND to buy new uniforms for Interahamwe militiamen and to dress them appropriately, taking care to publicly state that when the time comes, the President himself gave orders to attack with his militiamen. This attack was intended primarily to target the Tutsi, who were then considered indiscriminately enemies of the Republic.
On November 25, 1992, the MDR party sent a letter to President Habyarimana in which the MDR denounced an attack carried out in Shyorongi commune on November 15, 1992, by Interahamwe accompanied by soldiers in civilian clothes. The attack was led by the mayor of Shyorongi, Alexandre Hitimana, who had distributed rifles. Six people were killed, and more than 500 abandoned their properties in their flight. The Interahamwe were supported by their fellow militiamen who had come from Remera village in Kigali under the leadership of Habyarimana's brother-in-law, Aloys Ngirabatware. Ngirabatware was a leader of the Interahamwe in Remera. The MDR party claimed that such abuses were supported by the Minister of the Interior, Faustin Munyazesa, the Prefect of Kigali-rural, Côme Bizimungu, the Burgomaster of Shyorongi, Alexandre Hitimana, and the MP Bonaventure Habimana, a former Secretary General of the MRND and a native of Shyorongi.
The letter ended by pointing out to President Habyarimana that the killings were linked to his speech in Ruhengeri a week earlier, in which he had declared that he did not believe in the Arusha Accords, and that when the time comes, he would mobilise his Interahamwe. These words galvanised his supporters. The letter recommended that President Habyarimana, among others, ensure the security of all Rwandans, and punish all those who had participated in these acts of violence. It was signed by Bonaventure Ubalijoro, president of MDR in Kigali; André Rwajekare, the vice-president of MDR in Kigali; Anastase Gasana, the secretary of MDR in Kigali; and Juvénal Banzamihigo, the treasurer of the MDR in Kigali.
In January 1993, an International Commission of Inquiry led by the International Federation of Human Rights Leagues carried out investigations in Rwanda and discovered several graves in which the bodies of Bagogwe Tutsi victims killed by the Habyarimana regime had been buried in the prefectures of Ruhengeri and Gisenyi. The commission comprised 10 experts from different countries: Jean Carbonare (France), chairman of the group; Philippe Dahinden (Switzerland); René Degni-Ségui (Côte d'Ivoire); Alison Des Forges (United States of America); Éric Gillet (Belgium); William Schabas (Canada); Halidou Ouedraogo (Burkina Faso); André Paradis (Canada); Rein Odink (Netherlands) and Paul Dodinval (Belgium). The searches carried out by the investigators established that a total toll of 277 people were killed in March 1991 alone. The Commission noted that most of the victims were young men who had died from multiple fractures of the skull and face caused by blunt instruments. These massacres occurred in several Ruhengeri communes (Nkuli, Kinigi, Mukingo) and Gisenyi (Gaseke, Giciye, Karago, Mutura, Kanama, Rwerere).
The Commission established that local civilian and military authorities were involved in the killings, including the Prefect of Ruhengeri, Charles Nzabagerageza, and the Prefect of Gisenyi, Come Bizimungu, as well as the mayors of the Communes concerned. Nzabagerageza was President Habyarimana's cousin and was married to Habyarimana’s wife’s cousin. The Commission also noted the direct involvement of other dignitaries of the regime, including Public Works Minister Joseph Nzirorera, Colonel Elie Sagatwa, an advisor to President Habyarimana, and Protais Zigiranyirazo, the President's brother-in-law.
On the evening of January 28, 1993, Jean Carbonare, the President of the Commission, had just returned from Rwanda and was invited by presenter Bruno Masure to appear on the France 2 news programme, "the systematisation of the massacres of civilians", which had nothing to do with "ethnic clashes" but rather were part of "an organized policy" in which "the involvement of those in power is striking, to a high degree, in this genocide, this crime against humanity – we insist on these words."
Carbonare's speech was punctuated by images of a mass grave of human bones found by investigators in the communes of Mutura (Gisenyi) and Kinigi (Ruhengeri).
In Rwanda, Carbonare was received by Amb Martres, who described in detail the seriousness of the events observed by the Commission he chaired. Following this meeting, Martres sent a letter to Bruno Delaye, President Mitterrand's adviser on African affairs, showing the seriousness of the human rights violations that were taking place in Rwanda under President Habyarimana.
He wrote: "Mr. Carbonare [...] has kept me informed of the results obtained so far by this mission [...]. It has collected an impressive amount of information on the massacres that have taken place since the start of the war in October 1990 and more particularly on those of the Bagogwe (a Tutsi ethnic group) after the attack on Ruhengeri in January 1991. As far as the facts are concerned," continued the French ambassador, "the report [...] will only add horror to the horror already known. [...] President Habyarimana himself allegedly started the massacres during a meeting with his close associates. [...] During this meeting, the operation was programmed with orders to carry out systematic genocide, using, if necessary, the army and involving the local population in the killings, no doubt to increase their solidarity in the fight against the enemy ethnic group".
The Commission's findings provoked a reaction from the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, which decided to send its special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, and arbitrary executions, Bacre Wally Ndiaye, a Senegalese national, to Rwanda. He submitted his report on August 11, 1993, in which he established that "the Tutsi population is the target of large-scale attacks and massacres carried out by elements of the FAR, the administrative authorities and the militias of the MRND and the CDR. These killings raise the question of genocide".
Ndiaye indicated that these massacres were organized by the authorities and targeted the Tutsi as an ethnic group, and added that there was a risk of genocide in Rwanda if the United Nations did nothing to prevent it.
At the time Ndiaye and his team were carrying out their investigation in Rwanda, Habyarimana's regime was implementing an entire genocide preparation programme: the creation of radio stations and media preaching hatred, recruitment and military training of militias and their arming, creation of extremist political parties, distribution of machetes and weapons to the ethnically selected population, drawing up of lists of people to be killed, and so on.
During the period from January 31, 1993 to February 13, 1993, on the orders of President Habyarimana, who was under pressure from Col Bagosora, the opposition Minister of Foreign Affairs, Boniface Ngulinzira, was informed that he had been relieved of his duties as head of the Rwandan delegation to the peace negotiations, and was replaced by the Minister of Defence, James Gasana, of the ruling MRND party. Prime Minister Dismas Nsengiyaremye strongly denounced this decision. At the time, negotiations were due to address the question of merging the two armies, and the extremists no longer wanted Ngulinzira because of his probity. This decision clearly shows that Habyarimana and his extremists wanted to exclude Ngulinzira from the Arusha peace negotiations because they did not appreciate the fact that he was in favor of these negotiations, even accusing him of having sold the country out because he was in favor of power-sharing between the MRND and its opposition.
Generally speaking, 1993 was a year of intensified military training for Interahamwe, but also of meetings to prepare for the genocide. Some of these known meetings are as follows:
On November 17, 1993, the army chief of staff, Col Déogratias Nsabimana, led a meeting at Byumba military camp, including officers from this prefecture. At the end of the meeting, it was decided that all these officers should mobilize their troops and the population to avenge their brothers massacred by Inkotanyi. The press release of the newspaper Le Flambeau n° 0003 of December 6, 1993, mentions large-scale massacres, and notes: "What is shameful is that they are not planning to take revenge on the RPF, but rather to take revenge by massacring the Tutsis in the interior of the country."
On November 18, 1993, Joseph Nzirorera, the Secretary General of the MRND, chaired a meeting at Remera (Mwufe) in Kigali-rural, which brought together all Interahamwe leaders. This meeting decided to launch a civil war throughout the country, starting with Kigali and the surrounding area, followed by the towns of Gitarama, Nyanza, Butare, and Rwamagana. These towns were targeted as a priority because they were densely populated by the Tutsi and opposition Hutu.
On November 20, 1993, President Habyarimana led a meeting at his Rebero L'horizon hotel, in Kigali. It was decided to distribute weapons (including grenades, rifles and machetes) to Interahamwe and Impuzamugambi militias, which were to be used to exterminate the opposition Tutsi and Hutu. These weapons were distributed using Onatracom public buses under the supervision of the Minister of Transport and Communication, André Ntagerura.
On November 21, 1993, President Habyarimana led a similar meeting at the army headquarters. The meeting aimed to mobilize the officers to become more involved in the fight against Inkotanyi and the Belgians. They were looking for a pretext to derail the establishment of the transitional government.
At the beginning of 1994, the extremists who were preparing for the Genocide met again and refined the plan to disseminate weapons among Interahamwe in rural areas. They published a procedural manual entitled "Organisation of Civil Self-Defence.” This manual was one of many documents seized by ICTR police officers from Jean Kambanda's personal effects when he was arrested in Nairobi in 1997. It does not mention the names of its authors or even the date of its publication, but Kambanda confirmed during his trial at the ICTR that it was a confidential document. The researchers who analysed it compared it with other writings from the same period and concluded that it was written between mid-February and early March 1994. The document provides information on the resolutions of the meeting: to provide the population with the means of "popular resistance" under the supervision of the army, starting with the regions bordering Uganda. The first to receive weapons were the communal police officers, reservists, and politicians who were convinced that they were defending the gains of democracy and the Republic, in other words, the followers of Hutu Power. The Minister of the Interior and the Minister of Defence were responsible for implementing this plan. The Prime Minister, Agathe Uwilingiyimana, was not informed because the meeting’s participants had realised that she was not a member of the Hutu Power movement. This document reveals that 4,995 rifles and 499,500 rounds of ammunition were needed for each commune. This arsenal was to be backed up by traditional weapons such as arrows, spears, and others.
On January 7, 1994, a meeting was held at MRND headquarters, chaired by the party's president, Mathieu Ngirumpatse, and attended by the Minister of Defence, Augustin Bizimana, the Chief of Staff of the Rwandan Armed Forces, Gen Déogratias Nsabimana, the Chief of Staff of the Gendarmerie, Gen Augustin Ndindiriyimana, and the president of the MRND militias, Interahamwe, Robert Kajuga. At this high-level meeting, revealed by the Belgian intelligence services, it was decided to thwart UNAMIR's weapons searches and move them to other caches. Under no circumstances could such an operation to hide weapons intended to commit genocide be carried out without the knowledge and approval of the President of the Republic, Habyarimana.
The proof is that on the following day, January 8, 1994, the Rwandan army distributed arms to Interahamwe militia in the northern prefectures of Gisenyi and Ruhengeri. On the same day, in Kigali, a violent demonstration by Interahamwe militias armed with grenades and surrounded by para-commandos from Camp Kanombe and members of the presidential guard in civilian clothes blocked access to Parliament, where an attempt was to be made to swear in the transitional government. The Rwandan gendarmerie hardly intervened. The UN peacekeepers (UNAMIR) also did not intervene.
On January 11, 1994, Lt Gen Romeo Dallaire, the UNAMIR Force Commander, sent a fax to General Maurice Barril, Head of the Military Division of the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations, informing him that UNAMIR had precise information on arms caches in the capital, Kigali, and on the training of militias capable of killing more than 1,000 people in 20 minutes. This text was also sent to the ambassadors accredited in Kigali. The UN refused to authorize the confiscation of these weapons.
On January 12, 1994, Gen Dallaire and Jacques Roger Booh Booh, the UN Special Representative in Rwanda, informed the ambassadors of France, the United States, and Belgium, of the existence of these weapons and the militias' intention to carry out massacres. On the same day, Dallaire and Booh Booh met Habyarimana to ask him to put an immediate end to all subversive activities of this kind. On the same day, they met the leaders of the MRND, but nothing concrete was done by these various authorities, starting with the Head of State himself. On the same date, the French Ambassador to Rwanda, Jean Michel Marlaud, sent a telegram to the Minister of Foreign Affairs on the situation in Rwanda, in which he explained that he had received reliable and secret information from reliable sources and that he had solid proof that systematic and widespread massacres were being planned in the country. Amb Marlaud explained that there would first be provocations aimed at RPF troops stationed in Kigali to encourage them to react to defend themselves, after which the pretext would be found to massacre the Tutsi, starting with those living in Kigali. The Ambassador added that the Rwandan military which had prepared this plan intended to collaborate with 1,700 Interahamwe militiamen posted in Kigali who had received training and weapons to kill the Tutsi.
On January 15, 1994, the ambassadors of Belgium, France and the United States made a joint approach to President Habyarimana to ask him to halt these preparations. But once again, these approaches were hardly followed up by any concrete action.
On January 16, 1994, MRND and Hutu Power member parties MDR and PL held a major meeting at the then Nyamirambo stadium, during which arms were distributed.
On January 19, 1994, Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana sent a letter to MRND ministers accusing Defence Minister Augustin Bizimana of distributing weapons to the population and urging them to recover them, but to no avail.
On February 17, 1994, Habyarimana led a meeting of senior officers of the national gendarmerie commanded by Gen Augustin Ndindiriyimana. He discussed with them, among other things, the then ongoing stalemate in setting up the broad-based transitional institutions provided for in the Arusha Peace Agreement and the possibility of a resumption of the war. Habyarimana warned them: "If the RPF starts the war, we have plans to deal with their accomplices."
In these words, the genocide was announced in unambiguous terms; killing the Tutsi had become a matter of importance for the state, which meant that the gendarmes ordinarily responsible for ensuring security could massacre the Tutsi as soon as the authorities gave them the order to start.
On February 18, 1994, the Directorate-General for External Security of the French intelligence services (DGSE) drew up a secret memo reporting real ethnic massacres that had claimed the lives of more than 300 people counted in the preceding weeks, killed by the Rwandan army and militias with the participation or encouragement of the local authorities. In this memo, the DGSE announced that these massacres were part of a plan for the total extermination of the Tutsi: "This would be part of a major program of ethnic cleansing directed against the Tutsis."
The following day, February 19, 1994, Gen Christian Quesnot, President Mitterrand's private Chief of Staff, and Dominique Pin, who was number two in the French Presidency's Africa Department (Elysée Palace), presented President Mitterrand with two main options regarding Rwanda.
The first was to evacuate French nationals and withdraw the military component of Operation Noroît. Quesnot and Pin rejected it, advising President Mitterrand not to consider it: "It would mean the failure of our presence and our policy in Rwanda. Our credibility on the continent would suffer".
The second option is the one in which Pin considers the capture of Kigali by the RPF; immediately. He asserted that in such a case, ethnic massacres would escalate, and consequently, France had to increase its efforts to support the regime more than ever to prevent the RPF from taking Kigali.
The French authorities were aware that Habyarimana's regime was contemplating genocide but persisted in their unconditional support for it. All these warning signs were sufficient proof that the genocide committed against the Tutsi was the result of a carefully thought-out plan by Habyarimana's government.
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On February 20, 1994, the Chief of Staff of the Rwandan army, Gen Deogratias Nsabimana, showed his cousin Jean Berchmans Birara, who had been Governor of the National Bank of Rwanda, a list of 1,500 Tutsi who were to be murdered. In a Belgian newspaper dated May 24, 1994, Birara revealed that he had passed on this information to the members of a delegation that the European Union had sent to Rwanda and especially to the Belgian Embassy. A 1997 Belgian Senate report states that the then-Belgian ambassador to Rwanda, Johann Swinnen, confirmed this information during a hearing before the Belgian Senate.
Reports from foreign embassies posted in Rwanda in 1994 indicate the concordance of several elements of direct incitement to genocide in March 1994. For example, a telex dated March 1, 1994, sent to the Belgian authorities by the Belgian ambassador to Rwanda, Johann Swinnen, in which he indicated that RTLM was broadcasting "inflammatory statements calling for hatred, even the extermination of the other component of the population.”
A Belgian intelligence document dated March 2, 1994, stated that an MRND informer had revealed to the Belgian authorities that the party had drawn up a plan to exterminate all the Tutsi in Kigali if the RPF opened hostilities. The informant added: "If things go wrong, the Hutus will massacre them without mercy" and added that "regional divisions no longer exist and army morale has never been so high."
On March 3, 1994, Maj Podevijn of UNAMIR informed Dallaire that arms were being distributed to militias in Gikondo District, which was one of CDR's major strongholds. On March 10, UNAMIR discovered several quantities of heavy weapons intended for the Rwandan army and reported an increase in the recruitment of militias and soldiers. Dallaire requested authorization from the UN to confiscate these weapons and asked for reinforcements from the peacekeepers. He never received a positive response.
It was also during March 1994 that the last orders for machetes placed by Félicien Kabuga with the British company Chillington were delivered.
A few weeks later, they were used as instruments to perpetrate the genocide.
UNAMIR noted that in March 1994, large quantities of ammunition had been clandestinely extracted from the armories of Kanombe military camp and distributed, without UNAMIR's knowledge, to the various army camps in the interior of the country, in particular, that of Gitarama. These arms distributions were aimed at preparing for war, halting the Arusha peace agreements, and distributing arms to be used during the Genocide.
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Belgian warrant officer Benoit Daubie, who was in charge of weapons maintenance at Kanombe military camp, in Kigali, testified before the Belgian military prosecutor:
"I had access to all the ammunition shops at Kanombe before the attack (...) A large part of the depot had been emptied of its contents. The quantities of ammunition extracted were vast. For example, the distribution of 1,000 120mm mortar shells in Gitarama. Around 20% of the ammunition remained in the depot. This was about a month before the attack on Habyarimana's plane, and it took a whole week to transport them. A lieutenant in the FAR told me that it was in anticipation of an RPF attack, but I think it was done to escape the control of the UN observers. I know that the figures provided by the FAR General Staff to the UN were wrong because they did not consider what had been distributed en masse. All that mattered was the situation in the warehouse, which was almost empty. A German military aid worker told me that a lot of ammunition had been moved during the night.”
The purpose of concealing weapons from UNAMIR was to prevent the latter from controlling their use so that the Rwandan army could use them for massacres that could not be prevented by UNAMIR, whose mandate required it to concentrate essentially on the city of Kigali.
On March 29, 1994, the military commanders of the Rwandan army met again.
They determined the strategy for "defending the districts of Kigali [and] tracking down and neutralizing infiltrators in various sectors of the city." In the report of this meeting to the Minister of Defence and the Army Chief of Staff, it was decided that specific soldiers and reservists would be responsible for training civilians, in close collaboration with the administrative authorities.
The report noted that the Minister of the Interior and the Minister of Defence should rapidly assemble the weapons to be distributed to the civilians carrying out the operation. The commander of the armies in Kigali informed the participants that, in most city districts, the setting up of groups to implement the plan had been completed and that they were only awaiting the distribution of weapons and other equipment as soon as possible. However, during this meeting, they mentioned the lack of weapons – which also required training for civilians – and the problems associated with handling traditional weapons (swords, spears, archery, machetes, and knives). The military commander of Kigali was ordered to draw up an emergency list of soldiers who were not in the barracks. The prefect of the city of Kigali, Colonel Tharcisse Renzaho, had also been ordered to do the same for reservists and to provide information on trustworthy civilians. The next day, the prefect sent the army chief of staff a list containing many names of reservists and civilians who could be recruited to implement the plan. The list included the name, cell, sector, and commune of residence of each person retained.
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Lt Col Beaudouin Jacques-Albert who was a Belgian technical aid worker in Rwanda in his capacity as adviser to Gen Gratien Kabiligi, G3 of the FAR General Staff, was heard by the Belgian military prosecutor's office on May 5, 1994, in his investigation into the assassination of the ten Belgian peacekeepers. He revealed that the Rwandan Defence Minister had publicly announced that there would be genocide if the RPF did not stop the war: "A month or two before the attack, I attended a party at General Nsabimana's house, with the Belgian ambassador, Colonel Vincent, Colonel Marshal (UNAMIR), Colonel Le Roy, President Habyarimana, Augustin Bizimana (MINADEF) and a few other Rwandan officers. In fact, on that occasion, it became clear, or rather it was reaffirmed, that the Rwandans could not accept ARUSHA. Bizimana told me, after a few glasses of champagne, that he was ready to engage the Rwandan army if the RPF did not play ball. Ten days before the attack, on the last Friday in March, Colonel Vincent [Head of Belgian military cooperation in Rwanda] invited General Nsabimana and Colonel Kabiligi, the G3, to his house, and at this meeting they again clearly stated that Arusha was not possible, that they would eventually accept early elections and that if they wanted to impose ARUSHA, they could eliminate the RPF and the Tutsis and that it would take a fortnight at the most. They seemed sure of themselves".
All these facts show that the genocide perpetrated against the Tutsi between April and July 1994 did indeed begin in October 1990 under the direct supervision of President Habyarimana and that this genocide was the result of a well-developed methodical organization under the authority of Habyarimana, which reached its climax in 1994.
The reality of this genocidal plan was confirmed by Prime Minister Jean Kambanda when he pleaded guilty before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, admitting that: "there was in Rwanda in 1994 a widespread and systematic attack directed against the Tutsi civilian population, with the aim of exterminating its members."
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Habyarimana, who was in office between July 5, 1973, and April 6, 1994, died on the evening of April 6, 1994, in an attack on his plane carried out by extremists from his regime who fired on his plane from Kanombe military camp, before the plan was fully implemented. He is the person most responsible for the genocide, in his capacity as the highest state authority.
His successor, Dr Théodore Sindikubwabo, his mentor Jean Kambanda, and several other genocidaires such as Col Bagosora, and many other murderers found guilty by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, are responsible for carrying out the genocidal plan.
As we approach the 30th commemoration of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, let us remember the victims by continuing to work so that the commitment NEVER AGAIN is no longer a pious hope but an actual reality for future generations in Rwanda and around the world.
The author is the Minister of National Unity and Civic Engagement