The genocide perpetrated against the Tutsis in 1994 is not an event that surprised Rwanda and humanity as a whole. This genocide is the culmination of a long political process involving Rwandan and foreign actors. Belgian colonization and the Catholic Church, in particular, introduced stereotypes of categorizing Rwandans according to ethnicities that did not exist as such. Rwandans who were educated in Catholic schools and seminaries grew up with this ideological perception of their country's reality and failed to distance themselves from the logic of the colonizer to preserve the national unity and social harmony that were the heritage of our ancestors.
Instead of maintaining cohesion and working for the integral development of the country, these so-called 'enlightened' Rwandans made the discrimination of Tutsi the primary goal of their politics at all levels. The creation of the political party PARMEHUTU by a group of intellectuals supported by the Catholic Church is a major event that must be considered to understand the process that led to the extermination of Tutsi in 1994.
Indeed, PARMEHUTU was an inherently racist party in both its essence and practices. No Rwandan who was not Hutu could be accepted as a member of this party. Such a political line inherently contains the seeds of genocide. President Kayibanda, who was also the president of PARMEHUTU, implemented, since 1957, the date of the drafting of the founding text of PARMEHUTU, the ‘Manifeste des Bahutu,’ a policy based on hatred of Tutsi and their exclusion.
In Kayibanda's politics and his party, PARMEHUTU, Tutsi as a whole became scapegoats for the misfortunes that the Hutu allegedly suffered for decades, pretending to ignore that, in the history of Rwanda, the Tutsi monarchy had never carried out ethnic or collective massacres targeting a particular group. The Rwanda that the colonizer and the missionary found had both poor and rich upon their arrival. That Rwanda did not kill. It is therefore evident that the distant responsible for the genocide committed against the Tutsi in 1994 is the one who created a policy based on hatred of the Tutsi and introduced it as a regular political line. The PARMEHUTU Party and its founders are the primary culprits.
In 1963, under the pretext that a group of Tutsi exiles from Burundi had attacked Rwanda from Bugesera, President Kayibanda's regime organized new massacres against the Tutsis in the country, especially in the prefectures of Kigali, Kibungo, Gitarama, Gisenyi, Ruhengeri, and Gikongoro. Observers present in Rwanda, researchers, and missionaries signalled that these killings met the necessary conditions to constitute the crime of genocide. The international press widely covered it.
Kayibanda was overthrown in 1973 following a coup staged by General Juvénal Habyarimana, a military officer from the northern part of the country. He accused Kayibanda and his party, PARMEHUTU, of having caused the division among Rwandans. Habyarimana made an enticing speech advocating for working towards the unity and development of all Rwandans. It should be noted that Habyarimana came to power in a bloodbath against the Tutsi whom Kayibanda's regime had expelled from schools and positions in state institutions and private companies. Those who survived this carnage were once again forced into exile in foreign countries.
In 1975, Habyarimana founded his political party, the National Revolutionary Movement for Development (MRND), with the motto: Peace, Unity, Development. All Rwandans automatically became members of this party since it was a single party that received state funds for its operation. Despite the good intentions initially, Habyarimana quickly implemented a policy identical to that of his predecessor, Kayibanda. He established a so-called ethnic and regional balance system that enforced the limitation of Tutsi in schools and employment. He overly favoured nationals from his native region, who took the lion's share in all sectors of the country's life.
Moreover, Habyarimana refused to address the issue of Tutsi refugees, the first of whom had been expelled from the country in 1959. His presidency was also characterized by a series of assassinations and repression of democrats, independent journalists, and human rights defenders. Even those who denounced corruption suffered the same fate.
On October 1, 1990, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) began an armed conflict against the regime with the clear goal of breaking away from the policy of exclusion and discrimination that had characterized Rwanda since 1959. This armed conflict became an opportunity for the regime to carry out mass arrests and systematic and widespread killings of Tutsi, especially in the northern region from which the president originated. Whenever the regime lost ground militarily against the RPF, it reacted by organizing killings of Tutsi civilians on an exclusively ethnic basis.
The Arusha peace negotiations lasted three years, from 1991 to 1993, and were supported by opposition parties, namely the PSD, MDR, PL, PDC, and other smaller parties such as PDI or PSR. Before the dissolution of these parties in 1993 through Habyarimana's manoeuvres, they were convinced that the path of negotiations was the only possible way to solve the problem of war definitively. The Hutu Power movement pushed many members of opposition parties to adopt the extreme line.
On the one hand, after consultations between the PSD, MDR, and PL parties with the RPF, the MRND intensified its efforts to infiltrate and divide members of these parties. On the other hand, the MRND sought to ally with other smaller parties or create new ones to show that political parties were supporting it. It was at this time that the collaboration of the MRND with the CDR, PARERWA (Republican Party of Rwanda, created on January 20, 1992), PECO (Ecological Party, founded on November 30, 1991), and PADER (Rwandan Democratic Party, founded on January 20, 1992) was publicly announced. These parties issued numerous communiqués signed by their authorities condemning the Arusha peace negotiations: