Several efforts had been made for Rwandans who had been persecuted and forced into exile since 1959, to return home peacefully but the governments at the time, particularly that of Juvenal Habyarimana, were adamant. Negotiations did not yield anything.
"Rwanda is small and full. There is no room for people who are outside,” Habyarimana often argued in meetings or retorted when told by leaders who tried to persuade him to allow refugees to return home, as signs of impatience began to show.
On several occasions, he was warned that soon, the exiles might return by force. Perhaps those who were not there at the time, especially the young generations, might wonder why men and women had to pick up guns to fight their way back home, yet other peaceful options would have worked.
Tito Rutaremara, one of the senior politicians in RPF Inkotanyi, who was directly involved in political activities, including the Arusha Peace Talks, says that for nearly three decades, there had been attempts to talk to the governments in Rwanda at the time to allow people to return peacefully.
Born in 1944 in Gatsibo, in what used to be known as Kibungo territory, in the current Eastern Province, Rutaremara’s family fled the country between 1959 and early 1960’s when Tutsis were being persecuted and hounded out of their properties because of who they were.
Rutaremara, who studied primary school in Gatsibo was in his second year of secondary school at St. Andre College when he fled to Uganda, where he completed his high school before partly joining university and later relocating to Europe to complete university education.
"When we became refugees between 1959 and 1967 with our parents, we hoped that we would be coming back to Rwanda soon. In fact, we spent more than five to six years, hoping that we would come back,” recalls Rutaremara.
By the end of 1967, the first attempt by refugees to return, then known as ‘Inyenzi’ resistance, failed and many of the Rwandan refugees gave up and resorted to settling and finding life in their host countries.
"There was no hope. People started going around looking for small jobs, working in plantations of the Ugandans while young ladies went to work in the homes of rich people in Uganda,” Rutaremara said, adding that during those desperate times, many Rwandans became part of the ‘proletarian lumpen’ in Kampala and other towns of Uganda.
It was a tough period but many of the Rwandan refugees tried to get schools and study. Those who had a chance went up to university and it was around that time that the ‘renaissance’ started.
Searching for identity
"The renaissance to really think of Rwanda started in the 70s. It started with cultural renaissance, people started with dancing, doing poems, listening to old people telling stories of how Rwanda was, and so on,”
"That was a revival of young people trying to understand where they came from. At the time, there were so many groups,” Rutaremara says, pointing out that Rwandan refugees were in different groups scattered across the world.
The groups were mainly formed by people, depending on where they came from, where they live or the sectors they were working in.
However, there was a group of ‘critical thinkers’, known as ‘groupe de reflection’, who often discussed revolutionary ideas and shared them with the many groups of refugees in different countries.
It was the groups in Uganda and Kenya which made the first step in 1979 to start what was known as the Rwandese Alliance for National Unity (RANU) which started as a platform to discuss the problems Rwanda was facing at the time and try to find solutions.
RANU went on to have structures, through which people met and discussed different initiatives. In 1981, the National Resistance Movement (NRA) launched a struggle to liberate Uganda and members of RANU joined in to support.
Among the first 27 individuals who were led by Yoweri Kaguta Museveni, who captured power in 1986, included two Rwandan senior officers, Fred Rwigema and Paul Kagame. Later, many Rwandan refugees in Uganda and Kenya would join the Ugandan struggle.
"They came in to help liberate Uganda and later on, thought of going back to liberate their own country,” Rutaremara told The New Times, adding that joining the Ugandan struggle was also mainly because Rwandans were being persecuted by the Ugandan regime at the time led by Milton Obote.
It was a difficult period as Obote’s forces and officials hounded Rwandans out of Uganda, ransacking their properties yet at the same time they couldn’t return to Rwanda because Habyarimana’s government had locked the doors on them.
"In fact, a number of people committed suicide -they killed themselves because they could not go back to Rwanda and on the other hand, they had people chasing them out of Uganda,” Rutaremara says.
The young people who could not stand the persecution, decided to join the NRA movement, which started in the area where many Rwandan refugees lived. The plan was to liberate Uganda and Rwanda after.
They included children of ‘forgotten’ Rwandan refugees who had moved to neighbouring countries, even before 1959, including economic and non-economic refugees such as those who had been persecuted before and they left.
At the time, RANU used to convene a congress every two years and in 1985, a congress was convened to see how the movement could be turned into a dynamic political organisation, now that there was impetus.
Rutaremara, who at the time was in Europe but still a member of RANU, says that the young people who joined the NRA war and many who were studying in universities had started mobilising themselves and it reignited hope that something can be done.
Uganda first, Rwanda next
When the NRA captured Kampala in January 1986, RANU asked some people to come to Uganda to think of how Rwandans in exile can create a dynamic and pro-people mass movement with a clear ideology, which is ready to affront the problems Rwanda was facing at the time.
That is how the idea of the Rwandese Patriotic Front (RPF-Inkotanyi) came about. It was an idea they harboured from the start -to have an organisation that includes the masses, as opposed to a political party, which explains why RPF is referred to as ‘Umuryango’ (a family), as opposed to ‘Ishyaka’, a political party.
Rutaremara says that the reasoning behind it was that without the masses, the movement would not serve the intended purpose because it is the people from which the strength comes from.
"A mass movement means that you need people who will be with you when you start a struggle, people who will give you vital resources, people who will feed you and help you to look for money, food and ammunition for the people who are fighting,” Rutaremara observed.
RPF is born
It was in December 1987, from 25th to 27th, that the small group of four people, including himself, who had been assigned with the task of seeing how RANU can be turned into a dynamic political movement, presented their findings and propositions.
Among other things, a political program, operation guidelines, Code of Conduct and the new name RPF Inkotanyi, were adopted by a big congress attended by Rwandans from different countries in the region and across the globe, who shared a common cause.
"It was that time, in December 1987 when RPF was born. We put the structures, then elected new members, including civilians and members of military who had been fighting, which is how the late Maj. Gen Rwigema came in as the leader of the movement.
A group of Political cadres to lead the mobilisation efforts was put in place and they went around sensitizing the masses on the ideology of RPF and why it was created. It was much more than mobilising -it involved educating people.
They went around different countries, including clandestinely in Rwanda, mobilising people to join the political movement. Cells, chapters and brigades were created -women, youth and well-wishers came together under one organisation.
With the negotiations to return peacefully having failed, it took nearly three years to mobilise and tell people why the last option was to return home by force. Rutaremara says it takes time to make people understand an ideology, and later on support it. Same applies to recruitment and training of a force.
"We started on October 1, 1990. Because we didn’t have any other means, we had to come and liberate by force,” he said, adding that if they had a chance, they would have used other means such as demonstrations, but all those hadn’t worked.
When the war started, Belgium, France and Zaire, who were friends of Habyarimana, came in to support the Rwandan government forces on the frontline.
"We had a problem, because the second day, the head of army, who was even the chairman, died. We had problems fighting that side of Umutara-Kagera area,” he says, adding that in the next 10 days, two more commanders; Major Peter Bayingana and Major Chris Bunyenyezi were also killed in the battle.
From that point, Rutaremara says things went from bad to worse- people were fighting with no leadership or coordination and there was no system to bring in ammunition, food and other logistics needed to sustain a war.
It was at that time that Kagame, who was in the U.S pursuing military studies, returned to take up the leadership of the struggle, starting with a strategic retreat to change the attack line, shifting the frontline to the mountainous northern part of the country and also changed the methods of fighting.
At first the change of climate and terrain as well as the short transition period had implications on the fighters but they persisted. Kagame embarked on reorganizing the military structures, imparting discipline in the fighters and most importantly, restored morale.
"The army became strong again,” Rutaremara says, adding that they moved from defending their positions to pushing back the enemy when Kagame took over the reins.
"We came from weakness to strength,” Rutaremara says, emphasizing how Kagame rescued the situation.
How peace talks came about
With the war dragging on and Zairean soldiers caught misbehaving, looting and raping women, painting a bad picture from the Belgians who were fighting alongside them. The Belgian population wanted out of the ‘ugly war’ and they pressured their government to pull out.
Cornered, the Belgian Ministers of Defence and Foreign Affairs travelled to Africa to look for a way out. Rutaremara says they went to Tanzania and convinced Ali Hassan Mwinyi, the President of Tanzania at the time, to call Uganda’s Museveni to meet Habyarimana for peace talks.
The idea was to put in place a ceasefire, which would create a window for the Belgians to leave, without appearing like they had been defeated and are running away from war.
"Of course we didn’t have a ceasefire,” Rutaremara said, adding however that Mwinyi thought the idea could be pushed further and went to the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), which later became the African Union (AU) and convinced Heads of States to give negotiations a chance.
Negotiations resumed again, this time bringing in the United Nations and the U.S as observers, as well as other invested countries. It was agreed that this time RPF is invited to the negotiating table, to have a real ceasefire in place.
The then president of Zaire, Mobutu Sese Seko was made the facilitator of the negotiations which took place in Goma, Gbadolite and Kinshasa and eventually in N'sele, where a Ceasefire Agreement was signed on July 12, 1992, between the Government of Habyarimana, represented by the Minister of Defence at the time, Casmir Bizimungu, and RPF, represented by Kagame, who was the commander.
Rutaremara says that regardless of the ceasefire, Habyarimana’s forces went on fighting, showing no interest in peace. In between, France wanted to hijack the talks, moving them to Paris, but after the first meeting, RPF requested for a change of venue, to a more neutral city on the African continent, since France was already partisan in the conflict.
Arusha was chosen as the new location for negotiations to resume, bringing to the table a number of issues to be discussed including rule of law, power sharing between political parties, composition of the army and the return of refugees, among other issues. The agreement was signed in August 1983.
A reluctant Habyarimana
By November, the government of Habyarimana was still dragging its feet to implement its part of the pact, including allowing RPF Inkotanyi and other involved parties to join in forming a unity government as stipulated in the Arusha Accords.
It took the intervention of the United Nations Mission in Rwanda (UNAMIR) to move the RPF leaders who were supposed to join the cabinet and an army of 300 soldiers to protect them, from Mulindi to Kigali.
"Again, we had a problem because when we were negotiating, they went on killing people in Bugesera and in Bigogwe, among other places, until we said we are negotiating for peace and you go on killing? We attacked again and advanced,” Rutaremara says.
When they reached Shyorongi, almost getting to Kigali, more negotiations were called as pressure mounted on Habyarimana and eventually he accepted to sign and form a government in April 1994 but his plane would eventually be shot down by Hutu extremists on April 6 as he returned from the negotiations.
On all occasions, Rutaremara says that Habyarimana proved that he wasn’t signing because he wanted peace, but rather he had noticed that the RPF was strong, however much he tried he couldn’t defeat it, even with the support of friends.
"He never wanted the negotiations, that is why they wanted people to help them defeat us. They found that it was near impossible. People were telling them, if you don't negotiate, they will take Kigali,” he said.
Back home, he was under pressure from political parties which were protesting against his bad leadership and pushed him to sign. He got more pressure from his friends who warned him that the RPF would capture the whole country if he didn’t negotiate while he still had some level of control.
Rutaremara believes that had Habyarimana committed to the provisions, formed a unity government, met all the provisions and put in place functional institutions, perhaps the outcome would have been different.
However, he also faced a challenge because internally, some members of his government did not want him to sign, hellbent on implementing the genocide and soon as he signed, they took him out by downing his plane.
In the wake of Habyarimana’s death, the same people quickly isolated RPF, mobilised themselves and put in place military committees and later the interim government, cutting off any form of communication with RPF.
"We asked them that according to the Arusha agreement, you are supposed to call a joint committee but now you called only yourselves, they didn’t say anything,”
"Secondly, they put in place an interim government with civilians and members of the military, which was not part of the Arusha Agreement. We asked them "why don't you follow the Arusha agreement?” Rutaremara adds.
According to the seasoned politician, all these actions showed that the government was no longer interested in any agreement at all and the killings targeting Tutsi were now becoming widespread.
Moving in to stop the Genocide
The next thing RPF Inkotanyi did was asking them to stop committing genocide and even wrote to the International Community to intervene and exert more pressure on the government or it would resume the war, this time to stop the Genocide themselves.
"Of course, there was no reply nationally and internationally and that is when the commander Kagame said that now we are going to start a war to stop the Genocide, if the international community doesn’t want to do it,” he says.
What followed was not your ordinary war but rather a race against time because people were being killed in their numbers by the government forces who had already technically lost the war as well as Interahamwe militia who had been mobilised to kill Tutsis.
As someone who was mostly on the political side of things, Rutaremara says that there was a lot of manoeuvring and negotiations needed to go around some of the most difficult challenges and obstacles, but President Kagame’s strategic thinking, decision-making and vision always came in the most difficult of circumstances.
Even as the negotiations went on, RPF knew it was dealing with dishonest people, who on one hand are negotiating peace, but behind the scenes they are making lists of people to be killed and training the militia to carry out the massacres.
Rutaremara says that even as they joined, the plan was to make sure that they were now inside the country, and with a fair share of cabinet seats and a percentage in the army, they would stop the killings from within, but they never trusted the Rwandan government.
"We knew it would have been easier to fight from inside, rather than from outside,” recalls Rutaremara, adding that their fears were confirmed when the extremists went ahead to kill Habyarimana because they were not keen on sharing power or allowing RPF to get on board.
It was only the 600 who were in Kigali, surrounded by many forces, when Habyarimana was killed, while the majority of the RPF members were still up north. It took 100 days for RPF forces to push against all odds and drive out the genocidaires and liberate the country on July 4, 1994.
The aftermath and a labyrinth of challenges
After stopping the Genocide, the RPF established a government which immediately inherited the many challenges, the devastation, the orphans, the sick and injured the returnees, so on and so forth.
It was a complicated situation that even those who did not participate in the genocide or were not targeted also needed security because they were vulnerable.
Onboarding people into a new system, winning minds and hearts and convincing the millions who had fled the country to return were humongous tasks the RPF immediately took on.
It involved returning them, reconciling them with those they wronged, ensuring justice for the victims, resettling and reintegrating those who had returned while at the same time ensuring that the country has functional institutions. All this involved a different kind of mobilisation for the cadres.
There was a dire need to mobilise people to come from different countries and take up commerce and trade, bringing in what was needed to restart the country because life had completely stopped.
"Life had stopped completely. There was no commerce. We brought them quickly to come and feel the gaps in different areas, including trade,” he says, adding that the government assured them of security, even when remnants of the defeated forces were still causing havoc in certain parts of the country.
Bringing all people together was another step of the liberation struggle, each bringing their strength to get the country back on track. The situation was so dire that the RPF had to put in incentives for business people to start trading and doing business.
Cadres like him continued with the job of convincing Rwandans wherever they were in different parts of the world to return home and be part of the rebuilding process.
Rutaremara says that even after liberating the country, RPF continued with implementing what had been agreed in the Arusha accords, integrated more than 1,500 former members of the defeated FAR, restoring them with their status.
"If you were a general, you remained a general and the functions remained the same. If you headed a division or unit, you would be reinstated in the same function,” Rutaremara said, pointing out that it was one of the major steps towards unity and reconciliation.
"They were very well integrated. The second step was to bring political parties together and said, come let’s build institutions together, except MDR and MRND, but even their member who did not commit a genocide were integrated,” he adds.
Among them were diplomats who were abroad and were called back to come and be part of power sharing under the unity government. Many were posted to different positions or were sent to Parliament to represent their parties.
Rutaremara says that onboarding other parties and members of the armed forces as well as ensuring full restoration of security and stability were the biggest challenges the RPF started with.
The second priority was to bring back all people inside the country, unite them and provide them with urgent basic needs, including medicine, food and water. Some of the achievements at the time, including repatriation of such a high number of refugees without any support from outside.
Many who had fled to Burundi and Tanzania were returned peacefully but Zaire, which allied with Habyarimana’s government and had the protection of the French government at the time, turned down efforts to repatriate the over 1.2 million refugees.
"We had to go there and bring them to Rwanda,” Rutaremara said, referring to the undertaking as one of the hard decisions RPF Inkotanyi had to make, while at the same time rebuilding the socioeconomic lives of the people and restoring institutions.
Liberation happens in phases
Reflecting on the past years with Rwanda under RPF, Rutaremara says the actual liberation started in the post-Genocide era, where the mission was to create a united Rwanda where people see themselves as one and putting in place the basics, given the dire need that was there at the time.
It starts with an idea, preparation and then goes to removing a dictator or bad government, then inculcating the ideology and bringing people together to rebuild.
"Liberation happens in steps and phases,” he says, adding that in Rwanda’s case what followed was for the people to sit together, in the famous Urugwiro meetings, to share ideas and put in place a foundation on which a united country would be built.
It involves putting in place a constitution that suits all people, laws, a justice system, as well as economic, health and education policies, with the aim of improving the wellbeing of the people.
For Rutaremara, between 1994 and 2006, that’s what was being done was building the foundation phase- putting in place institutions, systems, laws and policies that guide the course of action.
"When you reach that phase, you now have a vision, in our case Vision 2020, where you say we are from the lowest of lows, lets now drive towards at least becoming a higher middle-income country,” Rutaremara said, adding that it is that vision that fed into Vision 2050, but it all starts with a vision and a plan.
"That Journey is another step of liberating our people,” he said adding that it continues to a level when all Rwandans are proud to be Rwandans and they have all the basic needs they need, including access to education, healthcare, pension and other services that ease their lives.
When Rwanda gets to that point, Rutaremara says that’s when it can be said that Rwandans have been liberated, otherwise the journey continues.
"Until we get there, we are still on the move. It is still a journey, of course in some areas we have achieved high results and in others, not yet, but we are yet to get where we want to be,” observes Rutaremara.
In terms of achievements, he says RPF has been right on track on the many milestones it set for itself, regardless of challenges, relating for example to resources, but over and above, it is fair to say RPF outdid itself.
"We reached the phases of liberation as we wanted them,” he said, adding that on average, RPF overshoot well above the expectations, citing unity as one of the key drivers, because people united to work for a common destiny.
He also said the other aspect was the fact that many people were still energetic and willing to put in work in whatever they did but most importantly, in Kagame, RPF had a visionary leader at the help, who provided the guidance.
"We have got a very good visionary leader who sees further than anyone can see, who knows how to organise and mobilise people,” Rutaremara said, adding that President Kagame’s influence and international reach which RPF leveraged.
Additionally, Rutaremara says that ICT has been a key driver for growth and development, easing the way of doing things, especially service delivery and having a young population keen to exploit its benefits has been a game changer.
Investing in energy, health, education and modernising agriculture are some of the deliberate actions Rutaremara says RPF has taken to stimulate socioeconomic development and the wellbeing of people.
As such, Rutaremara says that RPF cannot allow such progress to be interrupted, mainly because the country now has reached a phase where the gains have to be multiplied and consolidated and Rwandans have decided that Paul Kagame is the right person they need to continue doing that.
Rutaremara, who is the Chairperson of Rwanda Elders Advisory Forum (REAF) says that RPF will ensure continuity, empowering young people to take over, until Rwandans are fully liberated, but as of today, work continues.