Juvenal Habyarimana
Juvénal Habyarimana ruled Rwanda for twenty-one years, and the shooting down of his aircraft began the genocide. Born in 1937 in northern Rwanda to a Hutu family of some standing, he was educated at a seminary, studied medicine briefly in Congo, and joined the national guard as the Belgians withdrew. He rose to army chief of staff and minister of defence under Grégoire Kayibanda, and deposed him in a bloodless coup in July 1973, citing the violence against Tutsi that the regime had encouraged. He established a single-party state under the MRND, which every Rwandan was a member of from birth, and governed with a formal calm that attracted Western aid; Rwanda was called the Switzerland of Africa, and France, Belgium and international lenders supported him. The system was ethnically fixed. Identity cards recorded ethnicity, and quotas restricted Tutsi to about nine per cent of school places and public employment. Power was concentrated in the north-west among his wife's circle, the akazu. The coffee price collapsed in the late 1980s and the economy with it. The Rwandan Patriotic Front, formed by Tutsi refugees in Uganda, invaded in October 1990. The war ran for three years, accompanied by massacres of Tutsi civilians, the arming of Interahamwe militia, and the broadcasts of Radio Mille Collines. He signed the Arusha Accords in August 1993, agreeing to power-sharing, which the Hutu Power faction regarded as betrayal. On 6 April 1994 his aircraft was shot down over Kigali, killing him and the president of Burundi. Killing began within an hour, and some 800,000 people died in a hundred days.
- Lived: 1937 CE – 1994 CE
- Nationality: Rwandan
- Roles: head_of_state, military_leader
