To foreigners, the Genocide against the Tutsi lasted for 100 days, from April 7th to July 4th 1994.
But to Tutsi survivors, their relatives and to all Rwandans, the genocide lasted for thirty years.
The right timeline of the genocide against the Tutsi extends from 1st October 1959 to 24th October 1996, when Rwandan army invaded Zaire to repatriate willing civilians held hostage by genocide perpetrators and push the latter far from Rwandan borders to end their infiltrations.
Those who associate the genocide perpetrated against the Tutsi with the invasion of the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) in 1990, the liberation war that ensued for four years and the shooting of the plane carrying President Juvenal Habyarimana on the evening of April 7 of April 1994, only know part of the Rwandan history.
The Genocide against the Tutsi between April and July 1994 is simply what was recognized by the international community, as ruled by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) and approved by the United Nations’ resolution 2150.
The RPF war of liberation in 1990 was a reaction to three decades of systematic oppression, discrimination, deportation, forced marriages, rape, assassinations, ethnic cleansing and mass extermination of the Tutsi population.
The term ‘Genocide’ was used for the first time in Rwanda in 1964, when philosophers Jean Paul Sartre and Bertrand Russel, through the ‘Russel-Sartre tribunal for war crimes’, denouncing massacre of Tutsi.
On 23rd of December 1963, the Hutu population armed with machetes and spears went door to door, killing Tutsi families. Estimates of the massacres in Gikongoro and other parts of the country account for over 35,000 men, women and children.
Habyarimana (centre) and Kayibanda talk to unidentified colonial officer.
Then President Gregoire Kayibanda did two things that would seal the tragic fate of Tutsi in Rwanda for the next thirty years to come.
One: In the infamous speech in March 1964, Kayibanda responded to the genocide accusations with a warning: ‘assuming the impossible that you [Tutsi from exile] would capture Kigali. That would be the total and precipitated end of the Tutsi race.’ ‘Who is genocide?’ he asked repeatedly. Thereafter, his acolyte and Parmehutu ideologue Anasthase Makuza explains in a long interview to European journalists how Tutsi were worse than Belgian colonialists.
Two: Kayibanda declared blanket amnesty for all Hutu who had participated in pogroms, killed Tutsi, looted their property and burned down their houses. A Law of 20th May 1963 declared :
Art. 1. General and unconditional amnesty for all crimes committed during the social revolution in the period from 1st October 1959 to 1st July 1962 and which, due to their nature and their intent, the circumstances or motives that inspired them, remain within the framework of participation in the struggle of national liberation and thus bear a political character even if they constitute offences in positive law’
Art. 2 : ‘are excluded from benefiting the amnesty accorded by Article one of this law, offenses committed during the same period by persons who fought against the liberation of oppressed masses by the feudal-colonialist domination’.
This law effectively exonerated the killers from 1959 up to the independence in 1962, but condemned the pro-independence fighters. Mind you, Grégoire Kayibanda, Dominique Mbonyumutwa, Anasthase Makuza and their Parmehutu party were against Rwanda’s independence, as archives show.
The Parmehutu concept wasn’t really for the emancipation of Hutu people. It was a concept of subservience to the white man and opposing any African who resisted him.
Kayibanda its founder, was the personal assistant of notorious catholic priest André Perraudin – the real founder of Parmehutu and the mastermind behind the so-called ‘Hutu revolution’.
Hate against the Tutsi is the pillar upon which Kayibanda’s MDR was founded, the purpose of his twelve-year reign and the source of his downfall.
A small, short-sighted man, disciple of white fathers who bore an entrenched complex of inferiority - not towards the white fathers who enslaved him, but towards those who were agitating for the independence of his country.
The so-called Camarades de 5 Juillet who helped Habyarimana depose Kayibanda by military coup in 1973.
In the early sixties, his supporters held banners thanking Belgians for ‘nurturing’ them and said Rwanda didn’t need independence, then asked for their help to get rid of the Tutsi.
In preparation for future massacres, Tutsi families all over the country were rounded up and banished to inhospitable, arid areas to die of Tsetse flies.
Tutsi from ‘Ubufundu’ - ‘Ubunyambiriri’ in current Southern and Western provinces, who had survived pogroms of the 60s and failed to make it to exile, were ‘deported’ to Rukumberi in Eastern Province, while Tutsi from the North-Eastern regions were banished to Bugesera. Then followed their 30 years ordeal.
Noel Kambanda, a Genocide survivor explains: ‘Later in the early 80s, Juvenal Habyarimana resettled the ‘Abakiga’ (Hutus from the north) in nearby Sake and gave them water, electricity, schools, health centers, etc. There is no big distance between Sake and Rukumberi. But the people of Rukumberi used water from the lake for their survival. Rukumberi only received water and electricity after the genocide, under President Paul Kagame.
Rukumberi has many Tutsi families that were totally annihilated. Walking from the genocide memorial towards Lake Mugesera, you meet plaques with names of members of extinct families in abandoned plots and shrubs.’
The term Genocide was later evoked by Paul Dijoud, Director of African Affairs for then French President Francois Mitterrand, while meeting an RPF delegation in Paris in 1992. Dijoud repeated Kayibanda warning: ‘if you continue advancing your troops, you will not find any single one of your people left in Rwanda’.
For the last one month, a colleague and I toured Rwanda to research the progress of Unity and reconciliation. We were able to appreciate the magnitude of the Genocide beyond the 100 days in 1994.
In each area of the country, the Tutsi remember the Genocide differently. In Bugesera, most people lost their parents in 1992, in Rukumberi and Gikongoro, it dated back in the sixties and the seventies.
Others died at the hand of militias paid by Kayibanda to hunt and kill them in exile. Tutsi joined Museveni rebel movement in Uganda, Mulele and Che Guevara in Congo because they realized early they were never going to be accepted in Rwanda peacefully and that the UN was never going to help them.
On the theory of double Genocide: No such plan to exterminate Hutu was ever made. A genocide is typically planned by a small group of politicians, claiming to speak on behalf of majorities to exterminate a minority.
To avoid personal responsibility, they use a system of alienation, reward and blanket amnesty to make the masses participate. No such plan was ever made by a Tutsi elite in Rwandan history, that’s simply impossible because there was never such movement.
As a minority, the Tutsi have always strived in nationalistic and inclusive politics: The Rwandan National Union (UNAR), a royalist movement of the 60s and its military wing - the Inyenzi, were headed by Francois Rukeba – a prominent Hutu and a nationalist hero.
UNAR’s Secretary General, Michel Rwagasana, was another Hutu and cousin to then president Gregoire Kayibanda. After independence, Rwagasana stayed in Rwanda to represent UNAR in the post-independence parliament and was very vocal in opposing Parmehutu’s genocidal politics.
Rwagasana was killed in the early genocide against the Tutsi in December 1963 with 27 of his companions.
Although Hon. Rwagasana was Hutu, we honour him as a victim of the genocide against the Tutsi, because he and his colleagues were killed, not for their ethnicity, but for their nationalist ideals, seen by Kayibanda, Makuza & Co as an obstacle to their genocide project.
As we commemorate the genocide against the Tutsi this month, we will honour, among our national heroes, Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana, another Hutu who was killed for her progressive ideas of opposing the genocide, we will honour Students of Nyange, whom, when asked to divide themselves along ethnic lines, responded: we are all Rwandans. This really is the meaning of a Genocide commemoration.
Supporters of Gregoire Kayibanda hold placards pronouncing support for Belgian colonial masters.
The RPF, was equally headed by Colonel Alexis Kanyarengwe, a Hutu - relative of Habyarimana and member of the so-called ‘Camarades du 5 Juillet’, who helped the latter access power through a military coup in 1973.
In its ideals: the nine founding pillars, in its composition: the political leadership and in its deeds, the RPF was never built on any ethnic or any group.
The RPF won a complete victory and could have ruled alone, but it chose to share power with political parties found in Rwanda and unilaterally fulfilled Arusha agreements, which had been betrayed by the MRND.
The RPF was the first political movement since independence to bring back politics of unity of Rwandans.
During the war of liberation, killing non-combatants was prohibited in the RPA. RPA soldiers frequently found their families exterminated and their houses destroyed.
However they found Hutu neighbours wearing clothes of their relatives, listening to their father’s radio, riding their brother’s bicycle or sitting on their family furniture.
When they asked, neighbours said they didn’t know what happened.
Some of them lost it and committed revenge on the neighbours. These soldiers were court martialled by the RPA hierarchy and sentenced to death by firing squad to set an example to others and avoid a circle of violence among Rwandans.
This is documented in Romeo Dallaire’s book, Shakes Hands with the Devil.
The RPF never had prisoners of war. Every soldier who was captured on the battlefield or liberated from prison, was sensitised to the nationalistic goals of the RPF and recruited in its army, with their ranks.
General James Kabarebe jokingly recalls: ‘Colonel Lizinde was a bully. Even after we freed him from prison, he started bullying us. We called him Afande.’ Theoneste Lizinde was another Habyarimana relative and a ‘Camarades du 5 Juillet’.
The Rwanda Patriotic Army (RPA), which had stopped the genocide and vanquished, chose to integrate soldiers of the defeated regime. Already in January 1995, more than a thousand were reintegrated with their ranks and immediately assigned key positions, such as chief of the Gendarmerie and deputy chief of staff.
In the following years, they would be frequently appointed as ministers of defence. Those who did not want to go back in the army were demobilised, paid their package and reintegrated into the community. This program continues to date, benefiting militiamen of the FDLR.
Over 100,000 men and women have been reintegrated in this way and many among them have since been demobilised and reintegrated in society.
Today’s Rwanda does not discriminate against tribe, ethnicity or origin, let me illustrate: children of Maj. Gen. Pacifique Ntawunguka, the current FDLR militia, sworn to continuing the genocide project, are living in Rwanda, studying on prestigious government scholarships to pursue undergraduate in Rwanda and post-graduate education in China and in Ghana respectively.
No one told them that ‘Rwanda is full, that the remaining space is for wild animals which the country needs to promote tourism; that they cannot come back to their mother land.’ – as Habyarimana once said to Rwandans who were in exile.
On the contrary, today’s Rwanda encourages everyone to return home.
The RPF in its ideals, its being and its doing, has never and will never be anywhere near MRND, MDR or CDR. Impossible. Why? Because no one in Rwanda feels inferior, for the party is in the business of empowering the people, calling them to lift up each other and lift up the nation.
There are still Rwandans from the north in government, only this time, they work to lift up Rwandans from the south – and vice-versa. There are still Hutus in government, only this time they work to lift up Tutsi and vice-versa. It is, after all, a new Rwanda.
In conclusion, I am not against a ‘pro-Hutu’ movement per see, even I am pro-Hutu, in the sense that I wake up every morning to strive for the betterment of my fellow countrymen; All of them without distinction.
What I am against is an ‘anti-Tutsi’ or an ‘anti-Hutu’ ideology, to quote Nelson Mandela: "I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination... It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”
The views in this article are of the author.