The death of President Melchior Ndadaye in 1993 provided a profound catalyst for the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. It created an environment in which extremist Hutu leaders exploited fears of ethnic retaliation, allowing the genocidal machinery to evolve from isolated massacres into systematic, state-sponsored extermination.

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Alison Des Forges, an American historian and human rights activist, remarked that the genocide machine found favourable ground for its maturation in the Burundi crisis. The fervour of the Hutu Power movement, whose ideology served as an intellectual stepping stone to genocide, gained greater credibility. The Burundi crisis helped win over extremist factions of the MDR, PL, and PSD parties to the MRND/CDR coalition. The emotional shock caused by the death of the Burundian president, combined with the presence of Burundian refugees in Rwanda, was exploited to justify the extermination of the Tutsi.

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This extermination was presented as the ultimate means of ensuring Hutu survival. Ndadaye’s death made it possible to portray the extermination of the Tutsi as offering a double advantage. On the one hand, it served as a warning to Rwandan Hutu about what extremists described as a destructive Tutsi invasion. The narrative alleging RPF complicity in the death of the Burundian president helped foster acceptance of the idea of large-scale revenge.

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For example, a journalist writing for Kangura, a Hutu extremist newspaper, called on senior officers of the Rwandan Armed Forces to support the Rwandan people in the revenge they were preparing to carry out against the RPF because of its supposed crimes against Rwandans. "If Ndadaye had not been killed, the Tutsi could have continued hiding their game indefinitely. The Tutsi shall pay for the death of President Ndadaye until the end of time, whether they like it or not. Officers, it is with great sorrow that we inform you of the atrocities that RPF fighters are preparing against the people as part of their project to exterminate innocent people. Officers of the Rwandan army, I would like to make my contribution by asking you not to listen to this government, but instead to help the population, among whom are your parents and brothers.”

Exaggerated reports published by certain so-called independent newspapers, together with inflammatory broadcasts by RTLM radio linking the RPF to the death of the Burundian president, shattered the hopes that some Rwandans had placed in the Arusha Accord. Gradually, the logic of genocide prevailed over the logic of dialogue and democratic change. The Burundi crisis therefore provided genocide ideologues with an opportunity to portray the differences between Hutu and Tutsi as irreconcilable.

An examination of other genocidal situations shows that portraying an entire national or ethnic group as an enemy is often part of an effort to justify violence against that group in advance. Jacques Sémelin, a prominent French historian and political scientist, explains that accusations of malicious intent or treachery create an imaginary framework in which persecution of a targeted group is legitimised before it occurs. He further argues that such analyses, based on radical identity assertions, reinforce divisions such as Jews versus Aryans or Hutu versus Tutsi.

These narratives legitimise confrontation between "them” and "us.” It is the identity of the "other” that the "us” portrays as threatening.

In such a framework, there is no room for negotiation because the differences are presented as permanent and insurmountable.

The writer is a historian based in Kigali.