When individuals frantically manufacture ceaseless falsehoods around a single event, it is usually because the truth is too dangerous for them to acknowledge. Truth has a persistent practice: it endures noise, propaganda, forged narratives, and rehearsed outrage. Falsehoods, on the other hand, require constant maintenance. They must be repeated, expanded, reinforced, and reinvented whenever paradoxes appear. And nowhere is this more disturbingly visible than in the mythology constructed around the death of President Juvénal Habyarimana on April 6, 1994. For more than thirty years, an industry of trickery has attempted to transform one of the most enlightening criminalities in modern African history into a disordered mystery whose purpose is not to expose truth but to bury it. The result has been a straggling sedition culture built by genocidaires, genocide deniers, ex-FAR propagandists, FDLR ideologues, and professional anti-RPF campaigners who reprocess contradictions as though replication alone can create credibility. But the deceits themselves point straight toward the guilty. The death of Habyarimana did not create the genocide against the Tutsi. The genocide had already been prepared politically, militarily, ideologically, and psychologically long before April 6, 1994. The assassination simply served as the detonation switch for a machinery of extermination that had already been assembled, tested, armed, and loaded. The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) understood this reality clearly. In Prosecutor v. Ferdinand Nahimana, Jean-Bosco Barayagwiza and Hassan Ngeze (ICTR-99-52-T) judgement of December 3, 2023, the Trial Chamber stated in paragraph 953: “The Defence contends that the downing of the President’s plane and the death of President Habyarimana precipitated the killing of innocent Tutsi civilians. The Chamber accepts that this moment in time served as a trigger for the events that followed. That is evident. But if the downing of the plane was the trigger, then RTLM, Kangura and CDR were the bullets in the gun. The trigger had such a deadly impact because the gun was loaded.” That statement should everlastingly put an end to the fantasy that genocide somehow developed spontaneously from anguish or chaos. Guns do not load themselves. Radio propaganda does not develop accidentally. Death lists are not improvised instantaneously. Militias are not trained for years because of a hasty emotional reaction. The gun was loaded long before April 6. And the people who loaded it had every reason to eliminate Habyarimana once he became problematic to their final project. The great absurdity of genocide denial tales is that they ask the world to believe that the very people who were politically and militarily advancing through the Arusha Accords suddenly decided to assassinate the president in a way guaranteed to unleash the extermination of the Tutsi population they claimed to defend. The logic collapses immediately under scrutiny. Who benefited from the assassination? That is the question serious investigators ask. Not propagandists. Not conspiracy merchants. Not half-baked professional anti-RPF fantasists. There were many more who loaded the gun. Among them, the Habyarimana’s own family and the military leadership who made sure they created a situation to justify the Tutsi slaughter. The fanatics surrounding Habyarimana had openly opposed the Arusha process. They viewed power-sharing as betrayal. The Coalition pour la Défense de la République (CDR), Kangura polemicists, RTLM broadcasters, extremist officers in the FAR, and members of the Akazu had spent years preparing the population psychologically for extermination. The genocide was not a reaction but a program. The shooting of Habyarimana provided the justification they needed to start it. And however, instead of opposing this reality, the planners and defenders of genocide produced an avalanche of more and more ridiculous stories. Every few years a new “revelation” appears, usually from the same circles: former FAR officers, FDLR propagandists, genocide deniers, or members of the Habyarimana family. Fabrications from mother and son One of the most ludicrous stories concerns Jacques Roger Booh-Booh, the Special Representative of the United Nations Secretary-General in Rwanda. According to Jean Luc Habyarimana, the youngest son of President Habyarimana, Booh-Booh personally delivered a message from Paul Kagame to his father on April 3, 1994. Speaking on an online radio broadcast on April 6, 2019—exactly twenty-five years after the killing—Jean Luc claimed that he heard Booh-Booh tell his father: “Tell President Habyarimana that I’m going to kill him.” The interviewer, Serge Ndayizeye, said this was the first time such a story had emerged. It was not. The story had already appeared decades earlier in genocidaire circles. In particular, from Jean-Luc’s mother, Agathe Kanziga. Jean Kambanda—the interim Prime Minister of the genocidal government who later pleaded guilty before the ICTR—referenced the same claim in his manuscript titled: Rwanda face à l’Apocalypse de 1994. The manuscript was recovered from ICTR archives, which they got after Kambanda’s arrest in Nairobi in 1997. Kambanda cited Jeune Afrique No. 1738-1739 of April 28 to May 15, 1994, quoting Agathe Kanziga Habyarimana, the widow of the president. According to the text: “On Easter Sunday, three days before the tragedy, we had invited a senior United Nations official to share our family meal. This person told my husband, and repeated it three times before our close circle: ‘Paul Kagame has instructed me to personally warn you that he will kill you and that he will use every possible means to do so.’” Kambanda then added: “According to my investigations, this person would be none other than Roger Booh-Booh.” This is where propaganda sometimes becomes comedy. The story is so irrational that it falls and fails under minimal examination. Let us reflect what Agathe and her son are asking the world to believe. One, that the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) leader, Paul Kagame—a well-organized and strategic military commander—would announce in advance his intention to assassinate a head of state. Two, that he would choose to communicate this through the United Nations SG representative responsible for supervising the peace process. Three, that Jacques Roger Booh-Booh, whose duty was to maintain peace and report threats to the United Nations, would receive such information and simply act as a messenger instead of immediately informing UN headquarters in New York. Four, that after receiving such a warning, Habyarimana and his security apparatus did totally nothing meaningful to prevent the assassination. And lastly, Booh-Booh himself never publicly confirmed such an extraordinary event. This is not just implausible—it is intellectually insulting. If Booh-Booh truly received a direct assassination warning from Kagame, it would have instantly triggered an international diplomatic crisis. It would have been, necessarily—communicated to UN headquarters, foreign embassies based in Kigali, military intelligence services, and allied governments. Logically, unusual assertions require extraordinary evidence. So far, no evidence exists outside circles directly tied to genocidal enterprise. Not even notorious anti-RPF and pro-genocidaires like Judi Rever, Keith Harmon Snow, Peter Erlinder, Charles Onana, Ann Garrison or Father Serge Desouter have seriously attempted to use this story. That alone tells us something significant. Even professional conspiracy theorists understand how absurd it sounds. The story, which looks like an ideological incest—exists only among Agathe Kanziga, Jean Luc Habyarimana, ex-FAR documents, FDLR narratives, and former extremist officers. The same circles keep repeating the same fantasy to each other. But the lies become even more revealing when examined alongside the broader atmosphere of foreknowledge surrounding Habyarimana’s death. Because many people around the regime appeared to know something terrible was coming. Jean Kambanda’s manuscript contains another extraordinary claim. He says, President Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire allegedly cancelled his trip to Dar es Salaam and reportedly telephoned Habyarimana to dissuade him from traveling because he had been warned of danger. According to Kambanda, Mobutu had supposedly received information from “a very high-ranking figure at the Élysée Palace.” Kambanda further introduced yet another weird assertion involving the alleged suicide of a senior Élysée official after the attack. The genocidaire Kambanda, never clarified where or when this occurred. Then there was the claim by Maître Luc De Temmerman, lawyer for the Habyarimana family, who reportedly stated in La Libre Belgique on August 24, 1994 that the former Belgian Foreign Minister knew “something was going to happen” and had been warned twice. What are we to make of all this? At minimum, it demonstrates that multiple actors around the regime either possessed fragments of information, feared an impending catastrophe, or later attempted to manufacture retroactive myths of foreknowledge. But the utmost illuminating detail is this: despite all these alleged warnings, nobody effectively prevented the assassination. Why? Because the people with the greatest ability to protect Habyarimana were inside his own system. The Kanombe military airport area was not controlled by the RPF. The people closest to Habyarimana— the FAR and Presidential Guard, controlled the security perimeter. And yet the assassination succeeded perfectly in producing precisely the political outcome genocidaires desired: immediate mass extermination. That is not a coincidence. The premeditation becomes even clearer when examining extremist propaganda before April 6. The infamous Kangura No. 53, published in December 1993, predicted Habyarimana’s death by assassination in March 1994. Pause and consider the insanity of this. A publication aligned with Hutu-power ideology openly predicts the killing of the head of state months in advance, yet no serious crackdown follows. No emergency restructuring of presidential security occurs. No aggressive investigation dismantles alleged assassination networks. Instead, the regime continues functioning as though prophecy has become standard journalism. How does a regime newspaper casually predict the violent death of the president without causing massive alarm? The reason is simple. Those within extremist circles already understood the direction events were moving. Similarly, RTLM broadcasts on April 3, 1994 announced that a “small event” would soon occur and ominously referred to fierce fighting expected on April 7 and 8. What precisely was this “small event”? The shooting of Habyarimana. And what followed immediately afterward? The genocide against the Tutsi. Roadblocks appeared almost instantly. Assassination lists were activated. Politicians against the genocidal project were murdered methodically. The Presidential Guard moved with frightening efficacy. The Interahamwe and Impuzamugambi militias deployed quickly. This was not spontaneous combustion. It looked like the execution of a prepared operational plan. Enter the ex-FAR’s “Truth” Yet ex-FAR documents later attempted to create the illusion that they had been heroically uncovering RPF plots for months. The French 134-page document titled Contribution of the FAR to the Search for Truth about the Rwandan Tragedy – The October 1990 War and the April 1994 Catastrophe, later adopted by the FDLR in 2001, reads less like serious intelligence analysis and more like paranoid fiction stitched together after the fact. The ex-FAR document is also available in English as translated by ICTR—as Exhibit No. DK 81B tendered on 23 September 2004 in Case No. ICTR -98-41-T. According to these narratives, virtually every week brought another alleged RPF plot to assassinate Habyarimana. On November 21, 1993, military intelligence supposedly discovered an RPF infiltration plan to kidnap or kill the president. On January 22, 1994, an alleged letter from someone named “Zubere” supposedly discussed the need for 100 disguised soldiers in Kigali. On January 29, the RPF allegedly decided to kill or capture Habyarimana. On February 25, Faustin Twagiramungu supposedly planned ethnic unrest with the RPF. On February 26, after the assassinations of Félicien Gatabazi and Martin Bucyana, the RPF allegedly intensified plans because society had not divided enough. On March 19, 1994, Colonel Aloys Ntiwiragabo later claimed that he met RPA officers Colonel Stanislas Biseruka and Lieutenant-Colonel Caesar Kayizari—who, privately informed him that Habyarimana “had to be eliminated.” Col. Ntiwiragabo, at the time was FAR's Head of Military Intelligence. Then on April 2, ex-FAR allegedly received intelligence that civilians, FAR officers, and MRND leaders would be killed between April 3 and 9. Notice the pattern. Every failed prediction becomes retroactively useful after the assassination. The accumulation of allegations creates the illusion of inevitability. But serious intelligence does not work this way. If FAR intelligence possessed such astonishingly precise information over many months, why was Habyarimana not protected effectively? Why was the threat not neutralized? Why did the assassination occur anyway? And, why did every so-called warning conveniently support the political narrative genocidaires wanted after the genocide started? The answer is upsetting. These “intelligence reports” function less as evidence of RPF guilt and more as evidence that Hutu-power circles were constructing a tactical mythology to explain a crime they themselves envisioned to exploit. The lies were part of the operational architecture of genocide. One must also ask another question: why would the RPF assassinate Habyarimana precisely when implementation of the Arusha Accords was underway? The RPF supported the Arusha Peace Agreement because it legitimized political inclusion. It is known the Hutu-power diehards hated Arusha outcomes because it threatened their monopoly on power. The people most desperate to destroy the peace process were inside the Akazu and extremist military circles. For them, peace was dangerous. Power-sharing was perilous. Any compromise was treacherous. For these bigots, extreme mass violence and genocide offered a certain opportunity. The death of Habyarimana became politically useful because it created shockwaves, confusion, fury, and the impeccable emotional justification for extermination propaganda already prepared by the likes of RTLM and Kangura. The genocidaires needed a catalytic event—and they got one. The speed with which the genocide machinery activated remains one of the strongest indicators of preparation. None of what happened with terrifying speed emerges from spontaneous anger. It reflected coordination. The extremists had contingency plans. And the death of Habyarimana galvanized them. This is why attempts to endlessly blame President Kagame often sound more like psychological projection and less like investigation. The people who needed Habyarimana dead were those preparing genocide, not those seeking political integration under Arusha. Even the geographical circumstances matter enormously. The plane was shot down near Kanombe military camp, an area which was not rebel territory. What it means, the operational environment overwhelmingly favored insiders. Yet propaganda narratives require the public to imagine that the RPF somehow infiltrated, executed the operation flawlessly, and escaped while genocidaires simultaneously managed to launch a nationwide extermination campaign almost immediately afterward. The coincidence is excessively convenient. Unquestionably, one of the most revealing aspects of genocide denial literature is how frequently it substitutes quantity of speculation for quality of evidence. Endless theories are produced because no single theory survives scrutiny. The multiplication of fabrications The contradictions themselves expose the deception. Agathe Kanziga says one thing. Her son Jean Luc Habyarimana modified it twenty-five years later. Ex-FAR documents expand the mythology, while FDLR narratives recycle it. Aloys Ntiwiragabo exaggerates further in 2015. Each version attempts to reinforce the others while quietly introducing new details to repair earlier weaknesses. What they all forget is that lies do not become truth through multiplication. They simply become heavier, more unstable and more revealing. The conspiracy culture surrounding Habyarimana’s death mirrors the broader psychology of genocide denial itself. The same ideological ecosystem that once spread myths about Tutsi domination, “Hima empire” fantasies, and extermination propaganda later reinvented itself as a producer of alternative histories. Each lie serves the same function: protecting the moral and political legitimacy of those responsible for genocide. And because the original crime was so immense, the lies must become equally immense. The trigger mattered because the gun was already loaded as the ICTR judgement concluded. No serious observer should ignore the central role played by those closest to Habyarimana himself. His family, extremist political allies, intelligence operatives, Presidential Guard networks, and military hardliners had both motive and operational opportunity. If anyone deserved rigorous scrutiny regarding Habyarimana’s death, it was precisely those circles. Instead, they transformed themselves into self-appointed witnesses while spreading contradictory narratives designed to redirect suspicion outward. The loudest accusers often stood closest to the crime. That fact alone deserves attention. And the desperation of their propaganda reveals something deeper: they understand that if the assassination is correctly contextualized, the entire mythology of genocidal innocence ends. Because if extremists engineered or facilitated the death of Habyarimana to unleash genocide, then the foundational narrative of “spontaneous ethnic violence” crumbles completely. What remains is premeditated extermination. Which is exactly what happened. Today, genocide denial networks continue recycling these myths because the assassination remains symbolically important. It functions as the emotional gateway through which they attempt to reinterpret all of 1994. That is why every conspiracy theory surrounding the plane crash matters politically. It is wrong to assume the lies are not harmless. They are part of unending ideological warfare against historical truth. And however, the contradictions betray their creators. If Kagame truly threatened Habyarimana through Booh-Booh, why did no international institution react? If FAR intelligence possessed months of detailed warnings, why was the assassination not prevented? If the RPF orchestrated the operation, why did the extremists benefit so perfectly and immediately? If the genocide was spontaneous revenge, why were the killing structures already operational? If the assassination shocked the regime unexpectedly, why had extremist media already predicted catastrophe? The questions multiply because the mendacities fail initial tests. The death of Habyarimana remains tragic. But tragedy should not become a sanctuary for lies. The evidence surrounding the assassination points not toward an impulsive rebel conspiracy but toward extremist networks that had already prepared for mass extermination and required a catalytic event to justify it. The assassination became that catalyst. And the decades of contradictory propaganda since then reveal not confidence in truth, but terror of it. The guilty always fear coherent history. Because coherent history strips away mythology and exposes motive. Falsehoods must constantly mutate to survive. But in mutating, they reveal the very thing they seek to conceal. Lessons from lies Hannah Arendt, especially in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and her essay “Truth and Politics” (1967), makes her one of the most important thinkers for understanding systematic lying in political violence. The political philosopher Arendt, explained that authoritarian movements do not merely lie occasionally; they attempt to destroy the difference between truth and fiction altogether. French philosopher and sociologist Jacques Ellul, in his great work Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes (1962), reasoned that effective propaganda does not primarily depend on evidence. It depends on emotional integration into a political mythology built around fear, enemies, victimhood, and existential panic. Sociologist Stanley Cohen, in States of Denial: Knowing About Atrocities and Suffering (2001), scrutinized how individuals, institutions, and societies deny atrocities even when evidence is overwhelming. Cohen revealed how denial evolves from outright rejection into reinterpretation and eventually into blame inversion. In The Nature of Fascism (1991), historian Roger Griffin, argued that extremist movements often rely on myths of national rebirth achieved through violence. Griffin established how radical ideological movements portray society as facing existential destruction caused by internal enemies, thereby presenting violence as regenerative and necessary. Psychologist Ervin Staub, especially in The Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence (1989), explained how mass atrocities emerge gradually through scapegoating, fear cultivation, dehumanization, and moral reversal until perpetrators come to see exterminatory violence as justified or defensive. The assassination of Juvénal Habyarimana was not the birth of genocidal intent; it was the starter’s pistol for a race that extremists had been training to run for years. The cataclysm that followed was not the emotional convulsions of a shocked nation suddenly overwhelmed by grief. The genocide against the Tutsi was the execution of a prepared script by people who had already sharpened the machetes, trained militias, compiled lists of victims, poisoned minds through hate media—and transformed paranoia into political doctrine. The plane crash was useful precisely because it provided the emotional theater needed to unleash what had already been planned. And that is why the lies surrounding the event are so numerous, so theatrical, and so absurdly contradictory. The guilty cannot afford simplicity; they need fog, noise, confusion, and boundless conspiracy theories to hide the obvious. That is why the world has been treated to the spectacle of genocidaires and their ideological descendants expecting intelligent people to believe that Paul Kagame supposedly “instructed” the highest UN official in Rwanda to go personally deliver a murder threat to Habyarimana like some village messenger carrying gossip between feuding neighbors. One almost expects them next to claim that Kagame printed invitation cards for the assassination and distributed them through UNAMIR. The story is not merely fake—it is pathetically childish. Let them talk. Let them tweet. Let Jean-Luc follow the FDLR with facilitation from President Felix Tshisekedi as his mother Agathe whispers her lies. Since every word they speak only tightens the noose of truth around the real conspirators. And when history speaks clearly—and it always does—it will not speak in their favor. But let’s linger a moment on Agathe Kanziga—the iron widow of Kanombe, self-appointed high priestess of the Akazu, and the most unbothered grieving widow history has ever seen. When the plane went down in flames, killing her husband in what she now claims was a “RPF plot,” did she rush to the crash site? Did she console the siblings of her supposedly beloved Juvenal, who sat in disbelief at Kanombe, surrounded by shock and sorrow? No. Kanziga left the body behind like a suitcase she forgot to pack, fleeing with haste and calculation, her heart apparently burdened not by grief, but by the urgency of self-preservation—and, one suspects, of story-spinning. This is a woman whose idea of mourning was to conjure a Booh-Booh bedtime story years later, starring herself and her genocidal clique as clueless victims and President Kagame as the mustache-twirling villain. Agathe Kanziga had no time to attend funerals or shed tears with her in-laws and brother, but somehow found ample time, and creative energy, to fashion conspiracy theories from the ashes of a crime in which she was far more than a bystander. She was the Akazu’s queen bee, the one whose kitchen cabinet plotted the cleansing of Tutsis with bureaucratic efficiency. Her grief wasn’t private—it was nonexistent. Her loyalty to Habyarimana didn’t survive the plane crash. It evaporated the moment his usefulness as a figurehead died with him. If she had truly loved him—if she had mourned him as a wife, rather than repositioned herself as the exiled oracle of genocidaires—perhaps she would have stayed, wept, and buried him with dignity. Instead, she vanished into comfortable exile, leaving the cleanup to her husband’s terrified siblings and the lies to be managed later by her son, who now dishonors both parents by moonlighting as a publicist for those who brought Rwanda to ruin. The Booh-Booh warning theory is not just an insult to intelligence—it is an insult to the very concept of memory, of justice, of grief. It affronts logic, diplomacy, military strategy, and basic human intelligence all at once. It is the kind of lie you tell when you think the world has advanced amnesia. But they forget there are people who remember. We remember how Habyarimana’s wife fled, not for safety, but for power. How she left his body cooling in the wreckage while she preserved the only thing she ever truly cared about: the survival of the Akazu’s myth. And that’s why every word she and her son spit out is a confession—wrapped in projection, drenched in cynicism, and decorated with the blood-red ribbon of denial. The Booh-Booh nonsense isn’t just ridiculous. It’s the rotting bouquet laid at the grave of a man whose death they exploited, whose legacy they perverted, and whose family they abandoned without so much as a proper farewell. Nonetheless, these people repeat it with straight faces because genocide propaganda has always depended on the assumption that if a lie is repeated often enough, somebody somewhere will become foolish enough to believe it. But the lies betray them. Every fabricated warning, every recycled “intelligence report,” every exaggerated tale about mysterious letters, whispered predictions, Belgian soldiers in bars, or secret messages from Booh-Booh only deepens suspicion toward the very circles telling the stories. The problem of Kanziga and her son Jean-Luc and others within the Hutu-power circles is simple: they knew too much, too early, and benefited too quickly. RTLM was already warming up its engines of hate before the plane hit the ground. The mass murderers progressed with terrifying speed because they were not improvising but implementing. The genocidaires did not react to history—they activated a plan. And now, decades later, they continue drowning the truth in ridiculous myths because they know one thing with terrifying certainty: if the fog clears completely, the spotlight will fall exactly where they have spent thirty years trying desperately to prevent it from shining.
