{UAH} Rwanda’s Deadliest Secret: Who Shot Down Habyarimana’s Plane? The most under-investigated political assassinations
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Shot Down Habyarimana's Plane? The most under-investigated political assassinations
On the evening of April 6, 1994, Habyarimana boarded the Dassault jet in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania's largest city, accompanied by Burundian President Cyprien Ntaryamira, a three-man French crew, and seven additional Rwandan and Burundian officials. The group was returning from a meeting discussing the Arusha Accords, a peace agreement signed the previous August between Habyarimana's government and the rebel Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). The two had been at war since October 1990, when the RPF, a guerrilla force formed by Tutsi exiles, invaded from neighboring Uganda. Although a cease-fire was in effect, implementation of the Arusha provisions had stalled, and Habyarimana, a member of Rwanda's Hutu majority, had been reproached throughout the day by several regional leaders. As the plane took off along the Indian Ocean coast, the mood on board was likely tense.
With characteristics of both an ethnic group and a caste—though not quite either—the Tutsi minority had traditionally ruled Rwanda, a mountainous, densely populated, monolinguistic nation that existed as a centralized kingdom long before it was a modern state. Though governed by Tutsi kings, precolonial Rwanda also reserved political space for its Hutu peasant majority, and the two groups co-existed in an orderly, integrated society.
By using Tutsi elites to rule by proxy, however, Rwanda's Belgian colonizers had upended this balance of power, stoking Hutu resentment, and unknowingly sowing the seeds of future violence. Eventually coming to fear the Tutsi it had coddled, Belgium threw its weight behind a Hutu political awakening as it prepared to abandon Central Africa. By independence in 1962, leadership was firmly in Hutu hands. Between 1959 and 1964, facing a wave of anti-Tutsi uprisings, more than 300,000 Tutsi fled the country.
Three decades later, in early 1994, Rwanda sat at the edge of a precipice. Under the Arusha Accords, Habyarimana was supposed to lead the creation of a transitional government, with power shared between his ruling MRND party, the RPF rebels, and four existing opposition groups. Yet intra-party divisions, stoked by the growing clout of anti-Tutsi extremists, had repeatedly delayed the new government's formation.
On the ground to facilitate the transition, U.N. peacekeepers began to warn of a shadowy "third force"—radical Hutus out to sabotage the peace process and prevent the RPF from assuming a role in government. In January, an informant told the U.N. that army-backed youth militias, already flooded with weapons, were drawing up lists of Tutsi in every commune, and waiting for the signal to commence with their extermination. In Kigali, radio with ties to the Hutu supremacist party CDR called for the blood of Tutsi "cockroaches."
Then, around 8:25 p.m. on April 6, 1994, two surface-to-air missiles hit Habyarimana's jet as it approached the Kigali airport. Moments later, the plane lay in a crumpled heap at the edge of the president's garden. All 12 occupants, including Habyarimana, were killed in the crash. The murders of political moderates and their families, and of Tutsi men, women, and children, began within hours.
Despite several investigations into the crash, the last released in 2012, it remains unclear who ordered Habyarimana's death. The most widely accepted scenario, which leading Rwanda scholar Gérard Prunier presents in The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide, is that the plane was shot down on the command of Hutu extremists, including members of the opposition CDR and/or the so-called akazu—close associates of the president's wife Agathe who had long wielded a high degree of power. Among them was Théoneste Bagosora, the army chief of staff, who presided over a "crisis committee" following the crash and is considered to be a key mastermind of the subsequent killings. This version of events presumes Habyarimana's assassins saw him as a liability to their plans to foil Arusha and commence with the Tutsi extermination—the only way, they believed, to fully guard against a future Tutsi threat.
Finally, witness testimonies and multiple investigations suggest the missiles—probably Russian-made SAM-16s—were fired from either the Rwandan army's Kanombe barracks or from farther away in the vicinity of Masaka Hill, which was under patrol of the Rwandan Presidential Guard. Some witnesses reported seeing white men flee Masaka Hill minutes after the crash—possibly mercenaries hired to fire the missiles, which required technical knowledge that the Rwandan armed forces lacked.
A second theory, highly controversial in Kigali, blames the assassination on the RPF, which captured power three months later in the war that resumed as the massacres started. Although the RPF had received a favorable settlement at Arusha, proponents of the theory argue, Major General Paul Kagame, its top commander and Rwanda's current president, ordered Habyarimana's death to provide grounds for spoiling the cease-fire, and pave the way for an outright military victory.
Despite patrols by the Presidential Guard, it is possible that RPF assassins could have infiltrated Masaka Hill—a scenario advocated by the French judge Jean-Louis Bruguière, whose 2006 report implicated the RPF. Citing interviews with several RPF defectors, Bruguière claims a group of rebel officers, including Kagame, had plotted the attack on March 31, and that an RPF officer named Frank Nziza had fired the missile that brought the aircraft down. Bruguière subsequently issued arrest warrants for nine Kagame associates, including former Kigali mayor Rose Kabuye, who was arrested during a 2008 trip to Germany. Charges against Kabuye were eventually dropped.
Bruguière's report has since come under scrutiny after a key witness retracted his testimony, citing manipulation, and evidence emerged that the release of the report was timed to counter a Rwandan investigation into France's involvement in the events of 1994, which Kigali alleges included the arming and training of anti-Tutsi militias. Nonetheless, several former high-ranking RPF officials remain adamant that Kagame—whose forces have been implicated in multiple U.N. investigations into the killing of tens of thousands of civilians in Rwanda and Congo—was also behind Habyarimana's death. These include his former intelligence chief Patrick Karegeya, who was found murdered in January in a Johannesburg hotel room, and onetime chief of staff Theogene Rudasingwa, who told Agence France Press in 2011 that Kagame had told him "with characteristic callousness and much glee" that he had personally ordered the downing of the jet. If this is true, it would mean that Kagame, the man generally credited with ending the genocide, had also played a key role in stoking it—effectively choosing the pursuit of all-out victory over hundreds of thousands of Tutsi lives.
With such delicate questions unanswered the State House Museum stays far from politics.
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