Juvénal Habyarimana

Juvénal Habyarimana
Habyarimana in 1980
3rd President of Rwanda
In office
5 July 1973 – 6 April 1994
Preceded byGrégoire Kayibanda
Succeeded byThéodore Sindikubwabo
Personal details
Born(1937-03-08)March 8, 1937
Ruanda-Urundi
DiedApril 6, 1994(1994-04-06) (aged 57)
Kigali, Rwanda
NationalityRwandan
Political partyMRND
Spouse(s)Agathe Habyarimana

Juvénal Habyarimana (8 March 1937 – 6 April 1994) was the second President of Rwanda. He was president for almost twenty years, from 1973 until his assassination. During his government, he favoured his own ethnic group, the Hutus. He was nicknamed "Kinani", a Kinyarwanda word meaning "invincible". Habyarimana was a dictator. He was suspected to have cheated in all of his elections.[1]

Death

On 6 April 1994, Habyarimana, along with the President of Burundi, Cyprien Ntaryamira, seven passengers and three crew members were killed when his Dassault Falcon 50 was shot down with a surface-to-air missile close to Kigali. [2] His assassination caused tensions between Hutus and Tutsis to worsen, and helped start the Rwandan Genocide. It is one of the bloodiest events of the late 20th century.[3][4] Within 100 days, somewhere between 800,000 and 1 million Rwandans were massacred.[5]

References

  1. ↑ Philip Gourevitch (1998). We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families.
  2. ↑ Raymond Bonner (November 12, 1994). "Unsolved Rwanda Mystery: The President's Plane Crash". The New York Times. Retrieved 2008-01-01.
  3. ↑ "Rwanda fury at Kagame trial call". BBC News. 21 November 2006.
  4. ↑ "French probe exonerates Rwanda leader in genocide". Reuters. 10 January 2012. Archived from the original on 3 April 2015. Retrieved 31 August 2017.
  5. ↑ See, e.g., Rwanda: How the genocide happened, BBC, April 1, 2004, which gives an estimate of 800,000, and OAU sets inquiry into Rwanda genocide, Africa Recovery, Vol. 12 1#1 (August 1998), page 4, which estimates the number at between 500,000 and 1,000,000. 7 out of every 10 Tutsis were killed.

Other websites

Media related to Juvénal Habyarimana at Wikimedia Commons