Rwandan president Habyarimana puts final touches to genocide plan

French commandos training interahamwe militias who meticulously executed the genocide across Rwanda

This Tuesday 7^th April, 2015, Rwanda will mark the 21^st anniversary of the 100-day genocide against Tutsis in Rwanda back in 1994. Today on April 6 and the preceding months, then Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana had putting in place infrastructure of what was called the “apocalypse” by the AKAZU, an insider network of Habyarimana’s most trusted lieutenants.

Based on secret internal government communication and documents presented by prosecution at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, News of Rwanda brings you details of what was being planned and implemented to set in motion the mass slaughter of Tutsis across Rwanda.

Arms

In early 1993, after having obtained U.S.$6 million worth of arms from Egypt the previous March 1992, the Ministry of Defense took delivery of a further U.S.$5.9 million worth of arms and ammunition from South Africa on October 19, 1992. The March purchase included some 450 Kalashnikov rifles, a standard infantry assault weapon and the one then used by most Rwandan soldiers, and the October purchase included 20,000 R-4 rifles. At the time of the March purchase, the Rwandan army also bought two thousand rocket-propelled grenades, which require a significant amount of instruction to use effectively, but no hand grenades; in October they purchased 20,000 hand grenades, which could be used by persons with relatively little training.

Lists of Tutsis to be killed

In early October 1992, the army general staff directed all units and military camps to provide lists of all people said to be “accomplices” of the RPF rebels. When the order came to light in

Several weeks later, the chief of staff, Colonel Deogratias Nsabimana—the same man who had signed the September 21 letter circulating the definition of the enemy—was injured in an automobile accident. After he was taken to the hospital, a document was found in his car entitled cynically “Memo for the Protection of Human Rights” (Aide-Mémoire pour la protection des droits de la personne). It included a “list of persons to contact” (Personnes á contacter), 331 persons thought to be supporters of the RPF.

The notes for some persons gave a brief description of the charges against them as well as their names and locations. Some were accused of having allowed their children to go abroad to join the RPF, others of having held suspicious meetings of Tutsi in their houses or of having stockpiled arms for the RPF. Several were named because they had been detained as “accomplices” in the October 1990 arrests. In the prefecture of Butare, and presumably in other prefectures as well, lists had been kept of all local people arrested in 1990. Some of the lists had been brought up to date with more current information about thepersons named. All these lists offered a ready source of information for any who wanted to attack Tutsi and Hutu opponents of Habyarimana.

Genocide militia called “Self-Defense force”

Beginning in March 1992 the Interahamwe had proved their effectiveness in attacking Tutsi and Hutu who supported the MDR, the PSD, or the PL. Foreseeing the role they could play against such “enemies” in case of renewed combat, Habyarimana and his supporters stepped up the recruitment and training of the militia. Hoping to keep the effort secret, they sent the recruits to training camps distant from the capital.

One was at Gabiro, near a hotel in the Akagera game park, and another was in the northwestern Gishwati forest, adjacent to the Hotel Mont Muhe, which belonged to Habyarimana and his circle. The recruits at Gishwati lived in tents in the forest and were visited on the weekends by important MRND officials and businessmen who came up from Kigali to cheer them on.

According to a witness present on one such occasion in January 1993, the hotel staff killed and roasted a cow to honor the visitors and the trainees. The tired and sweaty recruits came out of the forest fifteen or so at a time to enjoy the barbecue and plentiful beer. After several groups had eaten, they gathered the remaining food and drink and transported it into the forest in a pickup truck for their fellow trainees. When the festivities were finished, the dignitaries spent the night at the Mont Muhe Hotel or at hotels in the nearby town of Gisenyi.

Col Theonest Bagosora the “genocide brain”

On January 20, a group of soldiers calling themselves AMASASU sent an aggressive open letter to Habyarimana. They were headed by “Commandant Mike Tango”, which was the alias for Col Theoneste Bagosora. When the recently-installed coalition government made changes in the army high command in June 1992, forcing the retirement of Colonel Serubuga, Col. Pierre-Celestin Rwagafilita, and others, Habyarimana sought to have Bagosora named chief of staff. Ministers of opposing political parties refused this arrangement, seeing Bagasora as no improvement over the other hard-liners.

In a compromise, Colonel Nsabimana, thought to be more moderate, was named to head the general staff and Bagosora was installed as head of the administration at the Ministry of Defense, where he was well placed to keep an eye on Minister of Defense James Gasana, who was seen as unsympathetic to hard-line positions. Bagosora enjoyed the support of Habyarimana’s wife and her brothers and of his own younger brother, Pasteur Musabe who directed a large commercial bank, and was described by one insider as the most important civilian in the akazu.

Bagosora would go on to become the central planning nerve of the genocide. He is currently serving 35 years for genocide.

Buying Machetes

If the war were to resume and a self-defense force were to be put into action, its recruits would need arms. According to an entry in the appointment book, Bagosora had foreseen being able to provide firearms for only one third of the recruits. The others were to operate with traditional weapons: spears, bows and arrows, and machetes. Spears and bows and arrows were not easily available on the world market, but machetes were another matter.

Requests for import licenses from January 1993 through March 1994 show that 581,000 kilograms of machetes were imported into Rwanda as part of a larger quantity of 3,385,000 kilograms of metal goods including also hammers, picks, and sickles. Assuming the average weight ofa machete to be one kilogram, this quantity would equal some 581,000 machetes or one for every third adult Hutu male in Rwanda. This was about double the number of machetes imported in previous years. These importations were remarkable not just for the extraordinary quantity but also for the identity of the importers.

The most significant was Félicien Kabuga, a businessman from Byumba and friend of Habyarimana, to whom he was connected through the marriage of their children. Kabuga had built his wealth through the export of coffee and the import of a variety of goods, chiefly used clothing, food, and household goods. During this period, Kabuga ventured into large-scale importation of metal goods, including machetes, for which he received seven licenses for a total value of 95 million Rwandan francs, or about U.S.$525,000. One cargo of 987 cartons of machetes, weighing some 25,662 kilograms, was shipped to him from the Kenyan port of Mombasa on October 26, arriving in Kigali in early November.

Hutu Power

For the genocide to roll out as planned, a political system was established by President Habyarimana. It was branded “Hutu Power” including extremist Hutus who viewed Tutsis as the worst thing that ever befell on Rwanda. Hutu Power was to be implemented by the “popular army of strong young men” as sketched out by the AMASASU and by Bagosora the previous January 1992. This army of self-defense was to supplement rather than to replace the party militia. Just a week after the Hutu Power rally, a commission of the Rwandan armed forces met to plan its organization. Perhaps aware of Bagosora’s early caution that party considerations should be avoided in the distribution of guns, they decided that firearms should be distributed “within the framework of legal work” and that trainees who received them should be recruited so as “to avoid suspicions among the different layers of population and among political parties.” They called for clear definition of administrative and technical responsibilities for what was now called “popular self-defense” or “civilian self-defense.”

At the end of March 1994, army officers—presumably members of the same commission—met again at the operations center to plan “defense of neighborhoods [and] the tracking down and neutralisation of infiltrators.” In a letter to the minister of defense reporting on the meeting, Chief of Staff Colonel Nsabimana again echoed the ideas of Bagosora and the AMASASU. He specified that soldiers living outside their camps as well as former soldiers would command the recruits and, because the supply of firearms was limited, he proposed that the civilian population in communes outside Kigali should be instructed in the use of machetes, spears, swords, and bows and arrows.

In October 1993, Habyarimana’s military and militia commanders filed updates to him and his wife Agathe Kanziga affirming that the entire system was in place for the genocide to begin. What was remaining was for Habyarimana to go to Arusha for symbolic signing of the peace accords. The signing was to deceive the world that his murderous government was committed to peace.

The final genocide plan and system were fully in place by April 7. Up until July 1994, more than 10,000 Tutsis were being DAILY. All these plans were put in place with tacit approval from Paris which had French commandos across Rwanda training militias, advising the army and bombing RPF positions.