Few events in recent times have been the subject of such speculation as the assassination, on 6th April 1994, of Rwanda’s president Juvénal Habyarimana. For 13 years, the identity of those who shot down the president’s Mystère Falcon jet—triggering the genocide of up to 1m Rwandans, mainly Tutsi—has remained a mystery. All that is known with certainty is that surface-to-air missiles were fired at the jet as it came in to land at Kigali airport, causing it to crash into the garden of the presidential villa—killing all on board.
By this time Rwanda had suffered over three years of civil war, with President Habyarimana’s Hutu government fighting a rebel army, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), created in neighbouring Uganda by Rwandan Tutsi refugees. In previous decades, thousands of Rwandan Tutsi had been forced into exile refugee camps, denied the right of return. The RPF emerged to enforce their rights, and invaded Rwanda in October 1990, eventually seizing territory in the north. In 1993 an international peace agreement—known as the Arusha accords, after the Tanzanian city in which it was signed—was brokered between the Rwandan government and the RPF, providing for a power-sharing democracy in Rwanda. UN peacekeepers were sent to monitor compliance with the agreement.
After the downing of the jet, each side in the civil war blamed the other for the death of the president, and a vicious battle for the historical truth has been waged ever since. It is widely believed that whoever is eventually found guilty will carry the moral responsibility for starting the genocide—which is why we may never know for certain who the assassins were.
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