Juvénal Habyarimana

Who was Juvénal Habyarimana?

Juvénal Habyarimana was the second President of the Republic of Rwanda, the post he held longer than any other president to date, from 1973 until 1994. During his 20-year rule he favored his own ethnic group, the Hutus, and supported the Hutu majority in neighboring Burundi against the Tutsi government. He was nicknamed "Kinani", a Kinyarwanda word meaning "invincible".

Habyarimana was a dictatorial leader, and electoral fraud was suspected for his unopposed re-elections: 98.99% of the vote on 24 December 1978, 99.97% of the vote on 19 December 1983, and 99.98% of the vote on 19 December 1988. During his rule, Rwanda became a totalitarian order in which his MRND-party enforcers required people to chant and dance in adulation of the President at mass pageants of political "animation". While the country as a whole had grown a bit less poor during Habyarimana's tenure, the great majority of Rwandans remained in circumstances of extreme poverty.

On April 6, 1994, he was killed when his airplane, also carrying the President of Burundi, Cyprien Ntaryamira, was shot down close to Kigali International Airport. His assassination ignited ethnic tensions in the region and helped spark the Rwandan Genocide.