April 2006

Number 1

The Rwandan Genocide: How It Was Prepared

A Human Rights Watch Briefing Paper

Context ........................................................................................................................................... 2
Economic forces ....................................................................................................................... 2
Demographics and history....................................................................................................... 3
Politics and regionalism ........................................................................................................... 4
The Immediate Crises: Internal Opposition and War ............................................................. 4
Internal challenges .................................................................................................................... 4
The war....................................................................................................................................... 4
Links between War and Internal Opposition: Resort to the Ethnic Appeal ....................... 5
Genocide: Ideology and Organization....................................................................................... 6
Slaughter as Self-Defense .................................................................................................... 7
Before leaving they will massacre the Tutsi...................................................................... 7
Definition of the Enemy ................................................................................................. 8
The RPF advance and the call for self-defense.................................................................... 9
Party rivalries and Hutu solidarity.................................................................................... 10
Expecting war.......................................................................................................................... 11
The Organization of Civilian Self-Defense document.................................................. 12
Letters of late March 1994 ................................................................................................ 14
April 7, 1994: Massive Killing Begins ...................................................................................... 15
The plan works........................................................................................................................ 15
The self-defense system formalized ..................................................................................... 16

On the twelfth anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, we must honor the memory of the
victims and think again of the pain and horror caused by the 1994 killing campaign. We
must recall the suffering that followed the refusal of others in the world to heed the cries
of those targeted for extermination.
Honoring the victims requires us also to continue investigating, documenting, and
analyzing how the genocide was prepared and executed, so as to be better prepared to
avert similar horrors in the future. As part of our continuing effort to bring to light the
fullest information possible about the genocide, we publish this briefing paper, drawing
upon some materials not previously used by researchers to show the planning and
execution of the genocide.1

Context
The genocide in Rwanda, like all genocides, was a complex phenomenon that resulted
from a combination of long-term structural factors as well as more immediate decisions
taken by powerful actors. Of course none of these circumstanceswhether poverty,
land scarcity, a population of two groups of very different size, a history of colonial rule,
or a misreading of historyin and of itself caused the genocide, no more than did the
introduction of multiparty politics or the start of war. But all these circumstances formed
the context in which Rwandans made decisions in this period of crisis, and so must be
taken into account in trying to analyze the genocide.

Economic forces
Rwanda was very poor, and in the years just before the genocide it had become poorer.
Some 90 percent of the population lived off the land, and with significant population
growth in recent decades most farmers lacked sufficient land to provide for themselves
and their families. In the late 1980s economic conditions worsened because of drought, a
sharp drop in world market prices for coffee and tea (the export crops that provided the
major sources of foreign exchange), and limits on government spending imposed by
international financial institutions.
1

Human Rights Watch (then Africa Watch) began reporting on massacres of Tutsi and other human rights
abuses in Rwanda in 1991. As part of an international commission of inquiry, Human Rights Watch documented
abuses and violations of humanitarian international law from October 1990 through January 1993. In
partnership with the International Federation of Human Rights Leagues, Human Rights Watch researchers
began gathering evidence about the genocide in 1994. After five years of research, we published Leave None
to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda. Human Rights Watch staff regularly assist judicial authorities in efforts to
bring to justice those guilty of genocide and other violations of international humanitarian law in Rwanda. This
briefing paper continues efforts to bring to light the fullest information possible about the genocide.

Demographics and history

Of the three groups that comprised the population, one, the Twa, was so small as to play
no political role. Of the other two, the Hutu was by far the larger group. Hutu and Tutsi
shared a common culture and language and occasionally intermarried. Neither group had
moved into what is now Rwanda in a single mass and at an identifiable moment in time.
Rather, small clusters of people drifted in over centuries and coalesced. As the Rwandan
state developed, an elite took shape and its members were called Tutsi; the masses
became known as Hutu.
The colonial administrations, first German, then Belgian, used and were used by the
Tutsi in a process that extended and intensified the control by the Tutsi-dominated
central state over areasboth Hutu and Tutsithat had previously maintained
considerable autonomy. During these years of colonial rule the categories of Hutu and
Tutsi became increasingly clearly defined and opposed to each other, with the Tutsi elite
seeing itself as superior and having the right to rule, and the Hutu seeing themselves as
an oppressed people.
Influenced by European ideas about race and the peopling of Africa, Rwandans came to
accept a distorted version of history. It held that Tutsi, a conquering group from
northeast Africa, had swept into Rwanda centuries before and had established the
Rwandan state through military prowess, through self-serving marriage alliances, and
through an exploitative clientage system based on the grant of cattle. It depicted Hutu as
the consistent losers in major battles as well as in the ordinary power struggles of daily
life.
In the mid-twentieth century, as the colonialists were preparing to leave, Hutu overthrew
the Tutsi elite and established a Hutu-led republic. In the process they killed some
twenty thousand Tutsi and drove another three-hundred thousand into exile. This event,
known as the 1959 revolution, was remembered by Tutsi as a tragic and criminal event,
while for Hutu it was seen as a heroic battle for liberation, to be celebrated with pride.
Just before and during the 1994 genocide, Hutu political leaders insisted on the
importance of protecting the gains of the revolution, which meant not just control of
political power but also the lands and jobs once held by Tutsi and distributed to Hutu
after 1959.
During the 1960s some of the Tutsi in exile led incursions into Rwanda, seeking to
unseat the new Hutu leadership. Within Rwanda officials incited and, in some cases, led

attacks against Tutsi still resident in the country, accusing them of supporting the
incursions. Most of the twenty-thousand Tutsi counted as victims of the revolution
actually died in these reprisal attacks and not in early combat surrounding the change in
power.

Politics and regionalism

Hutu leaders from central and southern Rwanda and from the northern prefecture2 of
Ruhengeri led the 1959 revolution and established the first republic. Within a decade
leaders from the center and south had taken control of the most important government
jobs and associated benefits. In 1973 military officers led by Juvenal Habyarimana and
representing the interests of the northwestern prefectures of Gisenyi and Ruhengeri
overthrew leaders of the first republic and established the second republic. Over time,
Habyarimana and his group executed or caused the deaths through starvation and illtreatment of the first president and some fifty others. Hutu of central and southern
Rwanda resented their loss of power and saw the killing of the first generation of Hutu
leaders as a betrayal of these leaders of the revolution.
The Immediate Crises: Internal Opposition and War
Internal challenges
Habyarimana set up a one-party state where tight central control was joined with an
initially successful push for economic development. But by the late 1980safter a
decade-and-a-half in powerhis political control was eroding and the economy was in
trouble. Pressed by international donors to allow greater space to the political
opposition, Habyarimana permitted the establishment of multiple political parties in
1991. The chief contenders in this newly opened arena were parties led by other Hutu,
particularly one harking back to the first republic and drawing its backing from central
and southern Rwanda.
The war
In October 1990 the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a movement led by children of
Tutsi who had fled the 1959 revolution, attacked Rwanda from Uganda. They claimed
they were fighting for the right of Tutsi refugees to return home and for the overthrow
of a repressive government. The Rwandan government army, with French military
2
At the time of the genocide, Rwanda was divided into eleven prefectures, each headed by a prefect. The
administrative unit below the prefecture was the commune, headed by a burgomaster, and below that was the
sector, headed by a councilor.

assistance, pushed the RPF back over the border within the first month of combat. In
1991, however, a reorganized RPF began a guerilla war, attacking Rwanda from bases in
Uganda. In June 1992 RPF troops won a substantial foothold in Rwandan territory, and
this was followed shortly afterwards by the start of protracted negotiations between the
RPF and the Rwandan government, producing the Arusha Accords that were concluded
in August 1993 and were intended to end the war.

Links between War and Internal Opposition: Resort to the

Ethnic Appeal
Even before the invasion, the RPF had recruited a small number of supporters, Hutu
and Tutsi, within Rwanda, but most Tutsi had no link to the guerilla movement and
some actively opposed the invasion, remembering the killings of Tutsi civilians that had
followed the incursions of the 1960s. Habyarimana and his supporters could have
chosen to mount an appeal based on nationalism against the RPF, but decided instead to
cast the war as a threat in ethnic terms. They may have believed it would be easier to
rally all Hutu once again behind Habyarimanas leadership if the threat were clearly
identified as Tutsi. (Although the RPF was predominantly Tutsi, its president was a Hutu
colonel, once a supporter then a rival of Habyarimana, who had fled Rwanda when
accused of plotting a coup some years before.)
But Habyarimana and his supporters apparently were swayed also by another
consideration: the fear that the growing internal opposition would link up with the RPF.
By identifying Tutsi as the enemy, Habyarimana and his group hoped to make
cooperation by the internal opposition with the RPF unthinkable. Initially that hope was
misplaced: the leading political parties opposed to Habyarimana (one predominantly
Hutu, one ethnically mixed, and one strongly influenced by Tutsi) had begun
cooperating openly with the RPF by 1992. Although this cooperation did not last and
some opposition allegiances later shifted towards Habyarimana (see below), it was the
prompting of these leading opposition parties in combination with international
pressure, that compelled the opening of government negotiations with the RPF.
Habyarimana and his group began those negotiations in July 1992 with a sense that the
dual crises of war and internal opposition had merged into a single grave threat to their
continued control.

Genocide: Ideology and Organization

Organizers of the genocide used ideology to bring Hutu to fear and hate Tutsi. They
then used the institutions of the state to transform the fear and hate into the myriad acts
of hunting, raping and killing that made up the genocide. To make the ideology deadly,
the leaders had to be able to give orders and see them executedfor this they had to
control the military, the administration, and the political parties. They used the radio,
too, to disseminate propaganda, but without the other channels of command, the radio
itself would not have sufficed.
Among the false ideas drawn on by political leaders and propagandists backing
Habyarimana were the following:

Tutsi were foreign to Rwanda and had no right to live there.

Despite the 1959 revolution, Tutsi continued to enjoy higher status and greater
wealth than Hutu and were in some way responsible for continuing Hutu
poverty.

Tutsi posed a danger to Hutu, who were always the victims, whether of Tutsi
military power or of Tutsi cunning (use of their women to seduce Hutu, use of
their money to buy Hutu), and so Hutu had a right and a duty to defend
themselves.

From 1990 through the 1994 genocide, propagandists used newspapers and later the
radio to disseminate these ideas hostile to the Tutsi. It was particularly the last ideathat
Hutu were threatened and had to defend themselvesthat proved most successful in
mobilizing attacks on Tutsi from 1990 through the 1994 genocide. This idea may have
been influenced by a study of propaganda methods. Among documents found by
Human Rights Watch researchers in a government office soon after the genocide was a
set of mimeographed notes summarizing methods of propaganda as analyzed by a
French professor, Roger Mucchielli, in a book entitled Psychologie de la publicit et de la
propagande. One of the methods described is persuading people that the opponent
intends to use terror against them; if this is done successfully, honest people will take
whatever measures they think necessary for legitimate self-defense.3
In December 1990, when the first RPF attack had been defeated and its troops driven
from Rwanda, a newly-established propaganda newspaper, Kangura, published an article

Human Rights Watch and the International Federation of Human Rights Leagues (FIDH), Leave None to Tell
the Story: Genocide in Rwanda (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1999), p. 66.

warning that the RPF had prepared a war that would leave no survivors.4 At the end
of December 1990, the vice-rector and a professor at the national university proposed
that all adult men be prepared to fight as a self-defense force to assure security within
the country if the army were occupied in combat at the frontiers. The force, they said,
should be trained by soldiers to fight with traditional weapons because they were
cheaper than firearms. Two months later, in February 1991, a national official and leader
from the northwest published a pamphlet claiming that the RPF planned a genocide,
the extermination of the Hutu majority.5

Slaughter as Self-Defense
In October 1990, two weeks after the first RPF attack and when the invaders were
already retreating, local officials and political leaders incited Hutu living in Kibilira
commune to kill some three hundred Tutsi neighbors in a self-defense operation. The
officials spread rumors that RPF combatants had killed Hutu in nearby areas and were
about to attack the Hutu of Kibilira commune. This massacre, like fifteen other attacks
launched by Hutu against Tutsi before April 1994, was far from the battlefront and the
Hutu faced no imminent danger from RPF combatants, far less from the neighbors they
attacked.6
In the first years of the war, RPF troops did attack civilians who lived near the northern
frontier, but their most devastating attacks on civilians followed the resumption of war
in April 1994.7 Even at that time the threat came from RPF combatants, not from
ordinary Tutsi civilians who were unarmed and posed no threat to others.

Before leaving they will massacre the Tutsi

When Habyarimana was forced to begin negotiations with the RPF in July 1992, some
military officers sought to stiffen his resistance against the pressure coming from the
political parties opposed to him and international donors. One such officer, the head of
military intelligence, warned Habyarimana that giving too many concessions to the RPF
could provoke a coup against Habyarimana himself. Although a ceasefire was then in
effect, he wrote of the consequences of possible future RPF advances. In a chillingly
precise foreshadowing of the events to come twenty months later, the intelligence officer

Ibid. p.78

Association des Femmes Parlementaires pour la Dfense des Droits de la Mere et de lEnfant en collaboration
avec Dr. Mugesera Lon, Toute la Verit sur la Guerre dOctobre 1990 au Rwanda, Kigali: February 1991, p.
5.
6

Human Rights Watch/FIDH, Leave None to Tell the Story, pp. 87-88.

Ibid, pp. 701-735, passim.

said that in the event of RPF advances, the military would kill the political leaders
responsible for concessions to the RPF, and the population would massacre the Tutsi
before fleeing the country.8
Habyarimana and the RPF signed the first protocol of the Arusha Accords in August
1992, beginning a year of forward-and-back progress, with Habyarimana first signing
then disavowing agreements until the final settlement was signed in August 1993. In the
meantime, leaders on both sides continued recruiting and training forces and procuring
arms. Just over a month after the first protocol was accepted, the chief of staff of the
Rwandan Armed Forces warned the men under his command that the enemy was still
intent on taking power and would do so at any price. Emphasizing that they were not to
put their faith in negotiations and that they must really understand what kind of
enemy they were fighting, he circulated a report from a military commission that had
examined ways to defeat the enemy. He said the soldiers were to pay particular attention
to the parts of the document that defined and identified the enemy and the milieu from
which he was recruited.9

Definition of the Enemy

The report divided the enemy into two categories, the principal enemy and partisans of
the enemy. The principal enemy was:
the Tutsi inside or outside the country, extremist and nostalgic for
power, who have NEVER recognized and will NEVER recognize the
realities of the 1959 social revolution and who wish to reconquer power
by all means necessary, including arms.10
In defining the partisans of the enemy, the military commission made the necessary nod
towards democratic openness, saying political opponents should not be confused with
the enemy. But then it condemned Tutsi and those Hutu who opposed Habyarimana. In
several places, it used Tutsi as equivalent to enemy and it said that Tutsi were unified
behind a single ideology: Tutsi hegemony.

8
Note from Anatole Nsengiyumva, Lt. Col. BEMS, G 2 EM AR to Chef EM AR, Kigali, July 27, 1992. Objet: Etat
desprit des militaries et de la population civile. The Linda Melvern Rwanda Genocide archive, The Hugh Owen
Library, University of Wales.
9

Dogratias Nsabimana, Colonel BEM, Chef EM AR [Chief of staff of the army], to Liste A, September 21,
1992.
10

Definition et Identification de lENI [Enemi] document circulated with the letter of Nsabimana to Liste A,
September 21, 1992.

The document deplored the loss of Hutu solidarity, which it blamed on enemy
machinations. It listed the establishment of multiple political parties as an advantage for
the enemy and warned that infiltrators had led these parties to favor the RPF. It asserted
that opponents of Habyarimana were turning public opinion from the ethnic problem
to the socio-economic problem between the rich and the poor. It stated that the enemy
and its partisans were recruited primarily among Tutsi inside and outside the country,
foreigners married to Tutsi women, and dissatisfied Hutu.11
Leaked to the press, the document became widely known in Rwanda. The document,
never disavowed by the military, gave the approval of the highest military authorities to
the idea that the enemy was to be identified as Tutsi. In interviews with confessed killers
from the Rwandan genocide, an American researcher found that three-quarters of them
had heard the phrase the Tutsi is the enemy or the Tutsi is the only enemy. This
was the most important way of understanding the killings, according to those
interviewed.12

The RPF advance and the call for self-defense

In early February 1993 the RPF violated the ceasefire and rapidly advanced across a
broad swathe of northern Rwanda, coming close enough to threaten the national capital,
Kigali. Under heavy international pressure, the RPF withdrew to its original positions
and a new ceasefire was arranged. The demonstration of RPF military strength caused
serious concern among Rwandan political and military leaders, all the more so because
the French, whose forces had helped halt the RPF advance, let it be known that they
would no longer bolster the increasingly disheartened Rwandan army and would seek to
arrange for the presence of a United Nations (U.N.) peacekeeping force instead. During
the offensive, the RPF killed a number of civilians and caused the displacement of
hundreds of thousands of others, many of whom camped in enormous settlements not
far from the capital, thus increasing further pressure on the government.
The RPF advance had shown the weakness of the Rwandan government army, split by
internal rivalries as well as divisions along regional and party lines.13 Even before the
stunning RPF advance, military and political leaders who doubted that the army could

11

Ibid.

12

Scott Straus, The Order of Genocide: Race, Power and War in Rwanda (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
forthcoming), chapter 6.
13

With the establishment of multiple political parties, members of the armed forces had been forbidden to join
parties formally, but most soldiers had preferences, some of them shown openly.

protect the nation had begun to call for a civilian self-defense force to act as the ultimate
barrier to RPF victory. Habyarimana himself espoused this idea in March 1993.14
The most explicit notes about such a force were jotted down by Col. Theoneste
Bagosora in an appointments book or agenda in early 1993.15 He specified that
recruits for the self-defense force would live at home and be trained locally, either by
communal police or by former soldiers or military reservists. They were to be organized
by sector with coordination done by sector councilors and police. Where possible some
recruits would be armed with Kalashnikovs or grenades, but he noted that participants
should be trained to use spears and bows and arrows. He mentioned the importance of
using the radio effectively and noted the name of Simon Bikindi, whose anti-Tutsi songs
were broadcast repeatedly during the genocide to heighten fear and hatred of the Tutsi.16

Party rivalries and Hutu solidarity

The early 1993 calls for a self-defense force produced no immediate result, probably
because partisan and regional rivalries, spurred by the formation of multiple parties in
1991, were still acute. Parties, both those for and those against Habyarimana, had
established militia that used violence against each other, in some cases causing death and
serious injury as well as extensive property damage in their skirmishes. The militia
attached to Habyarimanas party, the Interahamwe, was the strongest, in part because its
members received military training and firearms from soldiers. After March 1992 the
Interahamwe militia was used not just against other political party supporters but also in
the attacks against Tutsi civilians mentioned above.
Bagosora was aware that parties opposed to Habyarimana might well entertain
suspicions about the establishment of any new paramilitary group, even if its avowed
purpose was to defend against the RPF. In his agenda he noted the importance of
avoiding partisan considerations, particularly in the distribution of firearms.
Apparently not ready to join in a self-defense effort in early 1993, some leaders of parties
opposed to Habyarimana nonetheless began to move towards his side. Shocked by the
RPF offensive of February 1993 they wondered whether the RPF was set on a total
military victory rather than on a negotiated sharing of power. For many these doubts

14

Commandant Tango Mike to Monsieur le Prsident de la Rpublique Rwandaise, January 20, 1993.

15

In April 1994 Colonel Bagosora would take command of the military and political situation in the hours
immediately after the airplane carrying President Habyarimana was shot down. He is currently being tried on
charges of genocide at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR).
16

Agenda, Banque de Kigali, 1993, with name and telephone of Colonel Bagosora written inside the front cover.

were confirmed by the assassination in late October 1993 of neighboring Burundis

recently elected Hutu president. Burundi had a similar population of Hutu and Tutsi,
and the election had been hailed as a peaceful transfer of power from a dominant Tutsi
military elite to a fairly elected Hututhe first to serve as president in Burundi. His
assassination by a group of Tutsi military officers outraged many Hutu in Rwanda.
Propagandists, including those at the recently established Radio Tlvision des Mille
Collines (Radio RTLM), alleged that Tutsi RPF soldiers from Rwanda had been involved
in the coup and that they would also assassinate any freely elected Hutu president in
Rwanda.
The assassination of the Burundian president persuaded several important Hutu political
leaders to realign themselves with the forces supporting Habyarimana. Their parties,
once solid in opposing Habyarimana, split with the larger number of their members
moving to the side of the president and a smaller number still supporting cooperation
with the RPF. At a political rally in memory of the slain Burundian president, those
formerly in the presidential camp and those newly affiliated with it rallied to the cry of
Hutu Power, a blatantly ethnic statement of their political loyalties.

Expecting war
The final Arusha Accords, signed in August 1993, called for establishing a new
transitional government, including the RPF, to govern until elections could be held, but
months passed without the new government being installed. At different times each side
was responsible for delays as each sought to take account of the rapidly changing
political configurations. By the end of 1993 it was clear that each side was also preparing
for renewed combat.17
The United Nations peacekeeping force, the United Nations Assistance Mission in
Rwanda (UNAMIR), provided for by the Accords, arrived by the end of the 1993,
months behind schedule. Although the U.N. was soon made aware that the political and
military situation was precarious, the UNAMIR commanders efforts to obtain
authorization to act more vigorously against the threatened violence were generally
rebuffed.
The RPF, permitted by terms of the Arusha Accord to install six hundred of its soldiers
in the city of Kigali, clandestinely brought in more troops as well as more arms.
Recognized as a legitimate party under the terms of the Accords, the RPF also

17

Human Rights Watch/FIDH, Leave None to Tell the Story, pp. 141-172.

experienced an increase in public support as adherents previously fearful of

acknowledging their allegiance openly showed their leanings, and others joined for the
first time. Young people came to RPF headquarters in Kigali or to its base in northern
Rwanda for political training. They were also shown how to use firearms and some were
given arms to take home with them for protection, especially after February 1994
when tensions were high. They returned to their homes where they sought to recruit
new members for the RPF. In addition other young people were being recruited and
trained as soldiers to swell the combatant forces of the movement.18
The Rwandan army sought to bring in new stocks of arms (though in one case U.N.
peacekeepers were able to prevent the delivery). The preparations of military leaders
appear to have focused more on the militia and civilians, however, than on the regular
troops. After the Interahamwe recruited hundreds of new members, soldiers trained
them at military camps. Military leaders also provided firearms to civilian authorities and
political party leaders who passed them on to militia and carefully selected ordinary
civilians. Meanwhile propagandists spewed out increasingly vitriolic attacks against Tutsi,
calling for their extermination, and against those Hutu political leaders who refused to
rally to Hutu Power.

The Organization of Civilian Self-Defense document

In addition to preparing the militia as an increasingly effective strike force, political and
military leaders affiliated with Habyarimana moved to establish the long-discussed selfdefense organization. With Hutu Power erasing or at least minimizing previous party
rivalries, such a force became feasible. A week after the Hutu Power rally in late
October 1993, a commission of Rwandan army officers met to organize the program.
Just as Bagosora had indicated in early 1993, they recognized the need to distribute
firearms in a way that would avoid suspicions among the different layers of the
population and among political parties.19
By early 1994 planners met again and produced a document called Organization of
civilian self-defense (Organisation de lAuto-Dfense Civile). It was neither signed
nor dated, but its authenticity was established by Jean Kambanda, prime minister of the
interim government during the genocide. Investigators for the International Criminal
Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) seized the document when they arrested Kambanda in
1997. In a statement to the ICTR Appeals Chamber, Kambanda identified the

18
19

Ibid, pp. 180-181.

Commandement des Forces Armes Rwandaises en Exil, Contribution des FAR la Recherche de la Verit
sur le Drame Rwandais, 1995, Chapitre V, LAuto-Dfense Populaire.

document, said it was regarded as highly confidential, and said that it clearly predated
April 1994. Through analysis of the content and through comparison with other
documents and witness interviews, it appears that the document dates to mid-February
or at the latest to March 1994.
It is important to note who is to participate in the planned program, the proposed
organizational structure, the weapons called for, and the description of the groups to be
targeted by its activities. After an innocuous explanation of the need to organize the
population in order to deal with crime and vandalism, the document then moves to
discussing the need for popular resistance in the event of renewed combat. It
specifies that such resistance must be led by members of the armed forces (including
national police officers, retired soldiers and reservistsparticularly those who live in
civilian areas instead of in military camps) as well as by supporters of political parties that
defend the principle of the republic and democracy. At the time and during the
genocide this last phrase came to mean the Hutu Power parties. The plan, to be
implemented under the general chairmanship of the ministers of interior and defense,
created a complex hierarchy of organs and committees to coordinate military,
administrative, and political actors. It assigned a variety of tasks from the level of the
presidency and the military general staff down to the level of the administrative sector,
but in a striking omission, it assigned no task to the prime minister. The prime minister
in the months before April 1994, Agathe Uwiliyigiyimana, was not counted among the
supporters of Hutu Power and so despite her office, her ethnicity (Hutu), and her
political credentials, she was not included in the plan. Similarly, of the four burgomasters
in the city of Kigali, one was not involved in implementing the plan: he too was Hutu
but not a supporter of Hutu Power. These two leaders, like others opposed to
Habyarimana, were classed as accomplices and hence enemies by Hutu Power leaders.
Participants were to lead the population in self-defense against the RPF, protect public
property, obtain information on the presence of the enemy locally and denounce
infiltrators and enemy accomplices, provide information to the armed forces, and
counter any enemy action until the armed forces arrived. In a detailed analysis of
requirements by commune, the plan called for supplying participants with 4,995 firearms
and 499,500 bullets. It also mentioned the need for traditional weapons (bows and
arrows, spears), as had Bagosora a year before, and said that people should be
encouraged to get these weapons for themselves.

The program was to defend against actual RPF combatants in uniform but also against
disguised RPF and their accomplices: language so broad as to be easily interpreted
as encompassing Tutsi civilians.20

Letters of late March 1994

On March 29, 1994, army officers again met to plan the defense of neighborhoods in
Kigali [and] the tracking down and neutralization of infiltrators in different parts of the
city. In a report on the meeting to the minister of defense, Chief of Staff Gen.
Dogratias Nsabimana said that soldiers living outside military camps in civilian parts of
the city as well as former soldiers would command the recruits, who were to be reliable
civilians. Groups were to be organized within administrative units with direction
provided by soldiers working closely with administrative authorities. He said that the
minister of defense and minister of interior were to be contacted to obtain the necessary
firearms for the civilians. The military commander for operations in the city, present at
the meeting, indicated that some parts of the city were already organized and awaiting
arms and other supplies. It was reported that other civilian self-defense efforts were
already underway in areas outside the city and should continue in collaboration with
administrative authorities. Given the scarcity of firearms, it was suggested that the
burgomasters should instruct people in the use of traditional weapons, including swords,
spears, bows and arrows, and machetes. The commander of operations in the city was
asked to quickly prepare lists of members of the armed forces living in residential areas,
and the prefect was asked to provide similar information on reservists and reliable
civilians as soon as possible.21
The next day the prefect of the city of Kigali sent the chief of staff a list of several
hundred reservists and others (presumably civilians) chosen for civilian defense. Their
names were listed by cell, sector, and commune, the standard administrative units.22

20

Mimeographed document, Organisation de lAuto-Dfense Civile.

21

Dogratias Nsabimana, Gnral-Major, Chef EM AR, to the Minister of Defense, No. 0599/G3.9.2, Kigali,
March 30, 1994. The Linda Melvern Genocide Archive, The Hugh Owen Library, University of Wales.
22

Le Prefet de Prefecture de la Ville de Kigali, Renzaho Tharcisse, Col. I.G., to Monsieur le Chef dEtat-Major
de lArme Rwandaise, no. 14/04.07, Kigali, March 31, 1994. The Linda Melvern Genocide Archive, The Hugh
Owen Library, University of Wales.

April 7, 1994: Massive Killing Begins

The plan works
President Habyarimana was killed when his plane was shot down on the evening of April
6.23 Within hours members of the armed forces had killed political leaders opposed to
Hutu Power, thus fulfilling the prediction made by the head of military intelligence in
July 1992. Among the first killed was the prime minister, Agathe Uwilingiyimana. These
slain politicians were seen as responsible for concessions to the RPF and several of
them, including Madame Uwilingiyimana, were also seen as obstacles to installing a new
political configuration, comprised only of Hutu Power supporters. After these leaders
from the previous government were eliminated on April 7, military and political leaders
of Hutu Power designated and installed a new government to implement its objectives.
Soon after members of the armed forces, reservists, Interahamwe and other militia, and
ordinary civilians began hunting down and killing Tutsi. At sites where Tutsi had
gathered in the thousands and put up resistance, soldiers and national police officers led
the attacks, sometimes even using such weapons as mortars. The militia under political
party leadership, and ordinary civilians organized by the local administrative officials,
followed up the initial assaults, using a few firearms and many traditional weapons.
The soldiers and national police officers guarded the most important barriers and
patrolled the main roads while the Interahamwe militia and the ordinary civilians
guarded barriers at less crucial points, such as on local roads, and carried out footpatrols
in neighborhoods.
The preparations for civilian self-defense had not been finished when the unexpected
assassination of President Habyarimana triggered its implementation, but the basic lines
were clear enough to make the process work: military and administrative officials
cooperated, members of the armed forces providing the military know-how and the
administrators supplying the manpower, recruited according to administrative unit of
residence.

23

Although those responsible have not been definitively identified, the long-awaited results of a French judicial
inquiry into the shooting down of the airplane are said to attribute the crime to the RPF, a position held also by
several former RPF soldiers now in exile.

The self-defense system formalized

With a Hutu Power government in power after April 9, 1994, those who had secretly
elaborated a self-defense plan could now make it formal and public. Ten days after the
government took office, the authorities directed recruitment for civilian self-defense in
the southern prefecture of Butare and elsewhere. The local military commander
cooperated with administrative officials, the burgomasters and communal councilors to
recruit young men who were to be selected according to the administrative unit in which
they lived, to remain resident at home, and to be trained in the use of arms by communal
police officers or reservists.24
The new prime minister, Jean Kambanda, and the minister of interior further formalized
the self-defense program in decrees signed on May 25, 1994. According to former Prime
Minister Kambanda, several ministers referred frequently to the document on
Organisation de lAuto-Dfense Civile, in the course of cabinet discussions about the
program.25 This assertion is borne out by a comparison of the late May decrees with the
document from February or March 1994. The same objectives are listed for the
program, and some of the same phrases are used to describe positions and
responsibilities in the system. As with the earlier plan, the ministers of interior and
defense were to head the system, but in the later version, the minister of interior is the
chair and the minister of defense the vice-chair, instead of the two being of equal
importance.26
With the formal establishment of the system, the Interahamwe became incorporated into
it, their highly trained groups serving as the elite units to lead the less well trained or
untrained ordinary civilians. According to Kambanda, the militarily trained Interahamwe
were systematically incorporated into the civil defense under the label youth of
republican tendencies (a phrase much like that found in the Organisation de lAutoDfense Civile document), thus in effect giving clear government approval to the
crimes in which they had been engaged since early April.27

24

Lt. Col. Tharcisse Muvunyi, Comd. Place BUT-GIK to Monsieur le Bourgmestre, no. 0085/MSC.1.1, April 21,
1994.
25

Jean Kambanda, Elements de Defense de Jean Kambanda, January 28, 2000, p. 28.

26

Jean Kambanda, Premier Ministre to Monsieur le Prfet (Tous), Directive du Premier Ministre aux Prefets
pour lOrganisation de lAuto-Dfense Civile, no. 024/02.3, May 25, 1994 and Edouard Karemera, Ministre de
lIntrieur et du Dveloppement Communal, to Monsieur le Prfet (Tous), May 25, 1994.
27

Jean Kambanda, Les Circonstances entourant mon arrestation le 18 juillet 1997 Nairobi au Kenya, ma
detention en Tanzanie, mon transfert aux Pays-Bas et mon procs en appel, a document with 25 annexes,
dated October 19, 1999.

In the weeks before its formal establishment, as in the weeks after, the civilian selfdefense system was used to mobilize ordinary civilians to hunt Tutsi civilians who had
been identified with the military enemy. Using the civilian self-defense effort against
non-combatants, military, administrative and political authorities transformed the system
from a potentially legitimate form of self-defense into a violation of international law; by
defining the group to be targeted as Tutsi and seeking their elimination, the authorities
transformed the self-defense system into a weapon for genocide.