How Habyarimana lied about Tutsi massacres in Gisenyi, Ruhengeri

President Juvenal Habyarimana’s regime blinded the international community on the Tutsi massacres in Gisenyi and Ruhengeri while preparing the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi where more than a million people were murdered.

Radio Rwanda on March 12, 1991, stated that there was no ethnic unrest in Ruhengeri yet all Tutsi teachers were imprisoned for allegedly being linked to the RPA rebels. They were killed afterwards.

Habyarimana used the same fabrication on January 25, 1993 –when the extent of killings was already clear – and described the violence as a general reaction against the Arusha Accords.

In his letter of February 5, 1993, to the Fédération Internationale pour les Droits Humains, Habyarimana argued that the conflict between the Hutu and Tutsi was the inevitable result of the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) invasion.

On February 8, 1993, Habyarimana declared: “These unfortunate and reprehensible massacres in the north of the country were organized and made worse by those who have cynically exploited them for political ends and who have used them as a pretext to launch an attack that they had been preparing for a long time.”

The international community believed Habyarimana’s lies. No investigation was carried out as the prefect of Ruhengeri, Charles Nzabagereza, said that there was no reason to “unearth events that could cause unrest among the population.”

Later, their lies were exposed. Those who led the massacres declared that there were Tutsi killed because some of them were fighting alongside RPF. Genocide deniers advance the theory that Habyarimana’s plane crash, on April 6, 1994, triggered the killings.

However, many reports proved them wrong. It was planned and tested in Gisenyi and Ruhengeri, among other prefectures.  In March 1991, 277 Tutsi (Bagogwe) were killed in Gisenyi and Ruhengeri. These massacres took place in Nkuli, Kinigi, and Mukingo communes of Ruhengeri; Gaseke, Giciye, Karago, Mutura, Kanama, and Rwerere of Gisenyi.

A secret report from the genocidal government revealed that more than 360 victims massacred within a week of late 1990 in the Ngororero sub-prefecture. The local civil and military authorities including the prefect Nzabagerageza and that of Gisenyi, Come Bizimungu, as well as the bourgmestres of the municipalities concerned, were involved in these killings. There was direct involvement of other VIPs of the regime including then Minister of Public Works, Joseph Nzirorera, Habyarimana’s advisor, Col Elie Sagatwa, and Protais Zigiranyirazo, the president's brother-in-law.

Since 1990, when Habyarimana’s regime was massacring the Tutsi in Gisenyi and Ruhengeri, access to places of these massacres was restricted to the officials of the prefectures, the soldiers and the agents of the security services who were responsible.

Journalists also could not access the areas, except those from Radio Rwanda and Kangura, a Kinyarwanda-French magazine that served to stoke ethnic hatred in the run-up to the Genocide.