Word: habyarimana
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...litter the once manicured lawn. A tail wing juts through banana leaves. This is ground zero of Rwanda's carnage, where the bloodletting that has taken more than 200,000 lives had its catalyst. On a quiet evening two months ago, a French-made Mystere-Falcon carrying President Juvenal Habyarimana of Rwanda and the President of Burundi from peace talks in Tanzania was hit by rocket fire and slammed into the earth just outside the compound, killing all 10 on board. The impact blasted bodies and wreckage more than 500 ft., through a perimeter wall and up to the steps...
...death of the President blew the lid off simmering ethnic and political rivalries in the tiny Central African country. Hutu government soldiers and militia blamed the mainly Tutsi rebels of the Rwandan Patriotic Front for shooting down the plane; the rebels and others suspected hawkish extremists within Habyarimana's presidential guard. The same night, the massacres in the streets of Kigali began as Hutu sought revenge. Eight weeks and several hundred thousand lives later, the true cause of the crash is still a mystery...
...have contact with the so- called government in Kigali, which consists of a gang of murderers." Neither French troops nor French-equipped African troops are acceptable to the mainly Tutsi Rwanda Patriotic Front: France helped arm and train their opponents, the Hutu forces of the late President Juvenal Habyarimana...
Unless led by a hated tyrant, a country that loses its head of state by violence often goes a bit mad. In Rwanda the madness was spreading even before the night of April 6, when the plane carrying President Juvenal Habyarimana and his neighboring head of state Cyprien Ntaryamira from Burundi was shot out of the sky over the capital of Kigali, plunging into the gardens of the presidential palace. Habyarimana was a Hutu who had grabbed power in a coup in 1973 and worked hard to hang onto it. He was on his way back from a peace conference...
When it suited his purposes, President Habyarimana could behave like a model multiculturalist. By the late 1980s his economy was gasping, famine was spreading, and his hold on power looked increasingly fragile. In a gesture of reform he loosened controls on the press and began negotiating to allow competing parties into the government. But many thought he was still dragging his feet. In 1990 the exiled Tutsi of the Rwandan Patriotic Front invaded from Uganda and launched a civil war that came to a halt only last August with the Arusha accords, which mandated that power be shared. Tutsi would...