The Second Republic – The Regime of Habyarimana

Following a trend then common in Africa,⁸² President Habyarimana, in 1975, instituted the one-party system with the creation of the Mouvement révolutionnaire national pour le développement (MRND), of which every Rwandese was a member ipso facto, including the newborn. Since the party encompassed everyone, there was no room for political pluralism. The structures of a totalitarian regime were put in place systematically. The party was everywhere, from the very top of the government hierarchy to its very base.⁸³

From the beginning of 1980s, the external factors which had encouraged economic development were reversed, with the progressive decrease of external aid and serious deterioration of terms of trade.⁸⁴ The losses were felt at every level of Rwandese society, causing widespread discontent.

Growing inequality between most rural and some urban dwellers exacerbated the frustration of peasant farmers.⁸⁵

79 Prunier (1997), supra note 73, pp. 56-62. Before these incursions ceased, 20,000 Tutsi had been killed, and another 300,000 had fled to the Congo, Burundi, Uganda, and what was then called Tanganyika.

80 Gasana, E; et al, supra note 75, p. 157; Kakwenzire, J; et al “The Development and Consolidation of Extremist Forces in Rwanda 1990-1994” in Adelman, H & Suhrke, A. (1999) The Path of a Genocide: The Rwanda Crisis from Uganda to Zaire, New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, p. 19.

81 Gasana et al, supra note 75, pp. 155-158.

82See generally Decalo, S. (1990) Coups and Army rule in Africa , New Haven: Yale University Press.

83All officials were chosen from party cadres. Article 7 of the 1978 Constitution made Rwanda officially a one-party State with the consequence that the MRND became a "State-party", as it formed one and the same entity with the Government.

84Gasana et al, supra note 75, pp. 159.

85OAU, Report of the International Panel of Eminent Personalities (2000) Rwanda: The Preventable Genocide OAU/IPEP/PANEL also available at <http://www.oau-oua.org/Document/ipep/rwanda-e/EN.htm> last visited, September 8, 2009, (hereinafter referred to as “OAU Panel Report”).

The inability to control the rapid demographic increase exacerbated the land-shortage situation, thus leading to potentially explosive social disorders.⁸⁶ By the end of the 1980s, the number of peasants who were land-poor (less than half a hectare) and those who were relatively land-rich (more than one hectare) both rose. By 1990, over one-quarter of the entire rural population was entirely landless; in some districts, the figure reached 50 per cent. Not only was poverty on the rise, but so was inequality.⁸⁷

In addition, although already dependent to an unhealthy extent on international assistance, the Habyarimana government reluctantly concluded that it had little choice but to accept a Structural Adjustment Programme from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank⁸⁸ in return for a loan conditional on the rigid and harsh policies that characterized western economic orthodoxy of the time.⁸⁹

Like his predecessor, Grégoire Kayibanda, Habyarimana strengthened the policy of discrimination against the Tutsi by applying a similar quota system in universities and government services. A policy of systematic discrimination was pursued even among the Hutu themselves, in favour of Hutu from Habyarimana's native region, namely Gisenyi and Ruhengeri in the north-west, to the detriment of Hutu from other regions.⁹⁰ This last aspect of Habyarimana's policy, considerably weakened his power: henceforth, he faced opposition not only from the Tutsi but also from the Hutu, who felt discriminated against and most of whom came from the central and southern regions.

Like Kayibanda, Habyarimana became increasingly isolated and the base of his regime narrowed down to a small intimate circle. Rwandese used to call that group "akazu" (a small hut) in reference to the most restrictive or narrow political circle, which surrounded the mwami (King).⁹¹ This

86Rwanda population density was 221.9 inhabitants per Km² in 1970, 283.5 in 1978 and 386 in 1986. J C Williams (1995) Cahiers africains 14. The economic crisis led to endemic malnutrition in the country which, between 1984 and 1989, transformed itself into food shortage and even into famine in 1989 in Gikongoro. That social crisis proved even more pronounced among the rural youth. Those youth with uncertain futures no longer adhered to the official slogans.

Many of them went to try their luck in the informal urban sector. Over the years, there developed a floating mass of unemployed young men and women. These men were there in addition to those enrolled in the militia Interhamwe (Those Who Stand Together or Those Who Attack Together) who were the spearhead of genocide. See also Gasana et al, supra note 75, pp. 159.

87 DesForges, A. (1999) Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda, New York: Human Rights Watch.

88In this regard, a lesson is to be learned in the analysis of the conflict in Rwanda for the international financial institutions. “Even if the adjustment programme did not contribute directly to the tragic events of 1994, such a reckless disregard for social and political sensitivities in such a conspicuously sensitive situation would unquestionably have increased the risk of creating or compounding a potentially explosive situation.” See OAU Panel Report (2000).

89Woodward, D. (1996) The IMF, the World bank and Economic Policy in Rwanda: Economic and Social Implications, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 25; see also A Storey (1999/03) 17 Development Policy Review 1.

90Gasana, E; et al, supra note 75, p. 158.

91Ibid, p. 159.

further radicalized the opposition whose ranks swelled more and more.⁹² In October 1990, an attack was launched from Uganda by the Rwandese Patriotic Army (RPA), military wing of the Rwandese Patriotic Front (RPF), a political organization whose forebear, the Alliance Rwandaise pour l'Unité Nationale ("ARUN"), was formed in 1979 by Tutsi exiles based in neighbouring countries and elsewhere in the world.⁹³ With the military assistance of France, the RPA advance was halted.⁹⁴ After that, the RPA installed itself in the north from where it launched a guerilla war, under close supports from Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni, who paid tribute to the RPF for the military assistance he received from them during his guerilla war aimed at ousting Milton Obote.

To understand the violence of the RPF, it is necessary to go back a bit to its Ugandan origins. The hard core of the RPF was made up of men who were young boys in Uganda in the early 1980s.

They grew up as refugees in the violence of Uganda civil wars.⁹⁵ Their first experience of blood came with the Idi Amin massacres of the 1978-1979 war with Tanzania, and then later they suffered from the anti-Rwandese pogroms of 1982 and joined the Museveni’s guerilla forces.⁹⁶ There they not only fought, but they also witnessed army government massacring civilians in the Luweero region. Once they won the war they were quickly pressed again into combat, this time in the North, against troops of the “prophetess” Alice Lakwena. Now the tables were turned; this time they were the “forces of law and order” and it was the local population who were the insurgents. They in turn committed massacres; to such an extent that President Museveni had to send special military judges to the north to curb his own army. One of these judges was Paul Kagame, and some of the men he had to judge were later his own subordinates in the RPF. The whole life history of these forces therefore, even before they set foot on Rwandese soil had been full of the sound and the furry of civil wars, and for them violence was not exceptional; it was a normal state of affairs.⁹⁷

92Ibid.

93The Rwandese Patriotic Front demanded the implementation of the rule of law, the abolition of the policy of ethnic and regional discrimination as well as the right for refugees to return to their motherland. See Prunier (1997), supra note 73, p. 74.

94 Ibid, pp. 101-102.

95 There is abundant literature of varying interests on the political convulsions of Uganda between 1979 and mid-1990s.

Among the most interesting works, one could mention Dodge, C and Raundalen, M (Eds.) (1987) War, Violence and Children in Uganda, Oslo: Norwegian University Press; Kasozi, A. (1994) The Social Origins of Violence in Uganda (1964-1985), Montreal: McGill University Press; Gersony, R. (1997) The Anguish of Northern Uganda, Kampala:

USAID; Ondonda, A. (1998) Museveni’s Long March, Kampala: Fountain Publishers; Finnstrom, S. (2003) Living with Bad Surroundings: War and Existential Uncertainty in Acholiland, Northern Uganda, Uppsala: Uppsala University Press, and many more.

96 During the Uganda civil war, since Museveni was a Munyankole Muhima, also suspected to be of Tutsi origin, Obote’s thugs of Uganda Peoples Congress (UPC) Youth Wing attacked and killed Rwandese Tutsi refugees in Ankole whom they assimilated to their Bahima cousins.

97 Prunier, G. (2009). From Genocide to Continental War: The Congo Conflict and the Crisis of Contemporary Africa, London: Hurst & Company, p. 13.