Peter Ruti
Africa-Press – Rwanda. The Habyarimana regime epitomises the Genocide perpetrated against the Tutsi in 1994. The Genocide against the Tutsi was a culmination of what had been happening across the two immediate post-colonial regimes characterised by Hutuism ideology.
The assertion from some circles attributing the Genocide against the Tutsi to being the effect of Habiyariman’s death is an inaccuracy. One cannot write about the Habyarimana regime without associating it with the Genocide against the Tutsi.
Independence was attributed to the achievement of the 1959 Hutu Revolution. It was led by the ethnically radical PARMEHUTU party.
Its ideology promoted and encouraged the indiscriminate persecution of the Tutsi across the country. Post-independence Rwanda was marred by ethnic based hatred, hence the dehumanisation, persecution, segregation and exclusion of the Tutsi through cycles of massacres, unpunished killings and repetitive forced exile.
Rwanda under the First Republic and Second Republic
The hatred against the Tutsi that characterised the First and Second Republics was based on spreading the ideology of Hutuism.
This ideology is best illustrated by the 10 Hutu commandments issued and first published in 1959 by the APROSOMA political party. They were re-published in the newspaper Kangura in its December 1990 edition with the endorsement of the MRND-led Genocidal government.
The 10 commandments constituted a solid foundation for division, hatred and the persecution of the Tutsi since 1959. It attained its peak with the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi.
The First Republic, under Grégoire Kayibanda‘s presidency, asserted its legitimacy and power on the social and political persecution of the Tutsi and the mass adherence of the population to the PARMEHUTU ideology. This political party openly preached hatred against the Tutsi, calling them snakes, cockroaches, untrustworthy, and labelling them as foreigners, who should be sent back to where they supposedly came from – Abyssinia-Ethiopia. They organised cyclical killings of the Tutsi; in 1963-1967, in 1973, and later, that further sent waves of Tutsi into exile.
Through sensitisation and propaganda, local political and administrative authorities urged the population in their jurisdictions to persecute the Tutsi. Intense anti-Tutsi propaganda constituted the bulk of President Kayibanda’s public speeches, as well as radio broadcasts, popular songs, school programmes and more. Such propaganda was used to dehumanise the Tutsi, accusing them of being foreigners who had conquered and subjugated the Hutu for centuries.
The Tutsi who remained in the country were deprived of their political and civil rights. They were denied by the state the right to education, the right to employment, the right to civil participation and other human rights. In one of his public speeches, Kayibanda said that in Rwanda there were, “two nations in a single state, two nations between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy, who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts and feelings as if they were dwellers of different zones, or inhabitants of different planets”.
In the eyes of President Kayibanda himself, social cohesion between the Hutu and Tutsi could only be achieved by the establishment of two separate zones; otherwise one ethnic group had to disappear to allow the other to prosper.
Kayibanda went further by submitting a proposal to the UN and the former Belgian colonial authority for the redistribution of zones to establish Hutu-land and Tutsi-land. Tutsi-land would be the more habitable part of Bugesera, Buganza, and all surrounding territories that had become the provinces (prefectures) of Kibungo and Umutara (eastern Rwanda); the remaining part of the country would be the “Hutu-land”.
In December 1963, the Tutsi were massacred in killing sprees across the country that were organized by the Government of President Kayibanda. On December 21, 1963, Rwandan refugees from Burundi planned an armed attack in Bugesera.
They managed to capture Gako military barracks and advance up to the Akagera bridge.
Following this event, Kayibanda’s administration retaliated with the mass killings of the Tutsi in Bugesera, which spread to other regions of the country. In Gikongoro, the killing of the Tutsi began on December 24, 1963, the day before Christmas Day, which was labelled “The Bloody Christmas”. These killings were organised and supervised by the then Minister of Agriculture, Ephrem Nkezabera, and the then Prefect of Gikongoro Prefecture, André Nkeramugaba.
Source: The New Times
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