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Chapter 15: The Roots of Hate V: The Cockpit of War: The RPF Invasion and the Arusha Accords

On the last night of September 1990, David sat cleaning his rifle in the cool, thin air of the Ugandan highlands. He was twenty-one years old, a veteran of the brutal bush war that had brought President Museveni to power, and he had never, not once, set foot in the country he called home. For David, "home" was a story, a collection of half-remembered lullabies and his father’s bitter memories of a hill consumed by fire. Thirty-one years had passed since his family had joined the sorrowful exodus of 1959. He was a son of the diaspora, born and raised in the dust and stateless limbo of a refugee camp. Rwanda was not a memory; it was a promise, a cause, a destination.

At dawn on October 1st, he stood with four thousand others at Kagitumba, a small border post that was nothing more than a stripe of red dirt and a flimsy wooden barrier. This was the line drawn by the white men, the line that had made his father a refugee and him a man without a country. He belonged to a new force, the Rwandan Patriotic Front. The name was a declaration. They were no longer exiles begging for a right to return; they were an army, coming home by the barrel of a gun. As they crossed the imaginary line, moving with the disciplined silence of a professional military force, David felt the weight of a generation's vow settling on his shoulders. He was the child of the refugee, and he was fulfilling a silent promise made in the firelight of a burning nation.

In Kigali, the news of the invasion landed with the force of a bomb, creating a potent mixture of genuine panic and cynical opportunism within the Habyarimana regime. For Olivier, Paul’s son, the war arrived as a sudden, sickening change in the atmosphere of the city. The familiar, avuncular voices of the government announcers on the radio were replaced by hard, martial tones. They spoke of the invaders as the inyenzi, the cockroaches, the same dehumanizing term from the 1960s, now resurrected with a new, terrifying venom. They did not describe the RPF as a finite army of exiles; they portrayed it as a vast, existential Tutsi conspiracy, the return of the ancient feudal masters come to re-enslave every Hutu. And they declared, with chilling finality, that every Tutsi still inside Rwanda was a secret ibyitso, an accomplice.

The next morning, military jeeps screeched to a halt in Olivier’s neighborhood. He watched through a crack in the curtains as soldiers from the Presidential Guard, working from typed lists, kicked down the door of a wealthy Tutsi tailor and dragged him out. They did the same to a prominent Tutsi intellectual and a high school teacher. But they did not stop there. The second wave of arrests targeted Hutus: a journalist known for criticizing the government's corruption, a university professor who advocated for multi-party democracy, a businessman who was a key figure in one of the new opposition parties. The regime's message was brutally clear: the war was not just against the Tutsi, but against anyone who dared to oppose them.

The civil war that followed was a bloody, grinding stalemate. The RPF was a superior fighting force, but Habyarimana had the unconditional backing of the French government, whose Mitterrand administration saw the Tutsi-led RPF as a hostile "Anglophone" force and provided crucial military support to the Francophone Hutu regime. For three years the country bled. Finally, under immense international pressure, the regime was forced to the negotiating table. In the cool, air-conditioned conference rooms of Arusha, Tanzania, a peace was brokered. The Arusha Accords were a landmark agreement, a complex but profoundly hopeful blueprint for a shared future. There would be a power-sharing transitional government, bringing in the RPF and the internal Hutu opposition parties. The victorious RPF soldiers would be integrated into a new, unified national army. The refugees, all of them, would finally be allowed to come home. On a hot August day in 1993, a reluctant President Habyarimana, with a forced smile for the cameras, shook hands with the RPF leadership. For a brief, fragile moment, peace seemed possible.

But in a dark, smoke-filled office at the Ministry of Defence in Kigali, Colonel Théoneste Bagosora and the inner circle of the akazu watched the broadcast of the signing ceremony with cold contempt. Bagosora was a Hutu supremacist, an ideologue who saw the world in purely racial terms. He viewed the Arusha Accords not as a path to peace, but as a document of total and humiliating surrender. To share power with the RPF and the Hutu moderates was to surrender the Hutu Republic. To integrate the Tutsi-led army was to surrender the ultimate guarantee of Hutu dominance. To allow the refugees to return was to surrender the demographic calculus of power. It was, in his eyes, a death sentence for his world.

He switched off the television, the smiling faces dissolving into a pinprick of white light. He saw Habyarimana not as his leader, but as a traitor who had sold out the revolution. That evening, he convened a meeting of the faithful: the heads of the presidential militias, the inner circle of Hutu Power. They had to prepare for what Bagosora himself chillingly called "the apocalypse." They began to refine their death lists, which included not just Tutsi, but every Hutu moderate who had supported the peace deal. They accelerated the training and arming of the Interahamwe militia. They placed a massive order for half a million machetes from China. For them, the choice was simple and logical. If a forced peace meant their political death, then the only alternative was a war so total, so absolute, that there would be no one left on the other side with whom to make peace. The Arusha Accords, the international community's greatest hope, had just become the extremists' final and most powerful motive for genocide.

The Discourse 15: The Final Catalysts

15.1 The RPF Invasion and the Role of France
The invasion of Rwanda on October 1, 1990, by the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) was the cataclysm that drove the Hutu Power regime into its final, most radical phase. The RPF was not a foreign army; it was an army born of Rwanda's own history of exclusion, comprised primarily of the children of Tutsi refugees from 1959. See [citation 1]. The invasion triggered a bloody three-year civil war. Throughout this period, the Habyarimana regime was sustained by its most powerful international ally: France. Under President François Mitterrand, the French government provided critical and unconditional military, financial, and diplomatic support to the regime. Framed by a geopolitical lens that saw the English-speaking RPF as a threat to French influence in Africa (la Francophonie), France armed and trained the Rwandan army (the FAR), provided artillery support during key battles, and used its diplomatic muscle to shield the regime from international criticism, even as evidence of massacres and extremist plotting emerged. This unwavering support emboldened the Hutu Power extremists, giving them a sense of impunity and ensuring they never felt sufficient pressure to genuinely seek a peaceful compromise. See [citation 2].

15.2 The Arusha Accords: A Peace Deal Too Dangerous to Accept
Despite the military stalemate, immense international pressure forced the Habyarimana regime to negotiate, culminating in the Arusha Peace Accords of August 1993. This comprehensive agreement was, on paper, a monumental achievement of diplomacy. It laid out a detailed blueprint for national reconciliation, calling for a broad-based transitional government that would strip the presidency of most of its powers and share ministries among the ruling party, the RPF, and the powerful Hutu opposition parties. It also mandated the integration of RPF and government soldiers into a new, smaller unified army and organized the repatriation of refugees. See [citation 3]. For the international community, Rwandan moderates, and the democratic Hutu opposition, the Accords were a path to a new, power-sharing republic. But for the Hutu Power extremists of the akazu, the document was a death warrant for their entire political and economic system.

15.3 The Two-Front War: The Motive for Genocide
For the extremists, the Arusha Accords represented an existential threat on two fronts. First, a power-sharing government, a merged army, and the return of Tutsi refugees meant the end of their racially pure, single-party state and their kleptocratic control over the economy. The political scientist Scott Straus confirms that the prospect of being forced to peacefully surrender power was the ultimate, rational motive for the genocide against the Tutsi, whom they viewed as the racial enemy. See [citation 4]. Second, the Accords also empowered the Hutu opposition parties, who were their direct rivals for power within the Hutu community. From the moment the civil war began, the regime had conflated the RPF with all forms of opposition. The first wave of arrests after the invasion included Hutu democrats and journalists, and the Hutu Power ideology that crystallized in this period was equally aimed at eliminating these "traitors" and "accomplices," the political enemy. The plan for genocide was therefore a brutally logical two-step solution to this two-front threat. Step one: assassinate the Hutu moderate leadership to create a political vacuum. Step two: exterminate the Tutsi population to liquidate the RPF's social base and render the Arusha Accords meaningless.

15.4 The Victims of the Apocalypse
The assassination of President Habyarimana on April 6, 1994, was merely the pre-planned trigger for this "apocalypse." Within an hour, soldiers of the Presidential Guard were systematically executing the moderate Hutu leadership—Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana, the President of the Supreme Court, and dozens of other politicians who were on their death lists. With the political opposition eliminated, they turned to the racial enemy. Over the next 100 days, they murdered at least 800,000 people, overwhelmingly Tutsi, in one of the most intense and horrifying killing campaigns in human history. The genocide also consumed Rwanda's third ethnic group, the Twa, who, though not a political threat, were murdered simply for not being Hutu. The genocide was not a spontaneous explosion of hate; it was the final, most radical act of a desperate elite determined to retain power at any cost, the culmination of a century of manufactured division.