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

The border between Uganda and Rwanda is a simple line on a map, a colonial fiction drawn through the hills. On October 1, 1990, that line was erased by force. Thousands of soldiers of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, the sons of the Tutsi refugees from 1959, crossed into the country their parents had fled. They were no longer exiles begging for a right to return; they were an army, coming home by the barrel of a gun.

In Kigali, the Habyarimana regime reacted with a potent mixture of genuine panic and cynical opportunism. The invasion was a terrifying military threat, but it was also the perfect excuse. State propaganda went into overdrive, painting the RPF not as a specific army of exiles, but as a vast, existential Tutsi conspiracy. In the capital, moderate Hutus and prominent Tutsi civilians, entirely unconnected to the invasion, were arrested. In the countryside, massacres of Tutsi villagers were carried out in retaliation, a brutal preview of the logic of collective punishment that would later define the genocide.

The civil war that followed was a bloody, grinding affair that eventually forced the regime to the negotiating table. In Arusha, Tanzania, under the weary eye of international diplomats, a peace was brokered. The Arusha Accords were a landmark agreement, a complex but hopeful blueprint for a new Rwanda. It called for a power-sharing government, for the integration of RPF soldiers into the national army, for the return of the refugees. For a brief moment, it seemed peace was possible.

But in the smoky backrooms of Kigali, the Hutu Power extremists who surrounded President Habyarimana saw the Accords not as a path to peace, but as an act of treason. A death sentence. Sharing power with the RPF would mean the end of their kleptocratic rule, the end of their absolute control, the end of their ideology. As they listened to the radio broadcasts celebrating the impending peace, they began to make a different, more meticulous plan. They saw that if 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 to make peace with. The peace deal was the final catalyst.

The Discourse 15: The Final Catalysts

15.1 The Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF): The Return of the Exiles
The 1990 invasion of Rwanda by the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) and the subsequent Arusha Accords did not cause the genocide, but they served as the final, powerful catalysts. They provided the Hutu Power extremists with both the perfect pretext (a nation at war) and the ultimate political motive (the threat of losing power through peace) to transform their long-held ideology of hate into a concrete and meticulously planned "Final Solution."

The RPF was formed in the late 1980s by the children of the Tutsi refugees who had been driven out of Rwanda in 1959. Trained and hardened as part of the Ugandan army, their stated goal was not ethnic domination, but the right of all refugees to return to their homeland, the abolition of the ethnic ID card system, and the establishment of a genuine democracy. See citation [1]. On October 1, 1990, the RPF invaded northern Rwanda, initiating the Rwandan Civil War.

15.2 The Civil War as an Accelerant of Hate
The Habyarimana regime used the RPF invasion to immediately and dramatically escalate its anti-Tutsi propaganda and violence. It falsely portrayed the RPF not as a specific political-military group, but as a vanguard for a monolithic Tutsi conspiracy to re-enslave the Hutu people. This provided the pretext for the regime to conduct widespread arrests of Tutsi intellectuals and business leaders inside the country and to begin the formal training and arming of the Interahamwe civilian militias, ostensibly as a home guard to fight the RPF. See citation [2]. In reality, they were being prepared as the future foot soldiers of the genocide.

15.3 The Arusha Accords: A Peace Deal Too Dangerous to Accept
Under immense international pressure, the Habyarimana regime was forced to negotiate with the RPF, culminating in the 1993 Arusha Accords. This comprehensive peace agreement was a monumental achievement of diplomacy. It called for the repatriation of refugees, a new power-sharing transitional government that would include both the RPF and Hutu opposition parties, and the integration of RPF soldiers into the national army. See citation [3].

15.4 The Motive for Genocide
For the Hutu Power extremists of the akazu, the Arusha Accords were not a peace deal; they were a death sentence. The accords would have dismantled their single-party state, diluted their control of the army, and, most importantly, stripped them of the immense wealth they had accumulated through their kleptocratic rule. It was the prospect of losing power through this forced peace that provided the ultimate motive for the genocide. See citation [4]. The "Final Solution" was no longer just an extremist fantasy; it had become, in their eyes, the only way to "neutralize" the Tutsi population and the Hutu opposition in order to void the accords and retain absolute power. The assassination of Habyarimana on April 6, 1994, was not the cause of the genocide; it was merely the pre-planned trigger.

References

1. Dallaire, Roméo. Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda. Random House Canada, 2003.

2. Des Forges, Alison. Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda. Human Rights Watch, March 1999. https://www.hrw.org/reports/1999/rwanda/

3. United Nations. "The United Nations and Rwanda, 1993-1996" (The UN Blue Book Series, Volume X). https://peacekeeping.un.org/sites/default/files/pub/bookblue.pdf

4. Gourevitch, Philip. We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998.