Juvénal Habyarimana

Juvénal Habyarimana (Kinyarwanda: [hɑβɟɑːɾímɑ̂ːnɑ]; French: [ʒyvenal abjaʁimana]; 8 March 1937 – 6 April 1994) was a Rwandan politician and military dictator who was the second president of Rwanda, from 1973 until his assassination in 1994.

An ethnic Hutu, Habyarimana served in several security positions in the First Rwandese republic including minister of defense under Rwanda's second president, Grégoire Kayibanda. After overthrowing Kayibanda in a coup in 1973, he became the country's new president of the Second Rwandese Republic. Habyarimana later continued his predecessor's pro-Hutu policies. He was nicknamed Kinani, a Kinyarwanda word meaning "invincible".

Habyarimana led an authoritarian government, and electoral fraud was suspected for his unopposed re-elections: 98.99% of the vote on 24 December 1978, 99.97% of the vote on 19 December 1983, and 99.98% of the vote on 19 December 1988. During his rule, Rwanda became a totalitarian, one-party state in which his MRND-party enforcers required people to chant and dance in adulation of the president at mass pageants of political "animation". While the country as a whole had become slightly less impoverished during Habyarimana's tenure, the great majority of Rwandans remained in circumstances of extreme poverty.

In 1990, the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) launched the Rwandan Civil War against his government. After three years of war, Habyarimana signed the Arusha Accords in 1993 with the RPF as a peace agreement. The following year, he died under mysterious circumstances when his plane, also carrying the President of Burundi, Cyprien Ntaryamira, was shot down by a missile near Kigali. His assassination ignited ethnic tensions in the region and helped spark the Rwandan genocide.