Agathe Uwilingiyimana

This article or the following section is not adequately provided with supporting documents ( e.g. individual evidence ). Information without sufficient evidence could be removed soon. Please help Wikipedia by researching the information and including good evidence.

Extensive text without individual references.

Agathe Uwilingiyimana (born May 23, 1953 in Nyarhabengeri ; † April 7, 1994 in Kigali , Rwanda ) was a Rwandan politician and member of the opposition party Mouvement Démocratique Républicain. She was Prime Minister of Rwanda from July 18, 1993 until she was assassinated .

Early life

Agathe Uwilingiyimana, a Hutu , was born to farmers in 1953 in the village of Nyarhabengeri, about 140 kilometers southeast of Kigali . Shortly after she was born, the family left the Butare border region to work in the Belgian Congo . When Agathe was four years old, the family went back to Butare at the instigation of the father. After passing the entrance exam, Agathe was educated at Notre Dame des Citeaux High School and was allowed to teach the humanities at the age of twenty.

In 1976 she graduated in mathematics and chemistry and then became a mathematics teacher in a school in Butare. In the same year she married Ignace Barahira, a fellow student from her village. The first child was also born that year; the couple had five children in total.

At the age of thirty she taught chemistry at the Rwanda National University .

Promotion to Prime Minister

In 1986 she founded a savings and loan cooperative within the staff of the Butare Academy School. Because of their outstanding role within this self-help organization, the government in Kigali became aware of them; this wanted to use decision makers from the discontented south of the country. In 1989 she became a director in the Ministry of Commerce.

She joined the Republican and Democratic Movement (MDR), an opposition party, in 1992 and was appointed Minister of Education four months later by Dismas Nsensiyaremye , the first opposition prime minister in an alliance between President Juvénal Habyarimana and the five largest opposition parties. As Minister of Education, she abolished the ethnic quota system in the academic sector. This earned her hostility from extremist Hutu parties.

The Arusha Accords

The Habyarimana-Uwilingiyimana government continued to represent the dominant Hutu population and had the daunting task of concluding a peace deal with the invading Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), the Tutsi- dominated armed forces that have invaded Rwanda from Uganda since 1990 . Finally, on August 4, 1993, an agreement was reached between Habyarimana, the five largest opposition parties and the RPF itself; Under what has become known as the Arusha Agreement, it was agreed that Habyarimana's leading Mouvement républicain national pour la démocratie et le développement (MRND) would temporarily take over the presidency and the Prime Minister would be provided by the MDR. Following the suspension of Uwilingiyimana by the MDR, Faustin Twagiramungu , who also played a leading role in her removal, took over her position.

Administrative Prime Minister

President Habyarimana removed her from office just eighteen days after her appointment, although she remained in office as administrative prime minister for another eight months until her death in April 1994; this despite the strongest criticism of all Hutu-dominated parties, including her own MDR and President Habyarimana's party. In January 1994, the MRND held a press conference calling Uwilingiyimana a "political trickster".

The joint commitment to the "Transitional Broad Based Government" probably took place on January 8, 1994. That day the swearing-in of the entire government was planned, but after the morning ceremony in which the President was sworn in, the RPF and others left the event, so it had to be repeated that afternoon when the MPs were sworn in. Meanwhile, Uwilingiyimana wrote a letter to all parties suspending the pending ceremonies. She and a few others wanted to arrange for the ceremonies to be rescheduled a few days later; at that time the President would be on an overseas visit and she would have had the opportunity to empower the RPF with more authority. An officer of the Belgian army who was present at the time testified during the negotiations with the war crimes tribunal that it had been a coup in favor of the RPF. At this point Uwilingiyimana was moved to stand up for Faustin Twagiramungu. As a courtesy, she was promised a lower ministerial post in the new government. The RPF did not appear again for the planned celebrations, so that the establishment of the government had to be postponed. She agreed that the swearing-in should take place the next day.

The assassination

Talks between President Habyarimana, Uwilingiyimana and the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) never ended after the President's plane was shot down in a rocket attack on April 6, 1994 . In an interview with Radio France on the night of the attack, Uwilingiyimana said that there would be an investigation immediately. In her last documented words, she also said: “There is shooting, people are being terrorized, they are lying on the ground in their houses. I believe we are suffering from the consequences of the death of our head of state. We, the civilians, are in no way responsible for the death of our head of state. "

The UN peacekeepers sent this very night, before 3 am, an escort to her home in order to Radio Rwanda to bring, where they hold a live address to the people of Rwanda and wanted to call for calm.

Uwilingiyimana's house was protected by five Ghanaian soldiers from the UN troops as well as a unit of Rwandan police officers and thirteen Belgian soldiers. The Belgians claimed to have sent only ten men to Uwilingiyimana's house, but UN military observers from Kigali camp said that thirteen men were returned to the camp at 7:00 a.m. It can be assumed that the Belgians did not want to publicly admit that there were actually thirteen instead of ten men, because they were suspected of having been involved in the assassination attempt on the president. According to the Belgian army report KIBAT, Rwandan soldiers are said to have approached Uwilingiyimana's house between 5.55 a.m. and 6.45 a.m. They in turn suspected the Belgians of having participated in the attack. Finally they asked the blue helmets to lay down their weapons. The blue helmets immediately complied with the request of the Rwandan soldiers and handed over the weapons before 7 a.m., whereupon they were arrested. Ten of the Belgian blue helmets were later killed by Hutum militias.

Uwilingiyimana and her family, who were watching the events outside their home, fled with the help of Rwandan police officers who cut a hole in the fence surrounding the home. They arrived at the Kigali UNDP at around 7 a.m. and hid there. Eyewitnesses to the later investigation, initiated by the UN, stated that Rwandan soldiers entered the premises around 10 am looking for Agathe Uwilingiyimana; the circumstances of her death are unclear. Before she died, she was raped and found dead with a beer bottle shoved into her vagina. Everything indicates that the Rwandan soldiers did sexual violence to her and killed her.

Your legacy

Although brief, her political career has set something of a precedent , being one of the few female political figures in Africa to date. Simultaneously with her, Sylvie Kinigi was Prime Minister of Burundi . In memory of the Rwandan Prime Minister, the Forum for African Women Educationalists (FAWE) founded the Agathe Innovative Award Competition . This award supports projects that serve the education and income security of African girls. Agathe Uwilingiyimana was one of the founding members of FAWE.

literature

• Kevin A. Hill: Agathe Uwilingiyimana. In: Rebecca Mae Salokar, Mary L. Volcansek (Eds.): Women and the Law. A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook. Greenwood Press, Westport CT et al. 1996, ISBN 0-313-29410-0 , pp. 323-328.

See also

• List of female heads of state and government

Web links

• Report of the independent investigation into the activities of the United Nations during the genocide in Rwanda 1994 - contained in the section “The crash of the Presidential plane; genocide begins “the full results of the investigation on the morning of the assassination.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Alison des Forges : "Leave none to tell the story". Genocide in Rwanda. Human Rights Watch; International Federation of Human Rights., New York 1999, ISBN 1-56432-171-1 , pp. 52 ff .
2. ^ Alison des Forges: "Leave none to tell the story". Genocide in Rwanda. Human Rights Watch, New York 1999, ISBN 1-56432-171-1 .