Joseph Kavaruganda

Joseph Kavaruganda († 7. April 1994 ) was president of the Rwandan Constitutional Court and as a liberal Hutu opponents of racist propaganda against the ethnic group of Tutsi prior to the genocide in Rwanda . He was killed at the beginning of the genocide.

Joseph Kavaruganda was President of the Rwandan Constitutional Court. Since he rejected the anti-Tutsi propaganda (see genocide in Rwanda ), which was increasingly intensified in the early 1990s , he was repeatedly exposed to hostility. An assassination attempt on him failed as early as September 1991. Files were stolen from his office on February 21, 1994, for which Kavaruganda blamed CDR members . He was also threatened with murder several times, for example by the MRND party militia Interahamwe . He blamed the Presidential Guard for the murder of Justice Minister Christian Munyameza , whose dangerousness he emphasized in a letter to President Juvénal Habyarimana . In February 1994, he was due to fear him an assassination could be perpetrated by UN - UN peacekeepers protected.

On the evening of April 6, 1994, Kavaruganda learned of the President's death in a plane crash through a telephone conversation with his son in Brussels. Upon learning of the Presidential Guard's presence in his Kigali neighborhood , he sought help from a UNAMIR contingent , but was arrested by the Presidential Guard and murdered as a Liberal Hutu the following day during the genocide in response to Habyarimana's death .

literature

Linda Melvern: Rwanda The genocide and the participation of the western world , Heinrich Hugendubel Verlag, Kreuzlingen / Munich 2004. ISBN 3-7205-2486-8 .