Moving forward

Although Hutu insurgencies continued to occupy Rwanda’s government, a new constitution aimed at preventing further ethnic strife in the country was promulgated in 2003. Later that year the first multiparty democratic elections in Rwanda since independence were held; Kagame, who had ascended to the presidency after Bizimungu resigned in 2000, was victorious in securing another term. In 2006 the Rwandan government implemented a significant administrative reorganization, replacing the previous 12 prefectures with 5 larger multiethnic provinces intended to promote power sharing and reduce ethnic conflict. The country’s economy, adversely affected by the conflict of the early 1990s, continued to recover gradually. Recovery efforts were aided in 2006, when significant debt relief was granted by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and in 2007, when Rwanda joined the East African Community, a regional trade and development bloc.

The country’s second multiparty democratic presidential election since independence was held in August 2010 amid a climate of repression and violence. In the months leading up to the election, some independent and opposition media outlets were banned, and opposition candidates and supporters faced harassment. Some opposition members were arrested; some were barred from participating in the political process; and some fled from the country. Several individuals, including an independent journalist and an opposition party leader, were murdered. Kagame, who was standing for reelection, vowed that neither he nor his regime was involved in the killings. Regardless, the threatening environment meant that several opposition parties were unable to field candidates, and the three candidates who did participate in the election presented little challenge to Kagame, who was reelected with a resounding 93 percent of the vote. Voter turnout was reported as more than 95 percent.

Also in 2010 a UN report on human rights abuses that occurred in neighboring Congo during its 1993–2003 conflict sparked an uproar in several countries that were cited in the document, including Rwanda. Some of the report’s findings, which were leaked to the public in August, alleged that tens of thousands of Hutu in Congo were killed by Rwandan forces in 1996–97. Rwandan officials reacted angrily to the leaked findings and vehemently denied the allegations. They also threatened to pull the country’s troops currently serving in UN peacekeeping missions if the UN proceeded to published the report. The UN ultimately agreed to postpone the release of the report to provide Rwanda—as well as other countries mentioned in the draft—the chance to comment on the allegations contained in the report and to have their responses included in the final publication, which was released in October 2010. Additional UN reports, released in 2012, indicated that the country had been aiding insurgents who were currently fighting in Congo and provided detailed examples of Rwandan assistance to them; Rwanda again denied the charges laid out in the reports.

Under the 2003 constitution, presidents were only allowed to serve two seven-year terms, and Kagame was thus mandated to step down in 2017. Though Kagame himself had not definitively declared his desire to stand for another term as president, talk of amending the constitution in order to allow him to do so had been percolating for some years and finally came to fruition in 2015. Both houses of parliament voted in favor of amending the constitution to change the presidential term from seven to five years, which would take effect with the term of the winner of the 2024 election, as well as to essentially reset the current term-limit stipulation. The changes would let Kagame stand for a seven-year term in 2017 and then two five-year terms in 2024 and 2029, allowing him to potentially remain president until 2034. Additional proposed amendments affected other areas of government, such as changing the duration of terms for senators and Supreme Court officials. The proposed amendments were put to a referendum in December 2015 and were passed with a resounding 98 percent of the vote. In January 2016 Kagame announced that he would stand in the 2017 presidential election, saying that the outcome of the referendum clearly indicated that Rwandans wanted him to do so.

The presidential election was held on August 4, 2017. Kagame faced two other candidates: Frank Habineza of the Democratic Green Party of Rwanda and Philippe Mpayimana, who was running as an independent. Kagame handily defeated them, taking more than 98 percent of the vote.

Investigations into the 1994 plane crash and related controversy

The events of 1994 still weighed heavily in Rwanda in the 21st century. In 2004 Kagame came under fire after a newspaper leaked the findings of a report commissioned by French judge Jean-Louis Bruguière, including allegations that Kagame and other RPF leaders ordered the rocket attack that caused the 1994 plane crash that killed Habyarimana and triggered the genocide (echoing the claims of some Rwandan dissidents); Kagame vehemently denied the allegations. Rwanda severed relations with France in 2006 when Bruguière—claiming jurisdiction because the flight crew members that perished in the crash were French—signed international arrest warrants for several of Kagame’s close associates for their alleged roles in the plane crash and requested that Kagame stand trial at the ICTR. (Relations between the two countries were later restored in November 2009.) As before, Kagame denied having anything to do with the crash and countered by alleging that the French government armed and advised those responsible for the genocide. Later that year Rwanda established a commission to investigate France’s role in the genocide; its findings, released in 2008, alleged that almost three dozen French political and military leaders were complicit. In October 2007 the Rwandan government launched a formal investigation into the 1994 plane crash. The results, released in January 2010, indicated that Hutu extremist soldiers were responsible for shooting down the plane carrying Habyarimana, with the intent of derailing his peace negotiations with Tutsi rebels, and then used the incident as an excuse to initiate the genocide against the Tutsi and moderate Hutu.

Meanwhile, Bruguière had retired in 2007, and the French investigation continued under the direction of Judges Marc Trévidic and Nathalie Poux. They visited the crash site and its environs and compiled expert testimony in such areas as ballistics, acoustics, aviation, and explosives. They also lifted the international arrest warrants for Kagame’s associates. Based on the gathered evidence, in 2012 the judges found that the missile that hit the plane had come from the area of the Kanombe military base, which at the time had been held by the Rwandan military, including Habyarimana’s own Presidential Guard. That led the judges to conclude that the RPF rebels probably could not have been the perpetrators, because it was very unlikely that they could have breached the area and launched the missile from there. Attempts to officially close the investigation in the following years were postponed when witnesses occasionally emerged to claim they had evidence of the RPF and Kagame’s involvement in the plane crash. In 2018, however, the French case was officially closed, with Judges Poux and Jean-Marc Herbaut (who had succeeded Trévidic) citing insufficient evidence and noting contradictory or unverifiable witness accounts, as well as the disappearance of some witnesses before they could testify; no charges were filed. Appeals to reopen the case in 2020 and 2022 from the families of Habyarimana and others who had perished in the crash were unsuccessful.