On the evening of April 6, 1994, two presidentsâ€"Juvénal Habyarimana of Rwanda and Cyprien Ntaryamira of Burundiâ€"were killed when their plane was struck by two surface-to-air missiles near Kigali. Both men, their aides, and the French crew perished instantly. Expert investigations have long indicated that the missiles were fired from the Kanombe military barracks, suggesting an internal plot rather than a foreign attack.
But this story is not about the who or why of that fateful night. It is about what followed. It is about the shocking silence of a family that abandoned not only a country but the very bodies of those they claimed to love. Under normal human circumstancesâ€"indeed, under the most basic laws of decencyâ€"one would expect a national mourning, a solemn state funeral, an investigation into the deaths of two heads of state. At least, the final act of love that affirms life's value.
Instead, the killing of the president became the pretext, not for justice, but for the most organized and a pre-planned extermination campaign of the late twentieth centuryâ€"the Genocide Against the Tutsi. The plane crash was immediately recast as a divine signal â€" that the time had come to 'work.' Within hours, the Interahamwe militias, the Presidential Guard, and the state radio machine swung into action. Lists of Tutsis were already prepared.
And in that mayhem, while machetes gleamed and radio waves shouted for blood, something else happened that reveals more than any historical commission ever could: the first family fled, leaving behind their dead.
The Flight of the Living Abandoning the Dead
Just three days after the plane crash, on April 9, 1994, a French military aircraft lifted off from Kigali. On board were Agathe Kanziga Habyarimana, her children, and a close circle of allies. They flew to safety while Rwanda burned. But what made the escape most grotesque was that they left behind the bodies of their husband, father, and brother.
President Habyarimana's body lay in the mortuary at Kanombe Military Hospital. Alongside him was Colonel Élie Sagatwa, Agathe Kanziga's brother and the president's Private Secretary. The two men, whose power had defined an era of fear and division, were now mere corpsesâ€"unburied, unattended, and abandoned by those who owed them at least a final prayer. Their blood had not yet dried when their family boarded a French plane and left the country. No one paused to ask: Who buried the President? Who buried Colonel Sagatwa?
Even in death, the two key family members were treated like disposable instrumentsâ€"spent tools in a conspiracy too large for sentiment.
In many cultures, burial is the ultimate act of love, the last whisper of loyalty. But Agathe Kanziga and her children chose exile over decency. They fled with jewelry, documents, and servantsâ€"but not with the bodies of the men who had given them everything. While France saw them as victims escaping chaos; in truth, they were architects escaping accountability.
I have often wondered: what kind of people could abandon their own dead and then find the audacity to mock the living survivors of the genocide their regime engineered? Perhaps, as Rwanda's history shows, evil does not always end in the grave; sometimes, it boards the last plane out.
Love Died Before the Body
In most families, tragedy unites. Loss softens the heart, even of the cruel. But in the Habyarimana family, tragedy hardened what was already stone. They did not flee because they feared justice; they fled because they feared irrelevance. They could live without a husband, without a father, even without a grave â€" but not without power.
Their escape marked the ultimate betrayal of kinship. While Agathe Kanziga was being evacuated by foreign troops, her husband's siblings were left to fend for themselves amid the turmoil. Among those left behind were two elder sisters, Telesphore Nturoziraga and Godelive Barushywanubusa, both Catholic nuns in the Benebikira congregation, and their brotherâ€"Dr. Séraphin Bararengana, by then, a lecturer at the medical school in Butare. Dr. Bararengana is Habyarimana's younger brother. It was not just abandonment but moral cannibalism. They ate their own memory to preserve their privilege.
Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of this story is not political, but existential. In every society, the act of burial or cremation, is the bridge between the living and the dead. It is the proof that love outlasts breath. To abandon the dead voluntarily, is to announce that love has expired before life did.
Agathe Kanziga's silence speaks volumes. There has never been a public statement from her about why she left her husband unburied, why she refused to return his remains, or even what became of them. There has been no ritual, no commemoration, no acknowledgement. For her and her children, President Habyarimana was useful only when alive.
For years, I was haunted by one simple question: How could a wife abandon the corpse of her husband and brother? In November 1996, I met Sister Godelive in Gisenyi. She had just crossed the border back into Rwanda from the then-Zaire. She resembled her brother so much that recognition was immediate. Out of respect, I offered my condolences. But curiosityâ€"perhaps even disbeliefâ€"got the better of me.
I asked her why her brother had never been given a decent burial, who had taken that decision, and where his body was. She looked at me with the tired resignation of someone who had run out of explanations, shrugged, and said simply, 'Well, it happened like that.'
That phraseâ€"it happened like thatâ€"echoed in me for years. It was not an answer; it was a confession of moral collapse.
Nine years later, in 2005, I met Sister Godelive again at a Gacaca court in Remera and posed the same question. This time she admitted that 'some powerful people decided as such.' She never said who, but only revealed that on April 11, 1994, she and her two surviving siblings had driven to their birthplace to continue mourning. The family's matriarch, Agathe Kanziga, and her children were already goneâ€"safe in the arms of France.
The rest of the story, I pieced together from whispers: the president's body was first kept in the Kanombe mortuary, later moved to a refrigeration facility at the Gisenyi brewery, and finally transported to Ngaliema Hospital in Kinshasa via Goma. After that, silence. The coordinates of his final resting place remain a mysteryâ€"an unmarked shame.
A Family Without Mourning
The psychology of grief is universal, but in the Habyarimana household, grief seemed to have been outsourced. The widow never returned to see the grave. The children never once demanded to know where their father or uncle lay. They moved on as if death were a bureaucratic inconvenience.
In truth, they didn't mourn because mourning would require confronting guilt. To bury a body is to acknowledge the humanity of the dead; to refuse is to preserve the fiction of innocence. And for a family implicatedâ€"morally, politically, and ideologicallyâ€"in the genocidal regime that followed the crash, it was safer or convenient to let the corpse disappear.
In a sense, Habyarimana became the first casualty of the ideology he helped cultivate. Even in death, he was sacrificed to the machinery of Hutu Powerâ€"a system that devoured its own creator. His widow and children have never once spoken publicly about the decision to flee without burying him. Instead, they have busied themselves with rewriting history, denying genocide, and painting their family as victims of a grand RPF conspiracy.
The Habyarimana family offers a grim study in how greed corrupts not just politics but affection itself. In their world, relationships were transactional; loyalty was conditional on utility. Once Habyarimana's death ceased to serve their cause, his memory became disposable.
It is a form of kinship where affection is subordinated to ideology. In such families, mourning is not a private sorrow but a political liability. This is why Agathe Kanziga could abandon her husband's body and still appear serene; why her sons can deny genocide with academic confidence; and why none of them has ever shown genuine remorse. Their moral compass did not break in 1994 â€" it was never calibrated to begin with.
Sarcasm of the Unmourned Dead
Imagine, for a moment, the absurd drama of it all: The president of a nation is shot from the sky; his body lies cold in a morgue surrounded by loyal soldiers; the radio he once controlled blares hate speech into the night; and his familyâ€"rather than arranging a funeralâ€"packs suitcases. They run to the airport escorted by foreign troops, stepping over the ashes of a country they helped set ablaze.
One can almost hear the dialogue between Agathe and her son Jean-Luc: 'Should we take his body?' 'No time, my dear son. The French are waiting.' 'What about Uncle Élie?' 'I think he'll understand. As a soldier, he always followed orders.' And off they go, grabbing passports and memories selective enough to fit in diplomatic luggage.
The world later saw them on French television, faces composed, words measured, speaking of 'tragedy' and 'injustice.' But not onceâ€"just onceâ€"did they mention where their husband, father, or brother was buried. Their silence was louder than the French aircraft's engines that took them away. In broad daylightâ€" they fled their crime scene, not to mourn, or to bury, but to vanish.
The Structure of Moral Evasion
To mock the absurdity of this family's choices is not crueltyâ€"it is an ethical necessity. Since their silence tells a story about the broader pathology of genocide denial. The Habyarimana family's failure to bury their dead reflects their inability to face the truth. They negate the genocide against the Tutsi not because they misinterpret it, but because admitting it would require acknowledging complicityâ€"in ideology and in logistics.
Jean-Luc Habyarimana and his brother Léon have become the loudest voices in the choir of genocide denial, tweeting and speaking from Europe as if history were a social-media debate. They accuse Rwanda of manipulation, and present themselves as heirs to a stolen legacy. But what legacy is it, exactly? A father who presided over ethnic division? Uncles who planned genocide? A family that fled over the corpses of the very people they incited to kill?
It takes a rare kind of moral corrosion to transform tragedy into self-pity. The sons have inherited not the discipline of their father but the delusion and crimes of his regime. They have become digital exiles, yelling into cyberspace about justice while their own family's dead remain abandoned somewhere.
Even in war, there is a line that most people do not cross: the line of filial duty. To leave your dead unburied is to renounce your own humanity. But perhaps that, too, was symbolic. For if they could abandon their own, it is not surprising they could abandon a whole nation to slaughter.
Applied Hypocrisy and the French connection
When one studies genocide, one learns that denial is its final stage. The Habyarimana family, especially his wife and children, embodies that final stage perfectly. Their flight on April 9, 1994, was not just a physical escapeâ€"it was a symbolic act of denial. They fled from death, from truth, from the reckoning that burying their dead would have forced upon them.
France, of course, remains an accomplice in this macabre story. The French military not only evacuated the Habyarimana family but also shielded many of the regime's key figures during Opération Amaryllis. While thousands of Rwandans were being hacked to death, the protectors of 'civilization' were busy loading genocidaires onto planes.
To this day, France has never explained why it prioritized their evacuation over that of thousands of civilians who were being hunted. Who gave the order? Who decided that the widow of a fallen president was more valuable than the orphans left behind in the blood-soaked hills of Kigali? And who decided that her husband's and brother's bodies were not worth a grave?
The questions hang like ghosts over Rwanda's history, unanswered because those who should have answered them prefer silence.
The French authorities, who later welcomed Agathe into their territory, hold part of the answer to Rwanda's unburied questions. It is an irony too bitter for satire: the country that prides itself on liberty, equality, and fraternity became the safe haven for a family that showed none of the three.
The Lessons of Abandonment
What should the world learn from this grotesque tale of flight and forgetfulness? That genocide is not only the act of killing; it is also the refusal to mourn. It begins with the devaluation of others' lives and ends with the desecration of one's own dead.
The Habyarimana family represents that continuum perfectly â€" from the self-importance of power to the spinelessness of denial. Their behavior reveals how genocidal ideology destroys even the most intimate bonds. When a family can abandon its patriarch's corpse and feel no shame, imagine what it felt toward the people it deemed 'cockroaches.'
To tell this story is not to indulge in gruesome curiosity. It is to expose the anatomy of inhumanityâ€"the way political power can hollow out even the most cherished human bonds. I often think back to that quiet encounter in Gisenyi in 1996 â€" the weary eyes of Sister Godelive, although not so innocent, her resigned voice, her catchphrase: 'some powerful people decided as such.'
Those words carry the weight of a nation's unanswered questions. Who decided that mourning should be canceled? Who decided that Rwanda's agony would be christened as 'work'? Who decided that the dead president's body was less important than the genocidal plan his death unleashed?
History may never name them all, but we know their inheritors â€" the showy deniers, the self-proclaimed 'critics,' the ones who inherited silence and turned it into noise. But for Agathe Kanziga and her children, silence is complicity.
They live in comfort abroad, giving interviews and tweeting manifestos, yet the graves of their husband, father, and uncle remain unmarked mysteries. In a world that glorifies memory, there stands one tomb without a name, one grave without a body, one death without mourning. It belongs to Juvénal Habyarimana â€" not the man, but the symbol of everything that went wrong in Rwanda.
His family fled, his body vanished, and his legacy decayed into denial. Perhaps that is the justice of history: that the man who built his power on dehumanization was denied the very humanity of burial. Yes, those who denied humanity to others now cannot find closure even in their own kin's death.
Unburied Realities
If one were to build a monument to hypocrisy, it would not need a marble or granite stone. It would need only the invisible tomb of President Habyarimana and Colonel Sagatwaâ€"two men whose deaths unleashed cataclysm, and whose own families treated their bodies as inconveniences.
Still, the questions remain â€" sharp as wrecks of glass: How can those who abandoned their own dead pretend to lecture the living? How can those who refused a funeral of their most loved ones speak of truth? And how can silence still echo so loudly, three decades later?
Until those questions are answered, Rwanda's history remains incomplete â€" not because the nation forgot to bury a genocidal dictator, but because the family that fled him forgot how to be human.
One day, history will demand an answer to a simple, human question: Where are they buried? And in that answerâ€"or its continued absenceâ€"will lie the final judgment on a family that fled not only from justice, but from love itself.
Tom Ndahiro
Source : https://en.igihe.com/opinion/article/juvenal-habyarimana-s-family-the-symbol-of-moral-decay
