An ethnic Hutu, Habyarimana served in several security positions including minister of defense under Rwanda's first president, Grégoire Kayibanda.

[2] 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".

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.

After receiving a primary education, he attended the College of Saint Paul in Bukavu, Belgian Congo, where he graduated with a degree in mathematics and humanities.

By the start of the invasion from Uganda by the army of the Rwanda Patriotic Front, a rebel army made up mostly of refugee Tutsi who had helped Uganda's Museveni seize control of the presidency, Habyarimana's supporters had shrunk down to the akazu ("little house" or "President's household"), which was mainly composed of an informal group of Hutu extremists from his home region, namely from the northwestern provinces of Gisenyi and Ruhengeri.

[7] In October 1990, an attack on Habyarimana's government began when rebels from the RPF, a force of mostly Tutsi Rwandan refugees and expatriates who had served in the Ugandan army (many in key positions), crossed the border from Uganda.

[17] Zairian President Mobutu Sese Seko's contribution was to send several hundred troops of the elite Special Presidential Division (DSP).

[18] The Zairian soldiers raped Rwandan civilians in the north of the country and looted their homes,[19] prompting Habyarimana to expel them within a week of their arrival.

[20] With French assistance, and benefiting from the loss of RPF morale after Fred Rwigyema's death, the Rwandan Army enjoyed a major tactical advantage.

[21] Habyarimana accused the Ugandan Government of supplying the RPF, establishing a "rear command" for the group in Kampala, and "flagging off" the invasion.

Habyarimana was sworn in as interim President at the Parliament building, but then suddenly departed before calling up the new Prime Minister and cabinet to be inaugurated.

Habyarimana returned that afternoon with a list of new cabinet members from Hutu extremist parties, who had not been agreed upon in the Arusha Accords, to be sworn in.

Others, including the RPF, accused militant Hutus from within Habyarimana's party of orchestrating the crash to provoke anti-Tutsi outrage while simultaneously seizing power.

[30] At some point following, Habyarimana's remains were obtained by Zairian President Mobutu Sese Seko and kept in a private mausoleum in Gbadolite, Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo).

On 12 May 1997, as Laurent-Désiré Kabila's ADFL rebels were advancing on Gbadolite, Mobutu had the remains flown by cargo plane to Kinshasa, where they waited on the apron of N'djili Airport for three days.

On 16 May, the day before Mobutu fled Zaire and the country was renamed the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Habyarimana's remains were burned under the supervision of an Indian Hindu leader.