Agathe Uwilingiyimana
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Agathe Uwilingiyimana
Agathe Uwilingiyimana (1953 - 7 April, 1994) was a Rwandan political figure. She served as Prime Minister of Rwanda from 18 July 1993 to her death on April 7, 1994. Her term was ended after less than a year when she was assassinated during the opening stages of the Rwandan Genocide.
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Early life
Agathe Uwilingiyimana, a Hutu, was born in 1953 in the village of Nyaruhengeri, some 140 km south-east of Kigali, Rwanda's capital city, to farming parents. Shortly after she was born the family emigrated from the border region of Butare to work in the Belgian Congo. Her father moved the family back to the Butare region when Uwilingiyimana was four. After success in public examinations she was educated at Notre Dame des Citeaux High School, and obtained the certificate to teach humanities at twenty.
In 1976 she received an A-level certificate in mathematics and chemistry she became a mathematics teacher in a Butare social school. In the same year she married Ignace Barahira, a fellow student from her village. Their first child was born later in the year; they would go on to have five children.
When she was thirty (in 1983) she read chemistry at the National University of Rwanda. This was financially possible because her husband obtained a University Laboratory post at twice the salary of a maths teacher. She received a B.Sc. in 1985, teaching chemistry for four years in the Butare academic schools. (Much of the media was later critical of her scientific education, as it was thought that girls should be incapable of science study.)
Rise to prime minister
In 1986 she created a Savings and Credit Cooperative Society among the staff of the Butare academic school, and her high profile role in the self-help organization brought her to the attention of the Kigali authorities, who wanted to appoint 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 four months later was appointed Minister of Education by Dismas Nsensiyaremye, the first opposition prime minister under a power-sharing scheme negotiated between President Juvenal Habyarimana and five major opposition parties. As education minister she abolished the academic ethnic quota system, awarding public school places and scholarships by open merit ranking. This decision earned her the enmity of the Hutu-extremist parties.
On July 171993, after a meeting between President Habyarimana and all five parties, Agathe Uwilinigiyimana became the first woman prime minister of Rwanda, replacing Dr Nsensiyaremye, the man who had appointed her Minister of Education, and whose exoneration of the president was unpopular with the other parties. Since Uwilinigiyimana didn't have the power base of the other candidates, and was not wanted by Habyarima most observers believe that her appointment as prime minister was based on the political calculation by the President that she would divide the opposition, and by the opposition that she would be controllable. (If so, the president was right but the opposition parties were wrong.) On the day of her appointment, Nsensiyareme suspended Uwilingiyimana's MDR membership. (The MDR had opposed the formation of any interim government excluding the rebel RFP.)
Arusha accords
The Habyarimana-Uwilingiyimana government was still Hutu dominated, and had the daunting task of successfully negotiating a peace accord with the rebel Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), the Tutsi-dominated guerilla movement. An agreement between Habyarimana, the five opposition parties (led ostensibly by Uwilingiyimana), and the RFP, was finally reached on August 41993. Under the "Arusha accords", Habyarimana's ruling MRND would take the transitional presidency, and the Prime Minister would come from the MDR. Since the MDR has suspended Uwilingiyimana they chose Faustin Twagiramungu (who had been instrumental in suspending her) to replace her.
Caretaker prime minister
President Habyarimana officially dismissed her as Prime Minister eighteen days after her appointment to the office, but she stayed on in a caretaker capacity for eight months, until her death in April 1994. This was despite being excoriated by all the Hutu-dominated parties, including her own MDR, and President Habyrimana's ruling party, which held a press conference in January 1994 attacking Uwilingiyimana for being a "political trickster".
The swearing in of the "Transitional Broad Based Government" was to have taken place on March 251994. At that point, Uwilingiyimana was to have stepped down in favor of Faustin Twagiramungu, having been guaranteed a lower level ministerial post in the new government. However, the RFP did not appear at the ceremony, postponing the establishment of the new regime. She reached agreement with them that the new government would be sworn in on the following day.
Assassination
The talks between President Habyarimana, Uwilingiyimana, and the Rwandan Patriotic Front were never concluded, because the president's plane was rocketed on April 61994. In an interview with Radio France on the night of President Habyarimana's assassination, Uwilinigiyimana said that there would be an immediate investigation. She also said, in her last recorded words:
- "there is shooting, people are being terrorized, people are inside their homes lying on the floor. We are suffering the consequences of the death of the head of state, I believe. We, the civilians, are in no way responsible for the death of our head of state."
The UN peacekeeping force sent a Belgian escort to her home before 3am the following morning; they intended to take her to Radio Rwanda, from where she planned a dawn broadcast appealing for national calm. Uwilingiyimana's house was further guarded by five Ghanaian U.N. troops on the outside in addition to the ten Belgian troops. Inside the house, the family was protected by the Rwandan presidential guard, but between 6.55 and 7.15 the presidential guard surrounded the UN troops and told them to lay down their arms. Fatally, the blue berets ultimately complied (handing over their weapons just before 9 am).
Seeing the stand-off outside her home, Agathe Uwilingiyimana and her family took refuge in the Kigali U.N. volunteer compound around 8 am. Eye witnesses to the inquiry on U.N. actions say that Rwandan soldiers entered the compound at 10 am, and searched it for Agathe Uwilingiyimana; she was eventually found, and with her husband, was shot and killed by the presidential guard on the morning of April 71994
In his book Shake Hands with the Devil, UN commander Roméo Dallaire writes that Uwilingiyimana and her husband surrendered themselves to the genocidaires to save their children, who stayed successfully hidden in a volunteer's house (the children survived, leaving the country for Switzerland).
Legacy
Though short, her political career was precedent-setting as one of the few female political figures in Africa. She was contemporaneous with Sylvie Kinigi, Prime Minister of Burundi. As a memorial to the late Rwandan Prime Minister, the Forum for African Women Educationalists (FAWE) established The Agathe Innovative Award Competition. The award funds educational and income generating projects aimed at improving the prospects of African girls. One of FAWE's founding members was Agathe Uwilingiyimana.
References
- Hill, Kevin A. Agathe Uwilingiyimana. In Women and the Law, a Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook, Rebecca Mae Salokar and Mary L. Volcansek, editors. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, pp. 323-328, 1996.
External links
- A complete biography from FAWE (http://www.fawe.org/publications/Role%20Models/Agathein.pdf) (Since the Forum for African Women Educationalists has created an award in her honour it is to be expected that this contains no criticism of Agathe Uwilingiyimana.)
- Report of the independent inquiry into the actions of the United Nations during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda (http://www.jha.ac/Ref/aar007.htm) - containing the complete findings of the inquiry about the morning of the assasination in the section "The crash of the Presidential plane; genocide begins". Although Lt Lotin, the blue beret commander, had been ordered not to surrender his weapons, his orders also included the U.N. directive not to fire unless fired upon, and by the time his commander told him to negotiate (rather than surrender) four of his men were already disarmed.