Juvénal Habyarimana

Juvénal Habyarimana (8 March 1937 – 6 April 1994) was the second President of Rwanda. He was president for almost twenty years, from 1973 until 1994. During his government, he favoured his own ethnic group, the Hutus. He was nicknamed "Kinani", a Kinyarwanda word meaning "invincible". Habyarimana was a dictator. He was suspected to have cheated in all of his elections.

On 6 April 1994, he was killed when his airplane was shot down close to Kigali. It was also carrying the President of Burundi, Cyprien Ntaryamira. His assassination caused tensions between Hutus and Tutsis to worsen, and helped start the Rwandan Genocide. Within 100 days, somewhere between 800,000 and 1 million Rwandans were massacred.