Juvénal Habyarimana, Rwandan banker and politician, 3rd President of Rwanda (b. 1937)
Juvénal Habyarimana (Kinyarwanda: [hɑ.βɟɑː.ɾí.mɑ̂ː.nɑ]; French: [ʒy.ve.nal a.bja.ʁi.ma.na]; 8 March 1937 – 6 April 1994) was a Rwandan politician and military officer who served as the second president of Rwanda, from 1973 until 1994. He was nicknamed "Kinani", a Kinyarwanda word meaning "invincible".
An ethnic Hutu, Habyarimana served several security positions including minister of defense under Rwanda's first president, Grégoire Kayibanda. After overthrowing Kayibanda in a coup in 1973, he became the country's new president and eventually continued his predecessor's pro-Hutu policies. He was a dictator, and electoral fraud was suspected for his unopposed re-elections: 98.99% of the vote on 24 December 1978, 99.97% of the vote on 19 December 1983, and 99.98% of the vote on 19 December 1988. During his rule, Rwanda became a totalitarian, one-party order in which his MRND-party enforcers required people to chant and dance in adulation of the President at mass pageants of political "animation". While the country as a whole had become slightly less impoverished during Habyarimana's tenure, the great majority of Rwandans remained in circumstances of extreme poverty.In 1990, the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) launched the Rwandan Civil War against his government. After three years of war, he signed the 1993 Arusha Accords with the RPF as a peace agreement. The following year, he was killed under mysterious circumstances when his aircraft, also carrying the President Cyprien Ntaryamira of neighbouring Burundi, was shot down by a missile near Kigali, Rwanda. His assassination ignited ethnic tensions in the region and helped spark the Rwandan genocide.