In that stillness, a government was born â” not in celebration, but in defiance. Not in triumph, but in the persevering, unyielding will to live after a genocide that had aimed not just to exterminate bodies, but to annihilate the idea of Rwanda itself.
And so, under the grey dome of an ashen sky, a cabinet was sworn in. Pasteur Bizimungu, President. Paul Kagame, Vice-President and Minister of Defense. Faustin Twagiramungu, Prime Minister. Men whose political paths were diverse, sometimes even contradictory, but who now stood together, not because of shared ideology, but shared urgency â” to piece back together what had been shattered.
The master of ceremonies, Colonel Théoneste Lizinde, spoke into the microphone â” a voice surviving amidst the hum of makeshift generators, because Rwanda had no electricity, no functioning radio coverage save for rebel-run Radio Muhabura. Be reminded, there was no coin in any bank. The genocidaires, fleeing westward into Zaire, had looted the Central Bank and every commercial vault like avaricious ghosts making sure even the idea of rebuilding was starved.
No minister for Foreign Affairs. None for Agriculture. None for Justice. Those portfolios were left open, because justice was still on the run â” hiding in refugee camps, seeking asylum in European salons, commanding from French-created zones of impunity in Cyangugu, Kibuye, and Gikongoro.
But even among those offered positions in this new government, some revealed their true allegiances. Pierre Claver Kanyarushoki, Rwanda’s Ambassador to Uganda before and during the genocide, was offered the position of Minister of Agriculture. He refused. 'I can’t work for a government of Inyenzi,' he sneered, using the genocidal slur for the RPF, and dismissed the administration as 'a passing cloud.' His loyalty, it turns out, remained with the killers.
Kanyarushoki would later become the First Vice-President in charge of diplomacy for the Rally for the Return of Refugees and Democracy (RDR), a front organization of genocidaires masquerading as a democratic opposition.
Another name soon to reveal its duplicity was Jean Marie Ndagijimana, who accepted the post of Minister of Foreign Affairs briefly â” before vanishing with $200,000 meant for diplomatic missions. He, too, landed in the RDR as 'Advisor’, presumably lobbying for himself as Minister of Kleptocratic Affairs.
These men, and many others like them, believed they had time on their side, betting on the failure of the RPF. Their confidence found music in the Mugunga and Kibumba refugee camps near Goma, where the song 'Rwigere urumpe' â” 'Try it briefly and return it to the owners' â” echoed like a cradle song for the deluded, as corpses still rotted across Rwanda.
And the corpses were many. Piled in churchesâ”Simbi, Mugombwa, Karubamba, Nyamasheke, Bisesero⦠etc. Rwanda was more than depressing. Tutsi bodies stuffed into pit latrines. Left on roadside ditches like forgotten luggage. Some had decayed beyond recognition, their bones stripped clean. Others were bloated, oozing, and stinking in the sun. The air was thick with the smell of decomposition which defeated common sense and sanity.
Survivors of genocide â” mothers, children, the elderly â” walked among the dead in search of the living. Some could not speak. Some wept silently. Others just stared, eyes blank, refusing to believe the ground would not open and return what had been lost. Night after night, they sat beside the remains of their beloved â” without candles, without prayers, without proper burial. And they were not alone.
Who can forget about what we daily witnessed here and there? Stray dogs, overfed and fearless, roamed the streets and villages. Some had torn flesh dangling from their jaws. Many had gorged themselves on human remains, turning into feral beasts with blood-matted fur and glowing eyes.
For many survivors, this was the final indignity: that their mothers, fathers and sonsâ” husbands, brothers and sisters, had become dog meat. The pain of surviving genocide was not just emotional â” it was visceral, physical, crushing. This was not Rwanda rising. This was Rwanda crawling through ash.
A Government After Death
Fifteen days earlier, the capital Kigali had fallen to the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA). Butare had followed. Two days before the swearing-in, Gisenyi â” twin of Goma, the haunted city now cradling killers and their enablers â” was captured. But Rwanda was not “taken.” It was salvaged, barely breathing, one pulse at a time.
In many urban and rural areas, there was no food. No medicine except in RPA sickbays which had become de facto hospitals for the injured, orphaned, and nearly hopeless. Telephones were silentâ”dead as the bodies decomposed in homes, roadsides, churches.
Communications ran on RPA walkie-talkies. Electricity was a myth, except in pockets where small but noisy petrol-powered generators stuttered to life. Even the roads fought against progress â” with landmines and laced with rot. There were many booby-trapped houses which killed many after the country was liberated from the hands of genocidaires.
Stray dogs ruled neighborhoods. They had acquired a taste for human flesh. And yet, on July 19, Rwanda chose life.
This was not just the formation of a new government. This was the defiant creation of a post-genocide state. A metaphor of resurrection. Of renaissance. An audacity not to die or forget, but to continue.
Every Rwandan old enough to remember carries that date like a sacred scar. For survivors, the mere sight of humans standing again under a Rwandan flag â” however dilapidated â” was unbearable and necessary. There were no psychologists then. No grief counselors. Only silence and sobbing, and the unbearable guilt of surviving.
Rwanda was not just a country without infrastructure. It was a country without sleep. Nightmares were not confined to the night, but part of many people’s lives.
Along roads leading to Nyamirambo, Gikondo, Kicukiro or Remera, the smell of death lingered. It was not imaginary. It was not symbolic. It was literal. Skulls around the country were not metaphors; they were piled in churches. Bones were not symbols; they were scattered under beds, beside toys, in latrines.
But the RPA marched on â” not for conquest, but for protection. The only functioning institution in the country was the RPA, with its discipline, code of conduct, and mission not to avenge but to restore. It is this philosophy that prevented the genocide from becoming a genocide redux. One might have expected revenge; what Rwanda got instead was structure.
The Indifference That Killed
We should not let the world ever forget that all the terrible things happened on their watch. France, which gave cover to killers in its so-called humanitarian Zone Turquoise, harbored genocidaires and offered them not just shelter but respect. They fled to the Prefectures of Cyangugu, Gikongoro and Kibuye and declared 'victory' because they had not yet been captured.
Belgium, ever the former colonizer, shed crocodile tears while some of its media questioned whether what happened was 'really a genocide.' The UN, that indecisive assembly of diplomatic bureaucracy, watched and issued 'warnings' as over a million people were slaughtered in a member country.
And when Rwanda, emerging from its tomb, formed a government, these same actors snickered.
Stanislas Mbonampeka â” genocidaires’ former justice minister and legal mouthpiece of Hutu Power â” declared with certainty that the RPF-led government would not last beyond March 1995.
French generals echoed that sentiment. Belgian journalists parroted it. Some American think tanks labeled Rwanda a 'temporary success' â” as if human decency had an expiration date.
They waited. They are still waiting. The passing cloud never passed. They were very wrong. It rained, instead, and nourished a nation. July 19, 1994 was a new dawn after dusk.
What they did not understand â” what they still cannot â” is that Rwanda was not rebuilt from the benevolence of donors or the generosity of aid. It was rebuilt by orphans. By widows. By RPF cadres and wounded RPA soldiers, with missing limbs who still stood guard to protect the peace they had earned in blood.
The new leaders, many of whom had themselves lost family or barely escaped the machete, did not build for glory. They built the country, because not building meant returning to hell.
What was expected to collapse by 1995 became a government of such extraordinary resilience that, today, many of its architects are still guiding Rwanda â” not from memory, but through vision.
President Paul Kagame, then vice president, became the symbol of this new Rwanda. But the symbol alone did not sustain it. It was the system, the discipline, the refusal to wallow in pity, the unyielding embrace of dignity over despair.
Young Rwandans today â” many born after that fateful July 19 â” walk streets and villages that were once soaked in blood but are now wired with fiber optic cables. They enter schools built on mass graves. They apply for jobs in institutions once imagined impossible. They travel to other African nations not as refugees but as investors, consultants, peacekeepers, and doctors.
And to them we say: You are the answer to “Rwigere urumpe.” You did not “try it.” You owned it. You built it. You made liars of those who thought your parents’ survival was a historical mistake.
A Message to our African Youth
Rwandan youth are not exceptional because of geography. They are extraordinary because they chose hope when everything â” every thing â” told them it was irrational.
So, to the youth of Africa, from Harare to Abidjan, from Cairo to Kinshasa, from Dodoma to Abuja â” hear this: Your dignity is not a donation. Your future is not charity.
Rwanda is not a miracle. It is a product of commitment. Of sweat, blood and dry tears. Of non-negotiable dignity. If the children of genocide, walking barefoot through blood and bones, could build hospitals, make drones, plant forests, and negotiate peace, why not you?
Let those who still wallow in blame games, in tribal vendettas, in anti-development politics be reminded: every day you delay change, you entrench dependence. You are not fighting colonialism by destroying your country. You are only performing your own irrelevance on the world stage.
Let the blind watchers learn too. And to the so-called international “experts” who still host panels asking, 'But is Rwanda really democratic?' â” we laugh at your obsession with perfection from the people you once left to perish. Your hypocrisy is colonialism with a dictionary of synonyms. You scream about 'human rights' from capitals that denied Rwandans the right to life, equality and dignity.
You grieve the victims of other genocides but still invite FDLR sympathizers to conferences and op-eds. You read criminal Victoire Ingabire’s political manifestos and call it dissent, when it is merely a rebranding of ideology that saw infants smashed against walls.
And to President Félix Tshisekedi, who plots regime change in Kigali like a man tossing stones from his collapsing glass house â” do you not see that even your citizens would rather flee to Rwanda than remain in your oil-rich despair?
Your alliances with genocidaires do not make Rwanda vulnerable. They make Congo irredeemable.
We Rwandans Chose Life
On July 19, 1994, Rwanda had every reason to collapse, as an alternativeâ”and the only one, it rose.
Without pity. Without excuses. Without the world’s applause. We Rwandans saw the worst of humanity, and we decided not to become it. That day was not just a swearing-in. It was a covenant. Between the dead and the living. Between loss and resolve. Between despair and duty.
And to those who still wait for Rwanda to fall, we have only one answer: We are not a passing cloud. We are the rain that came after the fire to extinguish it. We are the nation that buried death and gave birth to life. We are Rwanda.
Not in one day, not by magic, and not by foreign aid. But by courage. The RPF did not just win a war â” it planted the seeds of reconstruction for reconciliation, often among people who had every reason to hate each other.
Sons and daughters of genocide survivors, who bore psychological wounds no words could heal, came together with sons and daughters of perpetrators â” the very people whose kith and kin had once hunted them â” to build a nation greater than its scars. It was not easy. But nothing worth building ever is.
Together, they staffed schools. They designed and built roads and bridges. They wrote feasible national policies. They launched businesses. They guarded borders, healed wounds, and picked up the piecesâ”others thought too crushed to mend.
They rebuilt homes on land still haunted. They cleaned rivers once clogged with bodies. They planted trees close to mass graves and built memorials that told the truth â” not to enflame hatred, but to anchor healing. They chose unity over disunity and vengeance, responsibility over victimhood. And they succeeded.
Today, Rwanda is admired by the world not because it was spared horror, but because it faced horror and refused to die. It stared into the deepest hole and built a bridge across it.
Rwanda’s youth, born of both trauma and resilience, now travel the world not as victims but as examples. That, perhaps, is the greatest revenge: not hatred, but excellence. Not war, but unity. Not death, but enduring, dignified life.
Under the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) Rwanda rose from ashes to resolve.
