This document is not simply an archival curiosity; it is a window into the psyche of a regime that had already lost the war intellectually, morally, and strategicallyâ”years before it lost everything else. The report is not purely a wartime memo; it is a revelation written in advance, a bureaucratic outburst dressed up as strategy, and a masterclass in how paranoia, racism, and criminal fantasy masquerade as statecraft.
By this point, the Habyarimana government was living in a corresponding universe of denial. Major General Fred Rwigema, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) Chairman and founding commander of the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA), had been killed on the second day of the October 1990 offensive. The regime celebrated prematurely, mistaking the loss of a leader for the collapse of a cause.
History, with its cruel sense of irony, had other plans. The struggle to liberate Rwanda from a criminal systemâ”continued under the leadership of Paul Kagame with renewed discipline and purpose. The RPF reorganized, adapted, and advanced. That alone should have triggered sober reassessment. Instead, it triggered hysteria. And it would end not in the regime’s triumph, but in its moral and political bankruptcy.
The report reveals a state stuck between fear and fantasy. The report opens in full panic mode. 'Reliable information,' it claims, indicated that Uganda was planning to attack Rwanda. Implicitly, the RPF was not Rwandan but Ugandan, despite a N’SELEâ”Zaire Ceasefire Agreement, of 29th March, 1991 and despite the obvious historical reality of Rwandan refugees expelled since 1959. The government refused to confront the political roots of the conflict: exclusion, statelessness, and decades of institutionalized ethnic discrimination. Instead, it clung to conspiracy theories with the desperation of a drowning man clutching a stone.
Satire becomes inevitable here, not because the subject is funny, but because the regime itself behaved like a catastrophic farce. When facts become troublesome, falsehood was elevated to doctrine. Once military defeat loomed, they did not rethink policy; they blamed Uganda, Burundi, internal 'traitors,' political parties, newspapers, even their own soldiers. And when all else failed, they arrived at what they believed was a stroke of strategic genius: assassinate President Yoweri Museveni. Murder, they calculated, would be cheaper than reform. History would later show that genocide, too, was seen as cheaper than justice.
When Inkotanyi do not disappear
The report’s dominant lament is almost comical in its petulance. The 'determined will of the INKOTANYI to continue fighting,' it says, despite the various concessions made by the Rwandan side, proves that the RPF were 'bad-faith actors who want nothing other than power under the auspices of President Museveni.'
This is grievance masquerading as analysis. The 'concessions' were cosmeticâ”offers that preserved a political system built on exclusion while demanding surrender from those whose very existence the regime denied. The RPF’s refusal to dissolve itself politely, as the regime wishedâ” was interpreted not as political resolve, but as foreign manipulation. The regime could not imagine that Rwandans might fight for Rwanda with such a determination.
Here the report exposes its intellectual bankruptcy and not intelligence. As Carl von Clausewitz warned in On War (1832), 'War is the continuation of politics by other means.' The Habyarimana regime refused to address the political causes of the war, yet was shocked that the military conflict persisted. They wanted a ceasefire without reform, peace without justice, surrender without recognition. Clausewitz would have diagnosed the problem instantly: the political objective was incoherent; therefore, the military effort was doomed.
Unable to defeat the RPF, the regime internationalized its paranoia. Uganda, they claimed, was the real enemy. Burundi was also accused of 'radical support' for the RPF, guilty of 'deliberate passivity' in stopping recruitment. The Burundian government, the report sneers, 'cannot find any argument' to explain its failureâ”therefore it must be morally and politically complicit.
The proposed response was 'high-level diplomatic action.' This phrase, in the language of the report, means threats, pressure, and diplomatic bullying. When that fails, more whining. When whining proved insufficient, the military solution followed.
The FAR’s 'major problem,' the report admits, was operational ineffectiveness: they could not pursue the Inkotanyi into Uganda, while the latter could fire from there. The solution? Identify positions beyond the borderâ”training centers, logistical hubsâ”and destroy them through raids. These raids would be accompanied by a 'large-scale campaign' highlighting alleged internal conflicts within the RPF. It was the time when Radio Rwanda would broadcast rumors about deaths of RPF’s leaders as an attractive strategy.
In other words: encroach upon international law militarily, and lie enthusiastically in the media. The belief that propaganda could substitute for battlefield success reveals a regime confusing noise for power and victory. In The Art of War, Sun Tzu warned, over two millennia ago: 'If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.' The Habyarimana government knew neither. It made fun of the enemy and lied to itself.
Killing President Museveni
Then comes the passage that takes away all remaining pretenses. Having failed militarily, diplomatically, and intellectually, the report proposes assassination.
'Through specialized private organizations, we should consider making an attempt on the life of MUSEVENI. It is not impossible to have him eliminated.'
This is not allegory or rhetoric. This is a state document proposing political murder. The justification is stunning in its cynicism: 'The cost of carrying out such a plan would be far lower than the cost of the war that MUSEVENI has inflicted upon us.'
Here, murder becomes a budgetary decision. Assassination is framed as cost-effective or fiscal responsibility. And who should oversee this enlightened policy? 'The military intelligence services,' tasked with an 'in-depth study' of the plan. The same services that could not win a conventional war were now expected to competently execute transnational homicide.
B.H. Liddell Hart once noted in Strategy (1954) that: 'The object of war is a better state of peaceâ”even if only from your own point of view.' Assassinating a neighboring president would not bring peace; it would invite regional chaos. But the regime had abandoned strategy for spite. It mistook criminal fantasy for realism.
Nervous army and ethnic extremism
Having proposed murder, the report then pivotsâ”without ironyâ”to the need for reflection. A permanent framework for study. A think tank. Military technicians meeting officials from the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Planning, and the National Bank of Rwanda (BNR) to prepare for a long war.
The absurdity is insightful. A government that refused to acknowledge why the war existed now wanted economists and sociologists to help manage it. Basil Liddell Hart warned against this exact stupidity: 'The more a strategy aims at decisive victory, the more it risks decisive defeat.' The regime wanted total victory without addressing the grievances driving resistance. It was planning for endless war while pretending it sought stability.
The report betrays deep anxiety within the Rwandan Army (FAR). Soldiers were whispering. Complaints once muttered were now printed in newspapers. The 'commander' was urged to 'react accordingly' to avoid an explosion within the army.
This is the language of a disintegrating institution. Discipline erodes not because soldiers are weak, but because leadership is dishonest. The FAR was being asked to fight a war whose rationale no longer convinced even its own officers. The regime responded not with reform, but with repression and ethnic mobilization.
That becomes obvious in the most revealing section: the 'Political Domain'. Multiparty politics was approaching, and the regime responded not with democratic confidence but with sectarian calculation.
The Social Democratic Party (PSD) was dismissed as a family affair of embittered former elites: Félicien Gatabazi, former minister imprisoned with his wife for embezzlement; Frédéric Nzamurambaho, allegedly resentful over exclusion from power. Parties were evaluated not on ideas, but on utility. Names were dragged through the mud with the trivial malice of a police file. Irrelevant character assassination stood in for political debate. Gatabazi was killed on 21st February 1994â”whereas Nzamurambaho, by then Minister of Agriculture, was murdered with his family on April 7, 1994.
The Republican Democratic Movement (MDR), however, was treated with cautious respect. It was popular. Wealthy. Ambitious. Worse, it coveted military positions. And then the most damning sentence appears: its 'extremist HUTU character' was described not as a danger, but as a weaponâ”capable of attracting a military already sensitized to ethnicity by a war 'imposed by TUTSI from outside.'
This was May 1991. In October 1993, Froduald Karamira of MDR would openly proclaim Hutu Power. The trajectory was clear. Extremism was admired, cultivated, and instrumentalized. The report even warns that soldiers should be kept away from political parties lest they align with 'the most extremist HUTU party.' They knew the danger. They fed it anyway.
Names need not be written for history to supply them: Officers like Augustin Bizimungu, Théoneste Bagosora, Aloys Ntiwiragabo, Aloys Ntabakuzeâ”and others shaped by the ethnic absolutism of the Kayibanda and Habyarimana eras. The report reads like a rehearsal for catastrophe.
Conclusion
The May 23, 1991 Military Intelligence Report stands today not as evidence of victimhood, but as proof of premeditated failure. It documents a regime that refused to face reality: that the RPF was Rwandan, that its cause was rooted in historical injustice, and that no amount of propaganda, raids, or assassination plots could erase that fact. Instead of reform, the regime chose conspiracy. Instead of dialogue, it chose ethnic hate mobilization. Instead of plans to win, it chose murder.
Sun Tzu cautioned that 'He who has no forethought but makes light of his opponents is sure to be captured by them.' The Habyarimana government made light of the RPF’s determination, misread its political legitimacy, and fantasized about killing Museveni as a shortcut to victory. That same mindset would later rationalize mass murder as a solution to political problems.
The document shows that genocide did not erupt from chaos or accident. It was preceded by calculation, admiration for extremism, and a belief that killingâ”whether one man or a millionâ”was cheaper than honesty and justice. In that sense, the plan to assassinate Museveni was not an anomaly. It was a rehearsal.
History has rendered its verdict. The regime that dreamed of murder in secret memos collapsed under the weight of its own fabrications. The report remains, stamped SECRET, now public and damningâ”a testament to how a state announced its crimes long before committing them.
The Habyarimana regime refused to address the political causes of the war, yet was shocked that the military conflict persisted.
The May 23, 1991 Military Intelligence Report stands today not as evidence of victimhood, but as proof of premeditated failure.
Rwanda’s Military Intelligence Report of 23 May 1991, stamped self-assuredly SECRET, is a window into the psyche of a regime that had already lost the war intellectually, morally, and strategicallyâ”years before it lost everything else.
