Relationship To MRND
In the 1980s and '90s, Bizimungu worked within the Hutu MRND government which ruled Rwanda until 1994. Prior to 1990, Bizimungu had close ties to Hutu president Juvénal Habyarimana. During this period, he held several positions, including director general of Electrogaz, the national electricity company.
In 1990 he joined the primarily Tutsi Rwandese Patriotic Front (RPF) when his brother, a colonel in the Rwandan Armed Forces, was assassinated, possibly on the orders of the government. At the time, dissatisfied with the Hutu government of Habyarimana, the RPF was just beginning its invasion of Rwanda from Uganda. Bizimungu lived in exile in Belgium, serving as the party's information officer. In 1993, he helped negotiate the 1993 Arusha Accords, ending the three-year Rwandan Civil War.
After Habyarimana's death in a plane crash on 6 April 1994, decades of complex ethnic, social and political hatreds were ignited and led to the Rwandan Genocide.
Read more about this topic: Pasteur Bizimungu
Famous quotes containing the words relationship to and/or relationship:
“Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“It is possible to make friends with our children—but probably not while they are children.... Friendship is a relationship of mutual dependence-interdependence. A family is a relationship in which some of the participants are dependent on others. It is the job of parents to provide for their children. It is not appropriate for adults to enter into parenthood recognizing they have made a decision to accept dependents and then try to pretend that their children are not dependent on them.”
—Donald C. Medeiros (20th century)