Citation
MULINDI, Rwanda, April 13 (Reuter) - Alexis Kanyarengwe, Hutu chairman
of the rebel Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF), says he wants to end
dictatorship and tribal bloodshed in his country racked by civil war.
I am a Hutu -- but this is not an ethnic war. It is a war against
dictatorship,
Kanyarengwe, 57, told Reuters in his headquarters at
Mulindi in the northern hills of the central African country gripped by
ethnic bloodshed that has killed tens of thousands of people.
Kanyarengwe, whose Tutsi-dominated RPF invaded in 1990 from
neighbouring Uganda, may soon have a chance to show the world whether
he can stop the tribal carnage.
His troops have advanced swiftly on Kigali, plunged into chaos when
Hutu President Juvenal Habyarimana was killed in a rocket attack on his
plane last week, and are engaged in close combat with seemingly
demoralised government troops.
Kanyarengwe, 57, is an oddity even among his own rebels. He comes from
the majority Hutu people while most of the RPF's 20,000-strong fighters
are drawn from the minority Tutsi tribe.
He is soft spoken and doesn't like confrontation,
said one RPF
official of Kanyarengwe, a stocky man with a strong handshake who likes
to wear a sporting jockey cap.
He is the political leader of a guerrilla movement which has fought on
the battlefield and around the negotiating table for RPF aims.
These included the overthrow of Habyarimana and the right of tens of
thousands of refugees exiled by four decades of tribal killing to
return home.
Major-General Paul Kagame, a 36-year old Tutsi and former military
intelligence chief in Uganda's army, commands the RPF forces.
The chairman was born in 1936, the son of a peasant farming family in
the village of Gatonde in the northwest of the country, at that time
under Belgian colonial rule.
He went to school at a White Father's seminary. In the year after a
bloody Hutu uprising against the Tutsi monarchy which forced thousands
to flee the country, Kanyarengwe enrolled in Rwanda's military academy
in 1960.
Among the first cadets with Kanyarengwe was Habyarimana.
He attended further courses in Belgium and on independence in 1962 rose
through the army ranks to become intelligence chief under President
Gregwa Kaibanda's government.
In 1973, he was involved in the military coup that brought Habyarimana
to power and was made interior minister but fell out with Habyarimana
in 1980 and fled into exile in Tanzania.
In 1987, when the nascent exiled Rwandan rebel movement adopted its was
named the RPF, Kanyarengwe was made its vice-chairman.
He was elevated to the movement's chairmanship after guerrilla leader
Major-General Fred Rwigyema was killed on the second day of the RPF
invasion of Rwanda in October 1990.
A Roman Catholic widower with nine children and also grandchildren,
Kanyarengwe challenges visitors to a game of chess at his house in
Mulindi where grass lawns lead to a long-since empty swimming pool on
this former government-owned tea estate.
Kanyarengwe refuses to reveal what his role will be in a government if
the RPF take control of Rwanda.
(c) Reuters Limited 1994
