Théoneste Bagosora, a former Rwandan army colonel, was convicted by a special United Nations-convened International Criminal Tribunal of being the mastermind behind the 100-day-long 1994 genocide of at least 800,000 ethnic Tutsis and even members of his own Hutu ethnic group who mixed with their minority Tutsi neighbors.
correction
An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Théoneste Bagosora’s conviction for the murder of 10 Belgian peacekeepers had been overturned on appeal. It was not. An earlier version also said Belgium continued to support the Tutsis after independence. In fact, after independence, Belgium helped the Hutus take power. The article has been corrected.
Even before his conviction made it safe to say so, African media dubbed Mr. Bagosora “the Colonel of the Apocalypse” because he had warned of such an event before the massacres. International news outlets referred to him as “Rwanda’s Himmler,” comparing him to Adolf Hitler’s chief architect of the Holocaust.
Mr. Bagosora was also found guilty of the 1994 torture and murder of 10 Belgian soldiers with a U.N. peacekeeping mission to Rwanda. The killings prompted Belgium to pull its 400 troops — reportedly among the best-trained in the U.N. peacekeeping force — out of the central-eastern African nation as the massacre of Tutsis began.
As well as the massacres of April-July 1994, Mr. Bagosora was widely suspected of ordering the shooting down by two surface-to-air missiles (SAM) of a Falcon business jet in which Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana, his Burundi counterpart Cyprien Ntaryamira and Rwanda’s armed forces chief of staff were killed near the capital, Kigali, on April 6 that year.
Mr. Bagosora, the president’s right-hand man, blamed Tutsis. But he was one of only a few who knew the jet’s itinerary and had previously commanded the army’s SAM-equipped antiaircraft battalion. The president’s death, along with the armed forces chief, gave Mr. Bagosora carte blanche to take charge of the military and effectively the government.
Within hours of the presidential jet downing, Rwanda’s first and so far only female prime minister, Agathe Uwilingiyimana, though herself a Hutu, was sexually assaulted and murdered by Mr. Bagosora’s men, according to the Tribunal’s judgment.
Mr. Bagosora declared himself leader of Rwanda as head of a new “Committee of Public Safety,” which conversely metasicized public terror. Members of his Interahamwe (“Those who attack together”) youth militia ran amok with machetes against Tutsis and even fellow Hutus who tried to stop them. Some Hutu men were reported to have slain their own Tutsi wives during the carnage.
Although a minority of around 15 percent in Rwanda, the Tutsis had dominated politics for decades, until colonial Belgium granted the nation independence in 1962. The Belgians had long favored and supported the Tutsis but after independence helped the Hutus take power. The fact that the Belgians had introduced mandatory identity cards, including ethnicity, made it easy for Mr. Bagosora’s Hutu forces to pick out Tutsis in the spring and summer of 1994.
Historian and human rights activist Alison Des Forges, an Africa expert, wrote what is considered the definitive account of the 1994 massacres, the 800-page “Leave None to Tell the Story,” published in 1999 by New York-based Human Rights Watch. The title refers to what Mr. Bagosora and other Hutu leaders told their men before they went on the rampage.
“Hundreds of thousands [of ordinary Rwandans] chose to participate in the genocide reluctantly, some only under duress or in fear of their own lives,” Des Forges wrote. “Unlike the zealots who never questioned their original choice, these people had to decide repeatedly whether or not to participate, each time weighing the kind of action planned, the identity of the proposed victim, the rewards of participating and the likely costs of not participating. . . . Those with misgivings found it easier to commit crimes and to believe or pretend to believe they had done no wrong.”
Des Forges campaigned for years to hold Mr. Bagosora and his cohorts to account, and her foundational efforts were widely credited with playing a key role in seeing them tried and convicted. She died in 2009 aboard a commercial flight that crashed in Clarence Center, N.Y., near her home in Buffalo, killing all passengers and crew and one person on the ground. (By then, she knew Mr. Bagosora had been convicted and, at the time, jailed for life.)
The 1994 massacres tapered off and ended after Uganda-backed Tutsis of the Rwandan Patriotic Front swept into Kigali, themselves massacring Hutus along the way and causing others to flee to Zaire (now Congo). Mr. Bagosora fled first to Zaire and later to Cameroon, where he was arrested in 1996.
Six years later, he went on trial in Tanzania by the specially convened U.N. International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), culminating in his conviction for genocide and crimes against humanity and his transfer to a special prison in Koulikoro, adapted for “genocidaires” (genocide convicts).
Mr. Bagosora was known to have married and had eight children, some of whom, including his son Achille, settled in Paris, but complete details about survivors were not immediately available.
Théoneste Bagosora, whose father was a teacher, was born into a Christian family in Giciye, Rwanda, on Aug. 16, 1941. He graduated in 1964 from officers’ school in Kigali as a second lieutenant and conducted further military training in France and Belgium.
By the time of the 1994 massacres, he was cabinet director in the defense ministry, but his closeness to Habyarimana meant he was always on the cusp of military and political power.
At the start of his trial in 2002, Mr. Bagosora insisted he was “a victim of ignominious propaganda,” denied any direct involvement in any killings and urged the Tribunal judge to “rehabilitate me back into society.” Referring to a prosecution statement comparing him to Hitler, he said: “Neither Hitler, Himmler or Göring ever went running around in Berlin to flush out Jews to be killed.”
A dramatic highlight of the trial came in 2004 when Gen. Romeo Dallaire, the Canadian officer who in 1994 headed the U.N. peacekeeping force came face to face, as a prosecution witness, with Mr. Bagosora for the first time in 10 years.
Dallaire recalled passing the colonel in the lobby of the Diplomat Hotel in Kigali just before the massacres began. Mr. Bagosora leaned in closely and snarled, “If I ever see you again, I will kill you.”
In his 2003 memoir, “Shake Hands With the Devil,” Dallaire wrote that, after being summoned to meet Mr. Bagosora and his youth militia leaders when the massacres were well underway, Dallaire stopped outside, removed the bullets from his pistol and left them in his vehicle “just in case the temptation to shoot them was too extreme.”
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