Rwandan Civil War

The Rwandan Civil War was fought from 1990 to 1994 between the Rwandan Patriotic Front, a rebel force made up largely of Tutsi exiles who had fled earlier waves of ethnic violence and organized in neighboring Uganda, and the Hutu-led government of President Juvenal Habyarimana. The Arusha Accords of 1993 established a fragile power-sharing framework and briefly paused the fighting, but the war reignited catastrophically after Habyarimana's plane was shot down on 6 April 1994, an event that triggered the Rwandan genocide, in which extremist Hutu militias and elements of the government killed roughly eight hundred thousand Tutsi and moderate Hutu over the course of about one hundred days. The Rwandan Patriotic Front, resuming its military offensive during the genocide, advanced across the country and captured the capital Kigali in July 1994, ending both the genocide and the civil war with a decisive rebel military victory. The new government formed afterward, eventually led by the Rwandan Patriotic Front commander Paul Kagame, has governed Rwanda since.