Rwanda's path to the coup began years before, in the contradictions of its own revolution. Under Belgian colonial rule, the Tutsi minority had been elevated to administrative authority over the Hutu majority. When Kayibanda founded the Parmehutu party in 1957, he channeled Hutu resentment into a political movement that overthrew the monarchy and won the 1961 elections. But independence did not unify the Hutu political class. Regional tensions split them -- central and southern politicians, led by Kayibanda, clashed with northern Hutu leaders who felt excluded from the spoils of power. The government that had promised emancipation began to fracture along geographic lines almost as soon as the colonial rulers departed.

In the months before the coup, Habyarimana's army -- composed largely of northern soldiers -- escalated persecution of ethnic Tutsi through vigilante committees enforcing ethnic quotas in schools and workplaces. When Kayibanda refused to endorse this policy, the military branded him weak. The army manufactured the justification for its own intervention: fake documents and rumors circulated against the president, while Rwanda's diplomatic isolation deepened. Neighboring Uganda, under Idi Amin's brutal rule, housed large numbers of Tutsi refugees and maintained hostile relations with Kigali. The country's economic and diplomatic position deteriorated, and Habyarimana positioned himself as the only man strong enough to restore order -- a classic pretext for military takeover, refined to an art form in Cold War-era Africa.

The coup itself was swift. Habyarimana announced the Committee for Peace and National Union the following morning, promising stability and reconciliation. The international community barely noticed. But what came next was neither peaceful nor unifying. Fifty-six people were arrested, most of them former government officials and political leaders. Between 1974 and 1977, all fifty-six were killed by the security services. Kayibanda himself died in detention in 1976, almost certainly of deliberate starvation. Others were killed by immolation, beating, or being tied to moving vehicles. These deaths were kept secret for years, surfacing only when cracks appeared in the new regime during the early 1980s. By then, Habyarimana's government was offering between $2,000 and $20,000 in compensation to the victims' families -- an admission of guilt disguised as generosity.

Habyarimana immediately banned all political parties, then created his own -- the National Revolutionary Movement for Development (MRND) -- as Rwanda's sole legal political organization. For twenty years, the MRND ruled a one-party state that maintained Hutu dominance through ethnic identity cards, quota systems, and periodic anti-Tutsi violence. This was the architecture of exclusion that made the 1994 genocide possible. Habyarimana himself died on April 6, 1994, when his plane was shot down approaching Kigali airport -- the event that triggered one hundred days of systematic killing. The coup of July 5, 1973, the one that was supposed to bring peace, had instead installed the machinery that produced the catastrophe twenty-one years later.