Agathe Uwilingiyimana

Agathe Uwilingiyimana (23 May 1953 – 7 April 1994), sometimes known as Madame Agathe, was a Rwandan political figure.

Agathe Uwilingiyimana was born 23 May 1953 in the village of Nyaruhengeri in the southern Rwandan province Butare, 140 km southeast of the Rwandan capital Kigali.

She moved with her farming parents to the Belgian Congo to find work, but they moved back to Butare in 1957.

She was a member of the Hutu ethnicity that made up the majority of the Rwandan population.

After success in public examinations she was educated at Notre Dame des Cîteaux Secondary School, and obtained the certificate to teach humanities in 1973.

She continued with graduate studies in mathematics and chemistry, after which she became a schoolteacher in Butare in 1976.

Uwilingiyimana married a high-school classmate, Ignace Barahira, in 1976; she kept her maiden name, as is customary for Rwandese women.

She had the first of her five children the next year.

By 1983 she was teaching chemistry at the National University of Rwanda in Butare.

She received a B.Sc.

in 1985, and taught chemistry for four years in Butare academic schools.

She received criticism from traditionalists for promoting mathematics and science study amongst female students.

In 1986 she created a Soriority and Credit Cooperative Society among the staff of the Butare academic school, and her high-profile role in the self-help organization brought her to the attention of the Kigali authorities, who wanted to appoint decision makers from the discontented south of the country.

In 1989 she became a director in the Ministry of Commerce.

This came in the midst of the Rwandan Civil War of 1990–94, and earned her the enmity of the Hutu extremists, as the quota system had favoured Hutus.

She joined the Republican Democratic Movement (MDR), an opposition party, in 1992, and that April was appointed Minister of Education by Dismas Nsengiyaremye, the first opposition prime minister under a power-sharing scheme negotiated between President Juvénal Habyarimana and five major opposition parties.

As education minister, Uwilingiyamana scrapped the academic ethnic quota system, instead distributing public school spots and awards on the basis of open merit.

She served as Prime Minister of Rwanda from 18 July 1993 until her assassination on 7 April 1994, during the opening stages of the Rwandan genocide.

She was also Rwanda's acting head of state in the hours leading up to her death.

She was Rwanda's first and so far only female prime minister.

Uwilingiyimana succeeded Nsengiyaremye as Rwanda's prime minister on July 17, 1993, following a meeting between President Habyarimana and the five parties.

The party was divided between moderates and extremists, and she was a moderate.

Nsengiyaremye and the MDR convened an extraordinary congress in Kabusunzu on 23–24 July, during which hardliners had her resign from the party, together with the president of MDR, Faustin Twagiramungu.

Uwilingiyimana briefly resigned in view of her lack of support, but a group of prominent personalities, including Twagiramungu and Théoneste Bagosora, made her renounce her resignation.

The MDR was thus split into two factions each claiming to be the real MDR.

At a meeting in Kigali, Habyarimana addressed her condescendingly as "You, woman!", to which she replied "Don't talk to me like that. I'm not your wife!"

The Habyarimana–Uwilingiyimana government had the daunting task of successfully completing the Arusha Accords with the rebel Rwandese Patriotic Front (RPF), the Tutsi-dominated guerilla movement.

An agreement between Habyarimana, the five opposition parties (led ostensibly by Uwilingiyimana), and the RPF, was finally reached on 4 August 1993.

Under Arusha Accords, Habyarimana's ruling MRND would take the transitional presidency, and the Prime Minister would be Faustin Twagiramungu from the MDR.

President Habyarimana officially dismissed her as prime minister on 4 August 1993, but she stayed on in a caretaker capacity for eight months, until her death in April 1994.

On November 3, 1993, she publicly warned against retaliatory violence against Tutsis for the assassination of the Hutu Burundian President, Melchior Ndadaye, and said that violence was being used to disrupt the Arusha transition.

This was despite being excoriated by all the Hutu-dominated parties, including her own MDR, and President Habyarimana's ruling party, which held a press conference in January 1994 attacking Uwilingiyimana for being a "political trickster".

The swearing in of the Broad Based Transitional Government (BBTG), was to have taken place on 25 March 1994.

At that point, Uwilingiyimana was to have stepped down in favor of Faustin Twagiramungu, having been guaranteed a lower-level ministerial post in the new government.

However, the RPF did not appear at the ceremony, postponing the establishment of the new regime.

She reached agreement with them that the new government would be sworn in on the following day.

The talks between President Habyarimana, Uwilingiyimana, and the Rwandan Patriotic Front were never concluded, and the president's plane was shot down by surface-to-air missiles at around 8:30 pm on 6 April 1994.

From Habyarimana's death until her assassination the following morning (approximately 14 hours), Prime Minister Uwilingiyimana was Rwanda's constitutional head of state and of government.

In an interview with Radio France on the night of President Habyarimana's assassination, Uwilingiyimana said that there would be an immediate investigation.

She said her home was under siege, and gave her last recorded words: