President Juvenal Habyarimana

President Juvenal Habyarimana: There was an overpowering stench of death, said Major Brent Beardsley, who served alongside General Romeo Dallaire both are now retired . , according to CBC. On April 6 the plane carrying President Juvenal Habyarimana a Hutu was shot down. His death sparked a wave of horrific violence in which more than 800,000 people, mostly Tutsi civilians, were massacred. A Rwanda Patriotic Front RPF rebel walks by the site of the April 6, 1994, plane crash that killed President Juvenal Habyarimana, triggering the genocide. Jean Marc Boujou/The Associated Press It's been 20 years since the Rwandan genocide, but for the Canadian soldiers who were there as part of a doomed UN peacekeeping mission, the sights, sounds and smells have not faded from memory. Rwanda was a country of seven million people in 1994, 85 per cent of them Hutu. Extremists within the Hutu ethnic group had been inflaming cultural tensions for years, blaming the Tutsi minority for economic and social problems. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.