On July 4th, 1994, the capital city of Rwanda, Kigali, fell to the forces of the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA), the armed wing of the RPF. The members of the so-called Provisional Government (established after the plane crash that claimed the lives of the Presidents of Rwanda and Burundi), the armed groups, and many people who were involved in genocide, fled mainly to DRC (then called Zaire) and to Tanzania. Over 3 million refugees fled to Tanzania and DRC.

On July 19th, 1994, RPF established a Government of National Unity with four other political parties, with a Prime Minister from one of these parties as the head of government business. These parties are the Liberal Party, the Social Democratic Party, the Christian Democratic Party, and the Republican Democratic Movement. Weeks later, the National Assembly was nominated by the four above-mentioned parties plus three other smaller parties, namely, the Islamic Party, the Socialist Party, and the Democratic Union for Rwandan People, in addition to the RPF. In this Parliament with 70 seats, RPF has only 6 representatives.

Two years after the establishment of the government, almost 4000 elements from the army of the previous regimes were integrated into the new national army, RPA.

The Cabinet, the National Assembly, and other institutions of government have not, for the first time, been established on the basis of ethnicity. They are not "Tutsi-led" or "Tutsi-dominated", as the enemies of the government have quite often alleged. It is the first time in the history of Rwanda that inclusive institutions are being established deliberately to fight the politics of division that have polarised the Rwandan society for so long, thereby sowing the seeds of genocide.