Tag Archives: Paul Kagame

Rwanda hit squads keep targeting hit squad whistleblowers

  By

Arsenal Bolt: Quick updates on the news stories we’re following.

“Rwandan officer who leaked assassination-list evidence becomes a target” – The Globe and Mail

The U.S. State Department warned former Rwandan Major Robert Higiro of a “credible” threat to his life (while residing in Belgium) after his evidential participation in efforts to stop the current Rwandan regime from continuing its global hit squad operations against critics and opposition figures. (This has been an ongoing crisis for many years now.)

Interesting to watch the U.S. State Department finally cooling significantly on its past enthusiasm for the Kagame regime in Kigali, Rwanda — in large part due to Kagame’s bid for an infinite presidency.

Rwanda joins the Third-Termism bandwagon

  By

As long expected, Rwanda’s parliament has joined neighboring Congo and Burundi (and beyond) in bids to repeal constitutionally-imposed term limits on their presidencies. France24:

The debate, set to take place over the next two months, was prompted by parliament being handed petitions signed by a total of two million people – or roughly 17 percent of the population – asking for the constitution to be changed, the head of the chamber, Donatilla Mukabalisa, told AFP.

“We have received two million requests,” she said, explaining that parliament has been receiving a number of what she insisted were spontaneous letters and petitions from individuals, groups or associations.

 
However, there are two significant differences in the Rwanda case, although all involve relatively authoritarian elected leaders.

The first is that Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame is already now in his 15th year in office (3 of them under an older constitution and 10 under the 2003 constitution) and the term length at the moment is a whopping 7 years. That length used to be more common under constitutions inspired by the French constitution of 1958, but it had fallen out of favor in most places some time ago and was removed in France itself in 2000. 4-5 years is the prevailing world standard for presidents and prime ministers at this point. Kagame’s new “first” term (after the 2003 constitution) was from 2003 to 2010. His second term began in 2010 and will not end until 2017. He would therefore have served a full 17 years as President of Rwanda even before embarking on a “third” term under the proposed constitutional revision now under consideration. Were he to serve out that term as well, and assuming that the term lengths are not shortened when the limit is lifted, Mr. Kagame would have served for an uninterrupted 24 years. As usual, his relationship with democracy is superficial and procedural at best.

The second is that, unlike many of the sub-Saharan African leaders who have been trying to remove term limits in the past year, Paul Kagame is widely supported enthusiastically by the international community to the point of getting a free pass on most abusive actions. It will be interesting to see which allies, if any, part ways with him over this issue after so much Western criticism of efforts to lift term limits in other countries.

Free & fair? Not likely.

  By

The results are in from Rwanda’s presidential election, during which many voters said they felt intimidated and the Opposition candidates were weak or restricted. Ten years into the job, President Paul Kagame has been re-elected to another seven years:

Rwanda’s president, Paul Kagame, who has been in control of this country since 1994 and helped resurrect it from genocide into one of the most orderly nations in Africa, appeared to have been re-elected on Monday by a staggering margin, according to partial election results released early Tuesday.

Mr. Kagame won 93 percent of the votes cast in 11 out of 30 districts, the National Election Commission said, and total countrywide results were expected by the end of the day.

 
Anyone who tries to tell me that this was free and fair is either stupid or willfully blind. Nobody wins elections with 93% of the vote in a true democracy.

In my series on the abuses of the Kagame government and the RPF over the past two decades, I wrote:

With very close ties to the United States government and military, President Paul Kagame has been able to get away with many things, in large part because he liberated Rwanda from the extremist Hutu dictatorship that was precisely carrying out a genocide against the Tutsi minorities. It’s pretty hard to criticize the person that finally ended one of the very worst genocides of the 20th century, after over 900,000 people had been systematically murdered nationwide, with the world watching and doing nothing.

 
Yes, he did a heroic, monumental thing in his life once. I recognize that. But it’s not a lifetime get-out-of-blame card.

Who really believes that just because you’ve stopped a genocide in progress and upgraded your country’s infrastructure (to have fast internet and good roads) means you should be permanently shielded from criticism, despite committing numerous atrocities of your own, repressing freedom, assassinating political enemies across a continent, abducting children, and arresting foreign lawyers who represent your opponents?

I explained in my second post why I am so intent on exposing the RPF’s abuses:

I raise this not to minimize the horrors committed by their Hutu genocidaire opponents … but because it is important that we confront all the facts — not just those that make one side play the pure villains and the other side the untainted heroes. The world does not divide evenly like that.

 
Some people still think it does.

 
Editorial note: This post was originally published (in a longer form) at Starboard Broadside. It was moved here and cut down in June 2015.

An unconvincing counterargument

  By

Killing a newspaper editor is not a compelling rebuttal to that editor’s allegation of assassinations, in my humble opinion. And the circumstances point clearly to his death being a government-sponsored assassination, too:

A Rwandan journalist who accused the Rwandan government of trying to assassinate a dissident in South Africa was himself killed Thursday night in Rwanda’s capital, Kigali.

Jean-Leonard Rugambage, 34, an editor and reporter for a suspended private tabloid, was shot twice and killed late Thursday night near his home, police officials said. Violent crime is exceedingly rare in Kigali, which is known as one of the safest and most orderly capitals in Africa.
[…]

Mr. Gasasira said that he and Mr. Rugambage had published an article on Thursday linking Rwandan government military and intelligence officers to the recent shooting of Faustin Kayumba Nyamwasa, a former high-ranking Rwandan general who recently defected to South Africa. Mr. Nyamwasa was shot and wounded by a lone gunman, who did not steal anything, on the streets of Johannesburg last Saturday.

Umuvugizi’s article claimed that a senior intelligence officer close to President Paul Kagame had telephoned orders to kill Mr. Nyamwasa, and that a former presidential guard was among the four suspects arrested in the past week in connection with the shooting.

 
Gen. Nyamwasa was considered a state enemy, like most people who oppose the current government of Rwanda.

This has been another chapter in my ongoing series of posts on Rwanda’s ruling party’s abuses in the post-Genocide period.

This article originally appeared on Starboard Broadside.

A Rwandan Genocide legacy (part 3)

  By

In parts 1 and 2 of my expanding series on a lesser-noted legacy of the Rwandan Genocide, I looked at some of the abuses that the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) committed in the past and are committing today. With very close ties to the United States government and military, President Paul Kagame has been able to get away with many things, in large part because he liberated Rwanda from the extremist Hutu dictatorship that was precisely carrying out a genocide against the Tutsi minorities. It’s pretty hard to criticize the person that finally ended one of the very worst genocides of the 20th century, after over 900,000 people had been systematically murdered nationwide, with the world watching and doing nothing.

In part 1, I cited Kagame and the RPF’s consolidation of power and suppression of opposition parties ahead of national elections this year, as well as the creation of a secretive work-prison camp holding abducted children. In part 2, I examined how dissent and new historical research attempts are being silenced on grounds of fomenting genocide and civil war.

In a similar vein, defense lawyers for those charged with crimes involving the 1994 genocide report serious intimidation even though they are merely serving the international community by providing legal counsel to defendants. One American lawyer has actually been arrested as a national security threat and Genocide denier, probably in part because he is representing a client that is an enemy of the individuals in power in the post-Genocide government. NY Times, 6/12/10:

Defense lawyers at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, which has been prosecuting ringleaders of the 1994 genocide, are threatening to stop participating in cases after one of their colleagues was jailed by the Rwandan government last month.

A growing number of lawyers contend that Peter Erlinder, an American who represents a senior Rwandan Army officer accused of directing death squads, was arrested for his statements at the tribunal even though he is supposed to be protected by diplomatic immunity while working for it.

Mr. Erlinder, 62, is charged with denying Rwanda’s genocide and threatening national security through his writings and speeches. Rwanda’s government argues that Mr. Erlinder’s work can “instigate riots” and “civil disobediences,” but it seems that many of the statements that the Rwandan government finds objectionable are actually part of Mr. Erlinder’s work as a lawyer in the United States and in Arusha, Tanzania, where the United Nations-backed tribunal for Rwanda is based.

So far, 11 lawyers with imminent court appearances have formally requested that the courts postpone their cases. At least 40 in total — a majority of the defense lawyers working for the tribunal — have signed a general petition saying they plan not to work unless their security can be guaranteed.

 
An article published today suggests that the lawyer who has been arrested might actually have been arrested because outside the ICTR he had decided to represent an opposition candidate who had pointed out the RPF also committed reciprocal atrocities during, preceding, and following the Genocide, when they were a rebel group working to overthrow the Hutu regime and wipe out the genocidaires after the events of 1994. As I discussed at length in part 1 of this series, that’s exactly what did happen, and yet she was arrested as a promoter of “genocide ideology” because she chose to speak out with the truth.

Furthermore, the lawyer in question recently filed a lawsuit, on behalf of the widows of the late presidents of Burundi and Rwanda who were killed in 1994 in an attack on the presidential plane that set the Rwandan Genocide in motion… and the lawsuit alleged (as France has in the past) that then-General Kagame had ordered the RPF’s security detachment in the capital to shoot down the plane. Since Kagame is now president, this is an extremely unpopular move to make within the ruling party’s upper ranks and was probably a serious compounding factor in his arrest. (And from what I understand, it’s much more likely that Hutu military extremists behind the coup shot the plane down, to provide the pretext to seize control and begin the killings within hours, and so this is obviously a very touchy subject with the Tutsis in power.)

Now, I have to state that I have no idea what this lawyer’s actual motivations are. He could very well be sympathetic to the Hutu side or he could be in it for the money (though that’s hard to believe if he’s an ICTR lawyer). Maybe he really believes that the Genocide wasn’t planned, when he says that on behalf of his clients charged with war crimes. However, he is a law professor and an international lawyer. It’s much more likely that he believes he’s just fulfilling a necessary role in a fair judicial system, which is that somebody has to represent the worst of the worst, or even just “the other side” of the story, to make sure everyone gets their day in court without making a mockery of the system. His legal statements probably don’t reflect his personal beliefs.

On balance, sure, the Rwandan Patriotic Front were almost certainly the “good guys,” if we have to pick, but that doesn’t mean they haven’t done bad things (e.g. killing Hutu civilians, destabilizing the Democratic Republic of the Congo several times), and as a political party in the post-Genocide period, they have been doing some very bad things that undermine the fledgling democracy of the country. If they continue to intimidate people and silence dissent or alternative viewpoints, they are not protecting any Rwandans or national security, but rather they are protecting themselves and their power… and the international community should be willing to criticize that and pressure the government to stop. Defense lawyers, who already face a nasty job in general, should not be facing the threat of twenty-year prison sentences just for doing their jobs to help international justice be served.

This article originally appeared on Starboard Broadside.

A legacy of the Rwandan Genocide

  By ,

It can be tough to criticize the liberators, the people who stop a genocide. They are heroes to many, and it’s easy to disregard the people who disagree as the oppressors. Hell, it took us long time in the United States to begin coming to terms with some of the inhuman military actions we took in World War II while liberating Europe and Asia from brutal, genocidal regimes. Rarely are the liberators perfect or unsullied.

In late October 1990, the “Rwandan Patriotic Front,” a ethnic Tutsi minority rebel army suddenly stormed the Rwandan border from Uganda. Once the invasion began Uganda felt compelled to support it. The rebels were largely Rwandan only by parentage and were seeking the right of return and political control of the country after what they saw as decades of injustice by the Hutu majority in the post-colonial period. The authoritarian Hutu-controlled government of Rwanda went into a state of emergency and began crackdowns and reprisals, and elite Zairian and French troops quickly arrived to back the Hutu government. The invasion was a failure and the rebels retreated, with their leadership disintegrating especially as Uganda’s government arrested some of them. Another RPF leader, Major Paul Kagame, was immediately recalled from the United States, where he had been receiving extensive military training during the preceding months, and he took command, planning out a guerrilla long-war strategy. By 1992, the Rwandan regime had been forced to enter a cease-fire settlement with the rebels, although the rebels remained in a weak position. After several months the RPF invaded again because the government was allegedly conducting “small” massacres, but French troops arrived again to arm and support the regime, which ended the invasion and resulted in another cease-fire, this time with UN peacekeepers and a plan for power-sharing. It must be noted that well over a million Hutu civilians had become displaced during the conflict due to RPF massacres.

In April 1994, the presidential plane was hit by a surface-to-air missile of unknown source and the Hutu generals initiated a violent coup within hours and began political purges. Within days, the general massacres of Tutsi civilians were rolling along as the Hutu hardliners had planned for months, and around a dozen Belgian UN troops were killed, prompting Western nations to send in rescue troops to evacuate all their personnel, leaving the ordinary Tutsis (and moderate Hutus) to their fate. Over the course of the next three months, the Rwandan military and an extremist militia committed systematic genocide, killing one person approximately every five minutes on average. (The final victim count was estimated at 800,000 to well over a million. The RPF puts the figure at 937,000).
Read more