How long will Western nations bankroll President Kagame’s brutality in Rwanda?

TORONTO – Foreign countries, including the United Kingdom and the United States, pour nearly a billion dollars every year into Rwanda – 40 percent of the troubled African nation’s budget.

Now, these donor nations need to ask themselves why they are bankrolling Rwanda’s descent into despotism under the direction of President Paul Kagame, who has promoted economic development at the terrible cost of killing, imprisoning, intimidating or exiling his critics.

This crucial question is inescapable in the wake of the recent conviction of four hit men apparently hired to assassinate a Kagame rival in Johannesburg, part of the recent round of violence against real and imagined enemies of the increasingly insecure strongman.

Let’s sort through the growing indications that Kagame is purging the military, tightening his control over civilian institutions, suppressing all opposition and eliminating his adversaries at home and abroad.

First, the failed contract killing: After evidence surfaced about the attempted murder of exiled former Rwandan Army chief Kayumba Nyamwasa in Johannesburg in 2010, a South African court convicted four men who had received $7,500 from “people in Rwanda” to commit what the magistrate called “a politically motivated” murder.

Meanwhile, the court acquitted a fifth defendant, a Rwandan businessman who prosecutors called the mastermind behind the crime.

Connecting the attempted assassination to Kagame, the South African government had already acted in March to expel three Rwandan diplomats allegedly linked to a raid on Nyamwasa’s house.

The shooting of Nyamwasa, who survived stomach wounds, was one of a series of attacks on Rwandan dissidents. The ever-expanding list of victims also includes: former Rwandan spy chief Patrick Karegeya, strangled in a Johannesburg hotel in June; former Rwandan Development Bank director Théogène Turatsinze, found floating in a lake in Mozambique in 2012; and opposition leader André Kagwa Rwisereka, decapitated and dumped in a Rwandan river in 2010.

Shamelessly, Kagame does not disavow politically motivated murders. Having already bragged that “many of my opponents tend to die,” Kagame vowed to “if possible shoot in broad daylight those who intend to destabilize our country” after South Africa expelled another group of Rwandan diplomats for their involvement in the killing of the exiled intelligence chief Karegeya.

These killings are only the tip of the spear for Kagame’s systematic drive to dominate Rwanda’s military and civilian institutions, while eliminating or intimidating actual and potential political opponents. Kagame’s critics have been arrested on trumped-up charges, assaulted by police or vanished from sight.

Having won a second, seven-year term in 2010 with a supposed 93 percent of the vote, Kagame has been suppressing opposition parties and closing newspapers that dare to dissent.

In a continuing purge of the military, he imprisoned four top officers in August for “threatening state security.” Their whereabouts are now unknown, and their wives are under constant interrogation and surveillance.

These arrests follow the detention and “rehabilitation” of the former commander of the United Nations and African Union peacekeeping force in Darfur, Sudan, Rwandan General Karenzi Karake, for “immoral conduct.” Kagame has sacked Army Chief of Staff General Caesar Kayizari and the chief of defense staff, General Charles Kayonga, sending them away as ambassadors to Turkey and China, respectively.

Similarly, Kagame seeks to dominate, even humiliate, civilian officials by constantly rebuking and reshuffling them. In July, Kagame fired Prime Minister Damien Haburemy and his cabinet after only two years in office.

Why do donor nations continue to subsidize and support Kagame? Perhaps it’s because they feel guilty about having failed to prevent the Rwandan genocide during the 1990s. Perhaps it’s out of gratitude for Rwanda’s role in providing troops for peacekeeping missions in Africa.

Many world leaders seem willing to make a Faustian bargain with Kagame: If he maintains his record of developing Rwanda’s economy, they’ll wink at his brutalization of Rwandan society.

But world leaders can’t say they don’t know about Kagame’s cruelty. A growing list of western governments, including the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Sweden and Belgium, are warning members of the Rwandan diaspora, including me, that we are targets of Kagame’s regime.

Among many condemnations of Kagame by governmental and nongovernmental organizations, the US State Department, in its 2013 human rights report, warned that Rwandan violations “included arbitrary or unlawful killings, both inside and outside of the country, disappearance [and] torture…”

Still, foreign aid continues to flow into Kagame’s coffers. How long will Western nations continue to subsidize killings, beatings, torture and the forced exile of Rwandans who dare to dream of democracy, not dictatorship, in our beloved but brutalized country?

David Himbara is a former senior aide and economic adviser to Rwandan President Paul Kagame.