Rwanda: Kagame gets tough

KIGALI, Rwanda — “If they want war, we’ll give them war and they’ll regret it,” warned
President Paul Kagame at one of his final campaign rallies before Monday’s election.

It was a moment in which the reluctant democrat’s mask slipped to reveal the military man beneath.

The outcome of Rwanda’s presidential vote is not in doubt: Kagame will win a landslide and another seven-year term in office. That Kagame is a strongman leader and an autocrat is also not in doubt, but is he the strong leader Rwanda needs or the emerging dictator his critics charge?

Sixteen years ago Rwanda was torn apart by a genocide in which ordinary ethnic Hutus were incited by extremist politicians and aligned media to turn on their Tutsi neighbors with machetes and guns. Some 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were murdered in an unrelenting three-month bloodbath.

Kagame’s rebel army, the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA), ended the genocide and has held power since, with a slightly changed name. The hegemony of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) is all but unchallenged.

On Monday, Kagame will face three challengers but two are members of the coalition government, none really hope to win and all have said they will rejoin the coalition after the vote.

These opposing candidates are nothing more than window-dressing designed to make Kagame’s re-election look democratic, say critics who argue that any who really dare challenge the regime are swiftly punished.

Arrests, blocking of political parties and gruesome murders have marred the run-up to the presidential poll.

“In recent months and weeks there has been an increase in intimidation, harassment and repression of anyone who is perceived to be an opponent or a critic of the government,” said Carina Tertsakian,
a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch.

Privately, Western diplomats in Kigali talk of “waves of oppression” in recent months. “Let’s not fool ourselves, Rwanda is not a democracy in the Western understanding,” one told GlobalPost.

Opposition activists have been beaten, aspiring presidential candidate Victoire Ingabire of the FDU-Inkingi party was arrested in April and another senior opposition official, Andre Kagwa Rwisereka of the Democratic Green Party, was murdered in July, his head almost chopped
clean off.

Both parties have been blocked from competing in next week’s election.

Two private newspapers have been shut down. Jean-Bosco Gasasira, editor of Umuvugizi, fled the country claiming his life was threatened. In June his deputy Jean-Leonard Rubangabe was shot in the face and killed outside his Kigali home.

Most high-profile was the attempted murder of a dissident general in South Africa during the recent World Cup. Lieutenant General Faustin Kayumba Nyamwasa, a former army chief of staff who fled Rwanda in February, was shot on his way back from a shopping trip in Johannesburg in June.

The nationalities of five men arrested in South Africa have not been revealed but on Thursday the diplomatic spat sparked by the attempted murder stepped up a notch when Pretoria recalled its ambassador in Kigali.

RPF officials dismiss as “preposterous” accusations that it was behind the botched assassination and has denied any involvement in the other murders.

But Kagame’s government has been accused of trying to kill its opponents before. In 1998 a former minister, Seth Sendashonga, was shot to death in Nairobi, Kenya, and a prominent judge turned
government critic, Augustin Cyiza, disappeared shortly before the last presidential election in 2003.

These were among a series of murders and disappearances that punctuated Rwanda’s otherwise impressive emergence from the horrors of the 1994 genocide. Since then Kagame has worked to rebuild the country’s traumatized society and shattered economy.

In such a difficult context stifling of dissent is often cited as a necessary price to pay for Rwanda’s stability but it has taken a worrying turn of late, diplomats warn.

One Kigali-based diplomat confessed to being “a bit shell-shocked” by the recent crackdown. Another described the human rights situation in Rwanda as “precarious,” adding that “this is still a military regime and threats are dealt with militarily.”

“Kagame is not yet ready to accept opposition, that there is a new generation that does not always agree with him,” said Ingabire, 41, of FDU-Inkingi. She is on bail accused of espousing genocide ideology, inciting divisionism and collaborating with brutal anti-Kagame rebels in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The charges against Ingabire, a Hutu politician, stem from her insistence that Tutsi leaders admit to alleged war crimes committed before and after the genocide. Such open talk of the divisions that
lie beneath Rwanda’s ordered society is rare, and illegal under new laws.

Green party leader Frank Habineza, 35, said the harassment, intimidation and murder of his deputy has left him scared and forlorn.

“It puts a lot of questions into our hearts about what’s next for Rwanda," he said. "Will it be like this forever, will the RPF ever bring democracy to this country?”