Rwandan asylum seekers have spoken of the fear of persecution they face from their own country as an i investigation reveals the UK has granted six people the right to stay since signing the controversial migrant deal.

Rishi Sunak’s bill returns to Parliament next week as the Government tries to deem Rwanda a safe country in order for the deportation deal to go ahead. 

An i investigation, however, has revealed that six people from Rwanda have been granted asylum since ministers signed the deportation deal with the country in April 2022.

Here, i speaks to two Rwandans who left the country to settle in the UK prior to the deal, and who still receive anonymous death threats if they dare to speak out.

‘I still receive death threats for speaking out against Rwanda’

By Poppy Wood

Prudentienne Seward still faces threats and intimidation for speaking out against the Rwandan regime almost 28 years after she came to the UK as an asylum seeker.

As recently as last year, she received a number of ominous phone calls from a withheld number. The voice at the other end of the line, whom she believes to be connected to the Rwandan Government, repeatedly told her to stop spreading claims Rwanda that “is not safe”.

“They were threatening me [that] they will kill me – they will kill my son,” she told i. “They said ‘if you don’t stop your activity you will be perished and your son will be perished. Why can’t you be silent?’”

Prudentienne was granted asylum in the UK on 6 April 1996, arriving with little other than her 11-month old baby clinging to her side. Five days earlier, on 1 April that year, her husband was shot dead after being ambushed by bandits in Angola.

The couple were in the country as part of their work for Oxfam, and had fled there after escaping Rwanda during the genocide.

Exactly two years earlier, on 6 April 1994, violence erupted across the country. Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana was assassinated after rebels shot down his plane, triggering a state of chaos, before armed Hutu militias began a killing spree of the Tutsi ethnic group.

Prudentienne’s family split up in the hope of avoiding being killed all together. Her father was from the Tutsi ethnic group and her mother came from a family that was mostly Hutu.

Prudentienne sought shelter in the nearby city of Butare, before eventually escaping the country through the help of aid agencies. When she returned to her hometown several months later to try and find her family, she was told that both her mother and sister had been killed by Tutsi forces.

As many as 800,000 people are thought to have been killed in the 100 days of militia violence in the country between 7 April and 15 July 1994, which ended when the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) declared a military victory. Rwanda has been governed as a de facto one-party state by the RPF since then, with former commander Paul Kagame as president since 2000.

In the years since, Prudentienne has made it her mission to speak out about the violence she witnessed in Rwanda from the relative safety of the UK. In her view, little has changed over that time. 

“Rwanda is not a safe country,” she told i. “The [Rwandan] people themselves can’t speak up, the country doesn’t even have any journalists now.”

Prudentienne thinks she would be imprisoned or killed “within a month” if she were to return to Rwanda, and that continuing threats against her show just how unsafe the country is.

“I would be sent to jail, or killed in a ‘car accident’, or by ‘food poisoning,’” she said.

[“The UK Government] can’t claim that Rwanda is a safe country. It’s not safe at all. I was shocked when I heard about the Rwanda deal – it’s a shocking and shameful project.

“Rwanda is a country that doesn’t even care about its own people – and then you’re sending other human beings there? You’re making a double suffering for people, because they’re coming here thinking they’ll be safe, and then you’re sending them to a country where they’ll be shut down.”  By Zoe Drewett, The I