Yet Rwanda has created, and continues to create, countless refugees of its own. At least 287,000 Rwandans live outside the country, having fled from the regime of President Paul Kagame – and it is estimated the figure could be as high as one million.
“Kagame is a stooge: he’s a conman of the West in dubious business including, now, human trafficking,” is how one such Rwandan exile describes the president and his £120m deal with the UK Government.
Etienne Mutabazi is the legal affairs officer of the Rwanda National Congress, a party formed in exile to oppose the Kagame regime. He left the country in July 1994, just after the genocide and now lives in South Africa.
As an academic he had been acquiring and studying documentation that implicated both sides in horrific human rights abuses leading up to and during the genocide. He quickly realised that as Kagame’s invading army, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) approached, his life would be at risk for the work he was doing.
In the UK, and the West generally, the story we have of Rwanda is the 1994 genocide of the Tutsi minority conducted by the Interahamwe, a Hutu militia, with support from the government, was ended by the heroic RPF.
The RPF won the war, put a stop to the bloodshed, and upon taking over have unified the country and built Rwanda into, not only one of the most stable countries in Africa, but also one of the most prosperous, marketing itself as the Singapore of Africa.
“There is no attempt to properly categorise what the RPF was doing at the time. It could also be described as genocide, but we are prevented from looking at that.”
But Kagame doesn’t tolerate any questioning of his narrative.
As a Hutu who left in the immediate aftermath of the genocide, the Kagame regime is quick to paint refugees like Mutabazi as enemies of the state or genocide deniers. Yet there has been a steady stream of exiles from Rwanda, from those within Kagame’s government since he took power.
One of those is Jean-Paul Turayishimye, who is of a Tutsi background and served in the Rwandan National Security Services until he fled the country in 2005. He feared for his life due to his close relationship with an army general who had fallen out with Kagame.
Ahead of a third round of questioning by the state over his association with General Faustin Kayumba Nyamwasa, for whom he worked as a personal assistant, Turayishimye left the country and made it to the US. He is now the co-ordinator of the Rwandan Alliance for Change, another organisation in exile that works towards freedom in Rwanda.
“Kagame’s very paranoid,” he explained. “He wanted a loyalty test [from the general] who was unwilling to incriminate himself on fabricated charges.”
The Kagame regime is not content with creating exiles, however, and has pursued some perceived enemies overseas in the past.
“It doesn’t matter where you are, Rwanda doesn’t use government agencies, they use diaspora members [to carry out assassinations],” said Turayishimye.
“We’re not safe anywhere, even in the US.” By Joe Walsh, I news
