A sign of the sensitive nature of the subject, the Rwandan government reacted even before the publication, on Tuesday October 10, of the Human Rights Watch (HRW) report on the repression carried out by Kigali outside its territory. The non-governmental organization (NGO) “continues to portray a false image of Rwanda, which only exists in its imagination,” responded Yolande Makolo, the spokesperson for the Rwandan government on Monday. Kigali and the NGO have had a tense relationship for decades, with the organization regularly denouncing human rights violations in the country, including arbitrary detentions and extrajudicial killings.
This time, it is an investigation entitled ““Join us or you will die”, the extraterritorial repression exercised by Rwanda” which annoys Kigali. The human rights organization is looking at how the regime of Paul Kagame, in de facto power since the end of the Tutsi genocide in 1994 and who announced that he would run for a fourth term in 2024, attempts to silence all political opposition.
HRW gathered some 150 testimonies from Rwandans living inside or outside Rwanda and documented fourteen murders or attempted assassinations, kidnappings, enforced disappearances and extraterritorial physical attacks since 2017. These abuses which take place, the authors say, “with worrying frequency, particularly in African countries or in those where the Rwandan government has an active presence” through its embassies, diaspora associations and economic partnerships.
In addition to physical violence, the report lists the freezing of financial assets, judicial harassment of dissidents, online threats, disinformation campaigns, hacking of private communication tools.
“Relentless logic”
With “relentless logic”, details HRW, and a strategy of encirclement, the Rwandan authorities also attack the families and loved ones of dissidents. Here too, judicial harassment but also arbitrary detention, acts of torture and ill-treatment, restriction of movement and seizure of property, strangulation of resources and professional prospects are commonplace. “If you publish my name, they will kill him,” a Rwandan activist did not hesitate to warn after having told the NGO investigators of the torture for months of one of his relatives by thugs from the regime in a private house transformed into an unofficial place of detention. This systematic targeting of loved ones, a “particularly vicious form of control”, is “hardly visible” abroad, analyzes the report, and establishes a climate of fear leading to self-censorship and undermining the emergence of any new dissidence .
Most of these situations either do not benefit from any national or international investigation to determine responsibilities, or see the procedures bog down or end, deplores Human Rights Watch, which also accuses the United Nations and more generally the community internationally for having “looked away” on the seriousness and consequences of such repression, particularly because Rwanda is one of the main providers of blue helmets (6,500) in five peacekeeping operations in the UN in Africa (Central African Republic, Mali, DRC, Sudan and South Sudan).
“What we denounce makes sense”
Furthermore, Kigali has also extended its influence by placing its loyalists at the head of leading institutions – notably its former minister of information and then of foreign affairs, Louise Mushikiwabo, elected in 2018 secretary general of the International Organization of the Francophonie – and by establishing partnerships with Western countries, like the controversial agreement with the United Kingdom which plans to send migrants who entered its territory illegally to Rwanda to study their asylum application and on which the British Supreme Court must rule.
Opponent Victoire Ingabire, president of the Unified Democratic Forces, welcomed the publication of this investigation. “We support it because it shows that what we denounce makes sense. Outside the country, the Kagame regime has chosen to use violence against opponents and those who do not share the regime’s vision. “It’s a way of showing their strength and that they can reach anyone, anywhere,” she responded.
Media close to the Rwandan authorities strongly criticized it, like the Rwandan media The New Times. According to an anonymous “highly placed” source cited by the newspaper on Sunday, the briefing was the result of a “politically motivated process, which involves discussions with discredited individuals or fugitives from justice, and the preparation of sources on this they should say.”
