(Bloomberg) -- For a week in September 2021, Serbian activists that helped topple Slobodan Milošević held encrypted audio sessions with the Dalfa-Umurinzi party, one of Rwanda’s last remaining opposition parties, on how to non-violently oust autocratic leaders. One discussion focused on using music for peaceful dissent; another detailed Mahatma Gandhi’s 1930 Salt March against British colonial rule.
“We decided to come together to mount a non-violent struggle,” said Assumpta Uwababyeyi, an activist exiled in Switzerland, who was among about 50 people on the calls. “It was a discussion and nothing else.”
The group left the training energized by the hope that they too could peacefully overthrow the autocrat who’s ruled their tiny central African country for three decades – Rwandan President Paul Kagame. On July 15, he’ll stand for re-election to a fourth term – against two opposition candidates who collectively barely garnered 1% of the vote in the 2017 election. In his years in power, he’s become a key Western ally — and never won less than 93%.
Like all opposition parties in Rwanda, the Dalfa-Umurinzi party operates in a constant state of danger – three of its members died in mysterious circumstances in recent years and four disappeared in the months prior to the sessions – but the link they’d used was secure, they thought, and the means they learned were peaceful. Still, a month later, nine people on the call were arrested – they haven’t been seen in public since, according to the party.
“Prosecuting participation in such an educational effort, and even more bizarre, arresting people for reading and having my book ‘Blueprint for Revolution’ speaks loudly to how scared the Rwandan government is of its own people,” Center for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies founder Srđa Popović said in an interview.
Interviews with dozens of opposition members both in Rwanda and in exile, human rights workers and lawyers, along with hundreds of pages of US court documents and Interpol red notices targeting defectors and critics illustrate how opposition to Kagame has been systematically suppressed during his decades in power – with political foes and longtime allies alike arrested, exiled, disappeared or assassinated.
The government didn't respond to repeated requests for comment, but has long denied any involvement in killings, suppression or arbitrary arrests of critics. Supporters point to the stunning transformation Kagame’s presided over, turning a country that was essentially left for dead in 1994 into perhaps the continent’s greatest development success story: the UN says Rwanda’s Human Development Index score more than doubled from 1990 to 2017—the world’s highest average annual growth rate.
Kagame himself frequently defends Rwanda's democracy from foreign critics, frequently pointing out eroding liberal norms across the West. "You are struggling with democracy, but my struggles with democracy are supposed to be different from your own. How?" he said in a state of the nation address in January. "The mess there is in democracy in your place is the same mess there is in my part of the world with democracy. Which mess is better than the other? It's all a mess."
At a rally before thousands of supporters last month, he said democracy must be put in the Rwandan context. "Democracy is often misunderstood or interpreted differently by people, but we have our own understanding based on the unique reality of Rwandans and what needs to change in our lives," he said, according to Deutsche Welle.
But “political opposition continue to face severe restrictions to their right to freedom of association, as well as threats, arbitrary detention, prosecution on trumped-up charges, killings and enforced disappearances,” Amnesty International said in a report released July 8. “This all has a chilling effect and limits the space for debate for people in Rwanda.”
Still, since leading the rebellion to liberate Rwanda from the regime that perpetrated the 1994 genocide, Kagame has turned his army into the favored ally on the continent of both African governments and Western powers, and his efficient governance has lured foreign donors.
“By turning a blind eye” to the government’s “domestic abuse for three decades, Rwanda’s donors and partners have allowed the Rwandan government to export its repression across the globe,” said Clementine de Montjoye, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch who was denied entry to Rwanda earlier this year following the publication of a report on the disappearances of critics abroad.
Supporters argue that Rwanda’s restrictions – on speech, expression and political space – are necessary given the genocide that killed an estimated 800,000 people, almost entirely from Kagame’s ethnic Tutsi minority.
But today most Rwandans were “born after the genocide or were minors,” said Victoire Ingabire, who founded Dalfa-Umurinzi after being jailed for eight years following a terrorism conviction when she challenged Kagame in the 2010 election. “They have nothing to do with the genocide and they need room to express their minds."
In many cases Kagame has turned against his closest allies – men who fought with him to free Rwanda – when they’ve disagreed with him. Eugene Gasana played a key political role in the rebel army. He later served as Rwanda’s ambassador to Germany and elsewhere, before becoming ambassador to the UN in 2009.
Gasana declined to be interviewed, but in a 2021 affidavit filed in a New York court proceeding he explained why he thought he and Kagame had fallen out in 2015, when Rwanda changed the constitution so the president could stay in office until 2034.
“I got frustrated with the way President Paul Kagame was assassinating Rwandans in Rwanda and abroad. In some cases he bragged about his kills. I reproached him privately. He did not heed,” he said. “I told him how dangerous making himself a life President would be to Rwandans. He construed my honest conversations as being his enemy.”
Kagame recalled Gasana, who instead applied for permanent resident status in the US, which was granted in October 2018 on the grounds that he and his family had become political targets, New York County Supreme Court documents show. Around the same time, Rwanda’s US lawyer claimed to Gasana’s employers that he’d been involved in a conspiracy against the Rwandan government with the help of unidentified foreign actors, court documents show.
Later that year, Gasana’s Rwandan bank accounts were seized and a former intern at the UN mission alleged that he’d raped and sexually harassed her in 2014. In fall 2019, the New York County District Attorney’s Office Sex Crime Unit “closed the case and didn’t file any criminal charges against Mr. Gasana,” his attorney wrote in 2021 to the New York Supreme Court, where his accuser filed a complaint in July 2020.
That month Rwanda requested an Interpol red notice for his arrest on charges of rape, attempted rape and sexual harassment. In 2021, Interpol reviewed Rwanda’s claims and found a “predominant political dimension” to the case and that if continued, the agency “may be perceived as facilitating politically motivated activities.”
Rwanda has also allegedly targeted foreign politicians and journalists.
In 2021, Belgium’s military intelligence contacted Marie Bamutese, a Rwandan refugee who was a candidate for the CD&V party in the Belgian elections this year. They told her that Rwandan agents likely hacked her phone and that of her journalist husband using Pegasus, the notorious Israeli spyware used by governments to target critics, journalists and activists.
Bamutese said the spying, assassinations and imprisoning were all part of a broad strategy to stifle dissent – a practice that intensifies when it’s election season in Rwanda.
“If you kill or disappear everyone who criticizes you, then everyone else is going to be silenced,” she said. “It all creates fear.”
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