‘Paul Kagame is without doubt the most ruthless politician operating in Africa today.’
(US Ambassador to Uganda, Johnnie Carson, quoted on page 321)
‘The entire country is a spying machine.’
(exiled Rwandan economist David Himbara, quoted on page 422)
This is a major, comprehensive and blistering attack on a contemporary African regime.
In a nutshell, the West and the international community for many years regarded the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) as heroes for invading Rwanda and bringing to a halt the 1994 genocide of Tutsis being carried out by the psychopathic Rwandan government dominated by advocates of the extremist Hutu Power ideology.
Not only that, but the RPF and its leading figure – tall, ascetic intellectual Paul Kagame – were also praised for going on to invade eastern Congo where they 1) sorted out the problem of the massive refugee camps holding over 2 million Rwandans refugees where the Hutu genocidalists were regrouping, and then 2) pressing this invasion on to the capital of Congo, Kinshasa, where they overthrew the rotten old dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko in 1997.
In the years that followed the West, the UN and the international community fell over themselves to lavish aid on Rwanda and fête its intense, driven president, Kagame, who presided over a peaceful multi-ethnic government and promoted his intention of turning Rwanda into a highly educated, high-tech economy, ‘the Singapore of Africa’.
For many years Financial Times and Reuters journalist Michela Wrong went along with this version of events and this highly favourable view of Kagame, ignoring the rumours and scattered reports which threw doubt on this image. Now she realises she was completely wrong. She has completely changed her tune.
This book is a comprehensive rubbishing of the historical record of Rwandan Patriotic Front (the political wing), the Rwandan Patriotic Army (the military wing) and President Kagame himself. It’s what Sun editor Kelvin Mackenzie used to call a monstering, an exhaustive, scathing demolition of all the RPF’s claims; an indictment of its behaviour before, during and after the genocide; and a terrifying depiction of a paranoid, controlling, vindictive and murderous regime, which is still in power, still holding its population in a climate of fear, and extending the threat of assassination to exiles and dissidents around the world. Here are the key points.
Wrong’s indictment
The 1990 RPF invasion of Rwanda was naive and destructive. Having contributed up to a quarter of the rebel army which brought Marxist leader Yoweri Museveni to power in neighbouring Uganda in 1985, long-term Tutsi emigrants from Rwanda and children of the refugees from anti-Tutsi pogroms conceived the idea of invading Rwanda and reclaiming their heritage.
This was a mistake. The Rwanda they wanted to return to, the ones their parents told them about, no longer existed. Instead, the invasion revived all the paranoid fears of the Hutu majority (Hutus make up 85%, Tutsis 14% of Rwanda’s population) that these violent invaders wanted to return Rwanda to the bad old days when a Tutsi monarchy and aristocracy lorded it over a subjugated Hutu peasantry. This paranoia was egged on by media outlets including Radio Télévision Libre des Milles Collines which was to play such a key role during the actual genocide (p.228).
The conventional view is that the Tutsi exiles just wanted to reclaim their heritage. The revisionist view is that the RPF invasion wasn’t about reclaiming anything, they wanted to seize absolute power, which is why the invasion marked the start of a four-year civil war, throwing the entire country into a state of crisis and edginess.
In other words, far from invading to stop the genocide in 1994, the RPF invasion in 1990 created the hysterical paranoid environment in which the genocide could take place.
The RPF made lots of mistakes from the start. First off was something which remains a mystery to this day, which is the unexplained death of their most charismatic leader, Fred Rwigyema. Wrong considers the two main versions of his death, plus the numerous minor variations, in great detail, but doesn’t come to a definite conclusion (pages 207 to 213). A few weeks later two other RPF leaders, Peter Bayingana and Chris Bunyenyezi, were dead.
These unexplained deaths paved the way for the rise of Paul Kagame. Kagame was out of the country at the time, undertaking, of all things, a training course at Fort Leavenworth in the USA, so he is generally exonerated of these unexplained deaths, but they were very convenient, as was his swift elevation to strategic leader on his hurried return to the rebels base.
Anyway, these deaths were indicative of the failure of the RPF’s initial incursion into Rwanda. Not only did they meet stiff resistance from the Rwandan army but were dismayed to discover how much the ordinary Hutu peasants feared and disliked them.
The conventional story is that Kagame was a military genius who led the battered remnants of the RPF into the remote Virunga mountains where they regrouped and studied guerrilla tactics. Wrong’s debunking version is that most of these decisions were taken by people lower in command and that Kagame’s main contribution, then as right through to the present day, was to instil a regime of fear.
Ugandan journalist Sheila Kawamara, a frequent visitor to Mulindi (RPF headquarters), registered the staff changes taking place. ‘We heard about a policy of extermination of all the officers who had supported Fred. When you were with them you could sense this climate of fear. Those who were more ruthless rose through the ranks at that stage.’ (p.229)
Wrong goes out of her way to quote contemporaries, former members of the RPF, eye witnesses, who one and all testify that Kagame was a controlling, spiteful, sadistic man who used terror to control all around him.
In the revisionist version the holed-up-in-the-mountains phase is transformed from a glamorous Che Guevara idyll into a death camp where hundreds of new recruits would be taken off and killed in the middle of the night for the slightest reasons, sometimes simply because they spoke French which the Anglophone Ugandan Tutsis suspected. Wrong dwells on the way the kafuni or common farmer’s hoe was the weapon of choice used to kill suspects and undesirables.
When the RPF did come down out of the mountains in 1991 and fought their way through north Rwanda to within 50k of the capital, Kigali, it was not only the official Rwandan army they fought but many of the Hutu peasants whose land they passed through. Upset to discover the peasants didn’t welcome them with open arms, the Tutsi RPF got used to massacring entire Hutu villages if it was convenient. The accounts of massacres are disputed but no-one disputes that Hutu peasants retreated before the advancing PDF forces. Eventually as many as 950,000 people were uprooted by the RPF invasion and turned into internal refugees, 15% of the population (p.230).
The RPF’s advance, the civil war as a whole, was suspended by the Arusha Accords of August 1993 which gave the RPF representation in a new national government.
Then Wrong makes her biggest accusation, which is that it was the Kagame-led RPF, and not Hutu Power extremists in his own government, who shot down the plane carrying Hutu president Juvénal Habyarimana. This was the trigger for the genocide which followed and which commended within minutes of news of the plane crash.
The shooting down of the plane carrying the Hutu president was the trigger for the start of the genocide so it’s always been a deeply contested event. It’s the ‘Who Shot JFK?’ of Central Africa. Amid hundreds of theories, three main ones:
- White men did it, either Belgians, French or Americans. But why?
- Conventional explanation: Hutu Power hardliners within the government did it because they feared Habyarimana was giving too much away by signing the Arusha Accords, and had the extermination plans ready to go.
- Revisionist explanation: the RPF did it because they knew the elections demanded by the Arusha Accords would consolidate Habyarimana’s government in power, whereas chaos and confusion would allow them to continue their military conquest and seize power.
As you’d expect, Wrong leans heavily towards theory 3, assembling a raft of evidence but, more to her style, numerous interviewees who all claimed the RPF and Kagame planned it. Western investigators charged the RPF with it throughout the 2000s, for example in 2006 a French judge accused Kagame and his allies of then shooting down. Then in 2011 a leading RPF exile, Theogene Rudasingwa, from 2000 to 2004 Chief of Staff to Kagame, posted a frank admission of the RPF’s guilt on Facebook (p.375). In 2012 another former RPF top gun, General Kayumba, went public with the accusation. In 2013 ex-RPF intelligence officer Jean-Marie Micombero joined the chorus (p.376). In 2014 the BBC broadcast a documentary, Rwanda’s Untold Story, which contained the accusation.
So, again, Wrong’s pressing of RPF guilt is not exactly new, and nowhere does Wrong find a smoking gun. Like the controversy around JFK it will rumble on forever.
There’s no doubt that Hutu Power ideologues had a fully worked-out plan for exterminating the country’s Tutsi population in its entirety, and were responsible for passing orders and instructions for mass murder down through the chain of command to the remotest parishes. But Wrong’s accusation is that:
- the RPF invasion created the unstable, feverish atmosphere in which many, maybe most of the Hutu population felt threatened by a Tutsi takeover
- and that the RPF was responsible for downing the plane and so triggering the genocide
The conventional view is that the plane shooting and the abrupt start of the genocide triggered the RPF to restart their paused invasion and that they swept through the country in order to stop the genocide. Wrong counters that the actual route of the RPF was calculated not on the basis of saving Tutsi lives but purely with a view to securing power (p.242). The notion that the RPF heroically intervened to stop the genocide is treated as a joke by one of the RPF’s own diplomats (p.350).
The conventional view is that the RPF established law and order wherever they went and protected what Hutus remained, like the conquering allied forces established law and order in 1945. The revisionist view is that on the contrary, wherever they went the RPF massacred Hutu communities but that these massacres went unrecorded or unreported in the context of the wider holocaust.
The conventional view is that the RPF begged for outside help. The revisionist view is that when the UN discussed reinforcing its small demoralised force in Kigali the RPF objected, repeatedly claiming that all the Tutsis were dead and the genocide over. This was because they knew a major UN intervention would end up preserving the existing Hutu regime, albeit with new leadership, whereas the RPF was set on securing complete military control. In other words, senior RPF figures were prepared to let the killing go on and tens of thousands more Tutsis to die, if it meant securing power (p.243).
The conventional view is that once the RPF had secured control of the entire country, Kagame then established an enlightened government of national unity in Kigali, ensuring key posts went to Hutus to ensure balance and trust. The revisionist view is this was the case for a very limited period, 12 months at most, into 1995, before these Hutu ministers started being sacked or forced to quit, in all instances replaced not just by Tutsis but by Tutsis loyal to Kagame personally (p.251).
The conventional view is that this enlightened RPF government then begged the international community and the UN to do something about the Hutu genocidalists who had taken refuge in the huge Hutu refugee camps just across the border in eastern Congo, repeatedly asked the West to intervene but, eventually, being goaded beyond endurance by Hutu militias crossing the border and carrying out little village massacres, reluctantly invaded into eastern Congo, killing the genocidalists and shepherding the 2 million or so Hutu refugees back into their own country.
The revisionist view is that the RPF planned to invade Congo all along.
The revisionist view is that, in the process, the RPF themselves carried out numerous massacres of Hutu civilians, men, women and children. In fact some scholars estimate the total number killed at 300,000, well on the way to matching the 800,000 killed in the genocide.
The conventional view is that the RPF wanted the Hutu refugees to return to Rwanda and to their abandoned properties, guaranteeing them safety if they did so. The revisionist view is that in the meantime tens of thousands of Tutsi exiles returned to the country and seized vacant Hutu properties, farms and houses, urban businesses, thus feeding into the Hutu narratives of conquest and grievance (pages 260, 270, 285).
The conventional view is that the genocide was a one-off event with a datable beginning and ending (7 April to 15 July 1994). The revisionist view is that the genocide was just a kind of wild upsurge in an environment where ethnic killing had been going on as far back as the overthrow of the Tutsi monarchy in 1959, with the most recent surge starting not in April 1994 but with the initial invasion of the RPF in October 1990.
‘The troubles between Hutus and Tutsis didn’t start in 1994. The genocide was part of a process which began much much earlier.’ (Robert Higiro, quoted on p.269)
And continuing long after. The conventional view is that the RPF brought peace. The revisionist view is that massacres within Rwanda, and then in Congo, continued on after the genocide.
Wrong details important evidence suggesting an RPF policy of systematic violence and intimidation which carried on after the genocide, but which was hushed up or downplayed at the time:
- the Gersony Report (pages 269 to 271)
- the Kibeho massacre (p.273)
The conventional view is that the RPF pursuit of genocidalists who fled west slowly, reluctantly changed a temporary incursion into eastern Congo into a campaign to carry on west as far as the capital, Kinshasa, and overthrow rotten old Mobutu, installing a nice new democratic regime, much to the applause of the west.
The revisionist view is that the RPF invasion of Congo 1) continued to be marked by RPF massacres, now not only of defenceless Hutus but often of Congo civilians too, 2) overthrowing Mobutu had always been the core aim of Kagame (and his ally, Uganda’s Museveni). Gérard Prunier calls it the first imperialist invasion by one African country of another, a sentiment echoed here by Polish journalist, Hrvoje Hranski:
‘They were colonisers, pure and simple, but we were sympathetic.’ (quoted page 301)
On this reading it was not just an incursion to stabilise a border region but a deliberate attempt to establish colonial control over an entire country, to take over Congo via Kagame and Museveni’s puppet ruler, Laurent-Désiré Kabila. Wrong quotes her hero Patrick Karegeya as saying:
‘We weren’t looking for a rebel leader. We just needed someone to make the whole operation look Congolese.’ (p.297)
The RPF atrocities inside Rwanda were difficult to document in the chaos of the genocide, but there were many more witnesses to their behaviour in Congo. In 2010 the UN brought out a 550-page report which ‘detailed 617 separate incidents in which Hutu refugees were bludgeoned, macheted, bayoneted, shot or burned to death’ (p.300).
By 1998 Mobutu was overthrown, Kabila was installed as puppet ruler of Congo, the Hutu refugee camps had been emptied, and the prolonged security crisis was over. In February Kagame was elected RPF chairman, to go alongside his posts of Minister for War and Vice President.
The RPF regime claimed that relations only deteriorated with Kabila when he began reaching out to remnants of the Hutu regime and the Interahamwe. The revisionist view is that relations deteriorated when Kabila began ruling for himself and kicked his Rwandan advisers out of Congo. It was then that Rwanda and Uganda began planning a second invasion and only then that Kabila reached out to the genocidalists as a desperate resort.
In April 2000 Kagame arrived at the acme of power, being elected president (p.319). The Rwanda-Uganda alliance completely collapsed and the two armies fought a vicious urban battle in Kisingani. Kabila made the mistake of abandoning his child warriors, even ordering them to shoot fallen comrades. Thus it was an aggrieved former child soldier, Rashidi Kasereka, who shot him at point blank range in the presidential palace. Later, Wrong claims that Patrick freely admitted that Rwandan intelligence were behind the assassination (p.323).
By the time the Ugandans and Rwandans fell out, many of the journalists who’d been sympathetic to the RFP had fallen out of love with them. What had started as an attempt to hunt down the genocidalists had turned into a naked grab of land and resources. Wrong gives a fascinating account of Rwanda and Uganda’s blatant looting of Congo’s resources and then moving to the ‘active extraction’ phase i.e. controlling the mines, the extraction and export of precious minerals (p.328).
It was a great revelation and shock to the regime’s western supporters when a UN report revealed that this systematic looting and theft was carried out by a Rwandan state body called the Congo Desk (p.329). And guess who was in charge of the Congo Desk? The Zelig of central Africa, Patrick Karegeya.
When it was set up the RPF devised a solemn oath of loyalty which all members had to sear. By the end of the Second Congo War, this had mutated into a mafia with its oath of Omertà i.e., you talk, you die (p.331).
After the war
Kagame has been able to string along and play the international community and western donors (chief amongst whom is the UK) for several reasons:
- the conventional view is that Kagame is a visionary New African Leader, committed to democracy and developing Rwanda into a modern, high education, hi-tech nation, ‘the Singapore of Africa’
- western guilt about not doing enough to prevent the genocide, particularly afflicted Bill Clinton and Tony Blair
Clinton later delivered fulsome apologies for America’s failure to act quickly enough or acknowledge the killings amounted to a genocide.
The revisionist view is that throughout the post-genocide period and right up to the present day, Kagame, far from being a western-style democrat and visionary, was establishing a terrifying surveillance dictatorship.
Precisely how he did that is revealed by the central thread of the book, the life, career and murder of Colonel Patrick Karegeya.
Patrick Karegeya as central theme
This summary gives the impression that the book is a logical or chronological account of the historical events but it isn’t, at least not to start with. The first hundred pages are something completely different.
Wrong opens her narrative, and thereafter uses as a repeated reference point, the murder of Patrick Karegeya, former head of external intelligence in the RPF regime and, at one time, a key member of Kagame’s close-knit RPF elite. The idea is that Karegeya was murdered because he had become a critic, and then an outspoken critic, of Kagame and, in 2010, helped set up an alternative Rwandan political party, the Rwanda National Congress (RNC).
Karegeya was murdered on New Year’s Eve 2013 in a room at the Michelangelo Hotel in the Johannesberg suburb of Sandton. But Wrong doesn’t just give an extended description and forensic analysis of the days and weeks leading up to the murder, then of the crime scene and the probable cause of events. Three things:
1. Wrong interviews everyone who ever knew Patrick Karegeya – his wife, his mother, his children, his friends from school days, his colleagues in the RPF, and those who joined him in exile and set up the RNC. And not once, but repeatedly.* Their eye witness accounts of Karegeya’s life and personality and career are quoted very liberally on every page. In fact we learn that Wrong met and got friendly with and interviewed Karegeya on numerous occasions from 1994 till his death. There’s so much about him that the first hundred pages or so of this book amount to almost a biography of the man, but also, there’s so many memories of him at home with his family, at bars laughing and chatting, so many of which are Wrong’s own memories, that at many points it feels like a personal tribute.
This would probably be my main criticism of the book. What with the tearful testimony of his loving wife, his adoring daughters, his admiring colleagues and the often gushing testimony of lots of other journalists who met and liked Karageya, quite regularly the book is in danger of turning into a hagiography. I was struck when she described a 5-page personal statement he wrote out for his daughter’s application for US citizenship as ‘precious’ (p.304). What, like the Turin Shroud or the Rosetta Stone? The tone of voice often verges on the gushing:
- Someone with a bigger ego might have staged a sustained sulk. Not Patrick. (p.352)
- And so, mulish, steadfast, defiant, Patrick served out his sentence [in prison] (p.361)
When Patrick is reduced to shaking rage by a journalist accusing the RPF of shooting down Habyarimana’s plane, his anger is explained away because he is under pressure to nobble the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (p.369). When a journalist jokily asked why Kagame won the 2003 election with ‘only’ 95% of the vote and Patrick threatens to have a journalist killed next time he visits Rwanda, this is excused as a joke (p.348)
But the man was a killer. He was head of RPF intelligence all through the 1990 invasion and civil war, through the genocide. He was paid to deceive journalists and the international community about the RPF’s own massacres and their ulterior motives in invading Congo, paid to lie to the world’s press about the failed attempt to capture Congo with Rwandan troops flown into the Kitona airport near Kinshasa (p.312). He continued to justify the regime even as he knew it was committing mass murder, charming and schmoozing foreign journalists while more and more RPF comrades were assassinated, fled the country or were thrown in prison.
He was ‘implicated up to the hilt’ (p.342). He was a highly paid part of the killing machine, and was rewarded with a big house, lots of cars, a jetsetting lifestyle, plasma TV when they were an unheard-of luxury, his kids sent to private school in South Africa or America, his wife forgiving him his multiple sexual partners (‘all part of the job’), liked for his high-living and charm by even the most sceptical journalists. So while we read another tearful tribute from his loving wife, my criticism of the book would be that Wrong lets Karegeya off very lightly and regularly risks sentimentalising him.
2. Anyway, amid the great sea of blood which was 1990s Rwanda, why such extravagant focus on just one man, when well over a million men, women and children died in terror or misery as a direct result of the actions of the government of which he was a key member and which he assiduously defended for so long?
Because Wrong uses her super-detailed profile of Karegeya as a tool, as a way into exploring the world of fear and paranoia which political exiles from the Kagame regime work under. And once this is established, Karegeya’s entire career becomes a scaffold or structure on which to hang a historical account of the RPF, going right back to its roots in the Rwandan Tutsi emigre or refugee communities in Uganda in the 1980s.
Rhus, in Wrong’s hands, Patrick emerges as a kind of Zelig figure, popping up at all the right places. He was the lynchpin middle-man between Kagame’s government and all manner of outsiders, whether journalists or NGOs or UN leaders, or heads of intelligence from neighbouring countries. He played a key role in the First Congo War, accompanying the clumsy tactless Kabila everywhere, acting as his press and PR supervisor, the central liaison between Kabila and Kagame, as well as liaising with all the governments in the coalition which had invaded Congo (p.301).
3. It dawned on me that ‘Patrick’, as he is referred to pretty quickly and then throughout, has another key advantage for a journalist like Wrong. People were prepared to talk about him. Half way through the book it dawned on me that Patrick’s story gives Wrong far more access to events than if she had chosen the more conventional route of writing a biography of Kagame. Kagame doesn’t talk, his friends and family don’t talk, lots of people interviewed, even the ones who worked closely with him, said they never really knew what was going on in his head. By contrast, Patrick was famously outgoing, chatty, had hundreds of friends and acquaintances, all of whom were happy to go on the record for this book. Their collective memories and anecdotes are far more free and effective at building up a kind of collage history of the RPF then any attempt at a biography at the notoriously tight-lipped Kagame could ever have been.
In other words, the more the book progresses, the more you realise what a clever strategic move it was to make Patrick the star and use him to shed light on the entire regime and Rwandan history from the 1980s right up to the present day.
After the Second Congo War drew to an ignominious close in 2002, Wrong’s narrative reverts, for the book’s last 100 pages, to the approach of the first hundred i.e. using a detailed look at Patrick’s career, his growing misgivings, how he was sidelined by Kagame, with extensive quotes from friends, family, colleagues, journalists and commentators, to shed light on Kagame’s growing paranoia and vindictiveness, and the slow enmeshment of the regime in more and more assassinations, scandals and accusations.
* Interviewees
In fact the book is jam packed with interviewees, its main feature, as a text, is the number of quotes on every page. Wrong must have put in what feels like thousands of hours of interviewing and annotating, then careful selection and ordering of hundreds and hundreds of quotes. At one point Wrong lists the types of people she interviewed for this book, which extends far beyond the friends and family of Patrick Karegeya. She lists: ‘serving and dissident members of the RPF, Rwandan and western journalists, diplomats, intelligence officers and military attachés’ (p.341).
Mossad assassination technique
Karegeya not only defected from the RPF but, in exile, set up the RCN. The implication of the whole book is that this kind of thing is not permitted by the tightly-controlled and vengeful Kagame regime, so he was targeted and assassinated using methods perfected by the Israeli security service, Mossad.
What is this Mossad assassination technique? Have your target approached by someone they know and trust, in this case a friend of the family. Make appointment for drinks and a chat in their hotel room. Let in two strangers, one of whom holds everyone up at gunpoint, while the other injects the target with a quick-acting tranquiliser. Then one assassin holds a pillow or towel over the target’s face, while the other strangles him with rope. The point of all this is it is completely silent, causing no fuss or attention. Then quietly leave the room, careful to leave a ‘Do not disturb’ sign on the door, check out of your own hotel, drive to the nearest airport, and be far away by the time anyone realises anything is wrong (p.29).
Do not disturb. The book is named after the sign the killers hung on Karebeya’s hotel door. But is also a wider indictment of the wish of western donors, the international community and Rwanda’s supporters, even up to the present day, not to rock the boat, not to reveal uncomfortable truths, not to ask difficult questions, not to disturb.
One among many state-sponsored murders
General Kayumba Nyamwasa
Wrong gives a similarly detailed account of the attempted assassination of former General Kayumba Nyamwasa. Nyamwasa had been Chief of Staff of the Rwandan Army as well as head of Rwandan intelligence from 1998 to 2002 i.e. during the Second Congo War. He became increasingly critical of Kagame’s authoritarianism until he fled into exile in South Africa. Wrong describes the bungled attempt to shoot him in his car on 19 June 2010. This attack crystallised the General’s decision to join with Karagey and others to found the opposition Rwanda National Congress in December 2010 (p.69).
Seth Sendashonga
Wrong devotes an entire chapter to the career of moderate Hutu Seth Sendashonga, recruited into the RPF government with lots of promises of reconciliation, then witnessing the Tutsis takeover of everything, the scales falling from his eyes with the notorious massacre of unarmed Hutus at the Kibeho refugee camp. Soon afterwards he quit the government, then left Rwanda, going into exile. Two years later he was shot dead by assassins (p.277).
No other nation in Central or East Africa has witnessed an exodus of former insiders to rival Rwanda’s and their flight speaks volumes for an entire political class’s understanding of the regime’s capacity for violence. (p.277)
Other examples
- Rwandan diplomat Alphonse Mbayire was recalled to Kigali and a month later a soldier with a grudge shot him twenty times
- David Kiwanuka’s body was found in a car trunk in Nairobi, shot in the head (p.280)
- Assiel Kabera, President Bizimungu’s adviser, assassinated (p.318)
Wikipedia:
- Wikipedia article about political assassinations associated with Paul Kagame
She gives more examples and details of Rwanda’s policy of overseas assassination (p.432). Many more opponents simply fled, becoming exiles like Patrick. The general name for the several escape routes from the country was ‘taking the subway‘ (p.318).
Wrong has two long sections devoted to detailed description of two separate assassination conspiracies where the middlemen hired to cosy up to the targets in preparation for hits admitted to the targets what was going on. This resulted in the targets taping the numerous phone calls from the minders back in Kigali to their agents in the field. Wrong explains the setups, introduces the characters, and quotes from the incriminating tapes, which in both cases were handed over to the local police as well as key western embassies, the FBI and so on (pages 395 to 401).
These cases amount to powerful evidence that the Kagame regime operates extensive assassination projects and teams to eliminate dissident and ex-RPF officials.
Buyer’s remorse
This book, then, is a case of buyer’s remorse, or an example of a western liberal fan of a third world political party, government and its leader, slowly coming to realise she’s been had.
The enthusiastic support of the West, and especially Western journalists, for an underdog rebel militia with a noble cause fighting a brutal stronger power reminds me of the decade I spent watching BBC and ITV journalists on location with the mujahideen in the remote mountains of Afghanistan, singing the praises of these plucky Davids fighting the Soviet Goliath. Only after the Soviets left and the country collapsed into a ruinous civil war from whose ashes arose the Taliban did those western journalists reconsider their decade of enthusiastic support for Islamic extremists.
Wrong has form here because her book about Eritrea’s long war for independence describes how western journalists such as herself were entranced by the commitment of the rebel Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF), young zealots who built an entire town in mountain caves, had daily education and self-criticism sessions in the best Maoist fashion.
Wrong says these western journalists wrote glowing accounts and counted themselves as ‘true believers’ in the cause. But, as so often happens, when the ELF zealots finally won independence and came to power, the intensity of their commitment and the harsh judgement of anyone in any way questioning the Party morphed into the paranoid dictatorship of ELF leader, Isaias Afwerki. Afwerki has been president of Eritrea for thirty years, during which he has turned it into one of the most repressive one-party states in the world, and all those ‘true believers’ and western supporters from back in the 80s…not so vocal now…
The moral of the story? It’s easy to be persuaded that one side in a foreign war, particularly if they’re the cool rebel underdogs, is standing up for justice and freedom, young and inspiring in their commitment and readiness to make the ultimate sacrifice etc. Wrong herself describes this psychological tendency as ‘the storyteller’s need to identify Good Guys and Bad Guys’ (p.299), the tendency I’ve ascribed to the influence of Hollywood movies on American foreign policy, especially in Afghanistan and Iraq.
But wars are never simple. War is always brutal. All sides in a war are compromised. The Good Guys-Bad Guys dichotomy comes from the Second World War when the Nazis unambiguously were Very Bad Guys. But most wars since haven’t had the same moral clarity. In general there are no Good Guys, just less absolutely appalling guys. That kind of childish moral simplicity has to be left behind in order to engage with the horrible, cynical complexities of the real world. The moral of the story is – don’t take sides in foreign wars. Gaza-Israel.
Disillusion with the RPF regime is not new
Disillusion may be new to Wrong but not to many other commentators.
- In 2008 the Economist questioned received opinion about Kagame.
- In 2010 the UN brought out a 550-page report which ‘detailed 617 separate incidents in which Hutu refugees were bludgeoned, macheted, bayoneted, shot or burned to death’ by the RPF (p.300).
- A 2011 article by Human Rights Watch lays out the case against Kagame.
- A 2012 article in the Guardian observed that America was having second thoughts about supporting the Kagame regime and predicted that Britain would, too.
The HRW article gives the tone of the revisionist, critical point of view. The author is phoned by a journalist enquiring into the UK’s ongoing support of the RPF regime in Rwanda, ‘a fragile country ruled by fear’:
We began by talking about the 2010 elections, in which President Paul Kagame was re-elected with 93% of the vote after three opposition parties had been excluded from the race; one opposition leader had been imprisoned; another opposition party member and an independent journalist were murdered; and a prominent government opponent narrowly escaped assassination in exile.
(Wrong describes the sinister and farcical events surrounding the same election on pages 67 to 68).
In other words, Wrong’s book isn’t a drastically new and stunning revision. Specialist reports and general opinion (of the specialists who care about the subject) have been heading in this direction for 15 years or more. What Wrong’s book does is pull together all the evidence, rewrite the history in the most damning way possible and, above all, use hundreds and hundreds of quotes from eye witnesses, from interviewees who were in at the formation of the RPF, of its successes in Uganda, its 1990 invasion, its role during and after the genocide, candid interviews with people who’ve worked closely with Paul Kagame and the regime’s other leading figures – to build up into an extraordinarily powerful, thorough and blistering indictment.
In the last hundred pages the comparison Wrong keeps reaching for is Stalin, a megalomaniac who spent all his time scheming, playing subordinates off against each other, organising random arrests, holding show trials, issuing random periods of imprisonment to anyone he even suspected of holding independent opinions, then demanding complete obeisance, ritual humiliation (pages 343 (Beria) and 356).
By the end of the book the reader is left thinking that Paul Kagame is the devil in human form:
The ultimate class freak has created a state in his own image: introverted, suspicious, unaccountable and a prey to sudden violence. (p.418)
The last few chapters
The last few chapters address more recent events:
Chapter 18: Do not disturb
Explains in detail why ‘the West’, ‘the international community’ and foreign donors continue to support and donate generously to Rwanda, despite the mountain of evidence about its wicked ways. 1) Residual guilt, even after all these years, about letting the genocide happen. 2) Generalised guilt of Western governments that the terrible plight of Africa continues to stem from the European colonial era (p.383).
Above all 3) the Kagame regime has brought peace and stability to Rwanda, and its defenders, such as former DFID minister Andrew Mitchell, emphasise that this is the first requirement of any government and so how, in that part of the world, it is to be supported (compare and contrast South Sudan’s recent collapse into ruinous civil war).
On many of the metrics used by western governments and international institutions, the Kagame regime has been a remarkable success, notching up unprecedented economic growth lifting one million Rwandans out of poverty between 2008 and 2011, improvements in metrics in public health and education, support for gender issues (for example, in 2010 64% of Parliamentary MPs were women) and so on.
Diplomatically speaking, Kagame has successfully positioned himself as maybe Africa’s most high profile statesman. In 2014 Kigali hosted the African Development Bank’s annual general meeting. In 2016 the World Economic Forum chose it for an ‘African Davos’. The 2022 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) was held in Kigali.
So the continued support of western donors is explained by the way they focus on these positive achievements. And so the World Bank has invested more than $4 billion in Rwanda since the genocide (p.430) and the British government has given the Rwandans £200 million without, so far, sending a single refugee there.
Chapter 19: Song of the stool pigeon
The chapter explaining the setups, introduces the characters, and quotes from the incriminating tape recordings made of senior figures in Rwandan intelligence recruiting then managing Rwandan emigres into assassinating outspoken critics in exile (pages 395 to 401). And the disappointing lack of response from western agencies and governments when presented with this evidence.
Chapter 20: The inquest
The long delay of the South African authorities in carrying out a proper investigation of or inquest on Patrick’s murder, the implication being they were leaned on by Rwanda. Progress only came when the case was taken up by campaigning lawyer Gerrie Nel of not-for-profit AfriForum leading to an inquest in 2019. Complex machinations amid which the South African state prosecutor justifies the decision not to prosecute those suspected of murdering Patrick because of the ties that exist between them and the Kigali regime (p.412). In August a verdict of death by strangulation i.e. murder, was returned.
The lost leader
The critics, obviously, say that all the achievements catalogued in chapter 18 (if they’re even true) could just as well have been achieved without the creation of a Stalin-level surveillance state and climate of fear based on arbitrary arrests, imprisonment and murder of political opponents.
You can see why so many of them still mourn the unexplained death of charismatic, caring Fred Rwigyema right back in 1990, the ‘lost leader’ that so many weave legends around. Wrong ends her book with a visit to her hero, Patrick’s, grave, but the very last paragraphs are a hymn to beautiful, innocent Fred, inexplicably dead before the civil war let alone the genocide took place, the lost leader so many dissident Rwandans mourn.
But that was 33 years ago, and we are where we are.
Thoughts
I know I should care about the minutiae of every one of the killings and assassinations, the tape recordings, precisely which RPF heavweight was implicated in which massacres or killings, but after a while it’s difficult to follow all the details. The overall impression is of a dazzling, long, immensely researched revelation of the RPF’s corruption and brutality.
But, when you put it like that, corruption and brutality, it sounds uncannily like most of the other African regimes I’ve been reading about for the last few years. Which African nation in the 60 years since independence has not had at least one murderous dictator, at least one civil war, elements of pogrom and massacre?
That’s a fairly trite thought but it leads onto a more interesting one which is how, stepping back, you can see how the uniqueness of the Rwandan genocide has dazzled many commentators and politicians into thinking Rwanda stands outside history, a special and unique case.
Wrong highlights (as does Prunier and other commentators) how lingering guilt about their inactivity during the genocide has led international bodies and western nations to give Kagame the benefit of the doubt despite the, by now, tsunami of evidence about the regime’s malfeasance.
Not unlike Israel, the Rwandan government has used the unspeakably horrific crime at the centre of its modern history to overawe commentators and silence critics (Wrong makes this point numerous times), to obscure the more everyday oppressions and dubious policies which are the stuff of most governments.
But considering the Rwandan genocide as a somehow one-off, unique, unparalleled and inexplicable mystery – as writers at the time like Fergal Keane and Philip Gourevitch did – removes it from history, erases the troubled history which led up to it; which, of course, explains it; and the continuum of wars and further atrocities which has followed on from it. Focusing solely on the genocide in effect helps prop up a dictator and a terrifyingly repressive regime.
Overpopulation
A leitmotiv of the narrative is how packed, cramped and overpopulated Rwanda was and still is (pages 238, 293, 417). Wrong claims it was and is Africa’s most crowded country (p.239, 280). In an economy based on agriculture you either own enough land to make a living farming or you don’t. Every inch of fertile land is staked out and assigned so, in order to acquire more land you must dispossess someone else.
Decades of land shortage have reduced agriculture to a grim battle for survival. (p.417)
If you learn of an invasion by the enemy tribe that is driving people like you off the land, then your natural reaction will be to fear for yourself, your land, your family and, if ordered by the government and the local authorities, be prepared to kill in order to protect your own.
I wonder if, in a way, the overpopulation of Rwanda and the demented, pest-control killing of the genocide is an allegory of our species – or maybe a vision of its future, packed like rats into a limited space, driven by mounting crises into hysterical psychopathy, the mass murder of our neighbours, quickly, before they murder us.
Day after day I read in the liberal press hand-wringing articles about the apparently unstoppable rise of authoritarian regimes around the world (China, Russia, India, Brazil) and right-wing anti-immigrant parties across Europe (in Germany, Italy, France, Holland).
Liberal commentators are at a loss to explain these phenomena but I wonder if there’s a simple explanation. There are too many of us, us humans, and we are turning against ourselves like rats in dungeon.
Credit
Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad by Michela Wrong was published in March 2021 by Fourth Estate. References are to the 2022 4th Estate paperback edition.
Recent Rwanda news
- Dissidents in UK say Rwanda is not safe (22 December 2023)
- Rwandan politician who criticised Sunak’s bill fears for her safety (14 December 2023)
- Rwandan courts will not protect refugees’ rights, say daughters of genocide hero (30 November 2023)
- Human Rights Watch report on Rwanda, 2023
- Reporters Without Borders report on Rwanda
- I criticised Rwanda’s leader – now I wake up screaming after constant online attacks by
Michela Wrong (Guardian, 27 January 2024)
Michela Wrong reviews
- In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in the Congo by Michela Wrong (2001)
- I Didn’t Do It for You: How the World Betrayed a Small African Nation by Michela Wrong (2005)
Books & Boots 