Hungry for Truth, Peace and Justice

Other Voices: Paul Rusesabagina says political, economic cruelty still rampant in Rwanda

Those who tout country as a success story need to look past the glitter to see all the misery and corruption.

By Paul Rusesabagina

New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof, among others, has been giving rave reviews to Rwanda's economic and political performance. Specifically, Kristof has called Rwandan President Paul Kagame the "African version of Lee Kuan Yew, the founder of modern Singapore."

There is little doubt that many Rwandan refugees with relatives besieged by terror and dire poverty back home are as dumbfounded and disappointed as I am by this judgment.

Let's consider just a few facts of Rwandan life under Kagame and his Rwandan Patriotic Front Party.

Weapons procurement gobbles up 13 percent of the total Rwandan annual budget, 60 percent of which comes from foreign assistance. According to a 2006 CIA report, this makes Rwanda No. 1 in the world in budget share allocated to arms purchases and other military spending.

While the average Rwandan lives on less than $1 a day, Kagame earns a fat and untaxed $315,000 annual salary. Former Rwanda President Juvenal Habyarimana, the man whose airplane I believe Kagame shot down on April 6, 1994, lived a simple life with a closer-to-reality annual salary of about $5,000 in today's exchange rate terms.

The Rwandan average per capita income is $250 annually, the same as it was in 1990. Discrimination and greed are at an all-time high.

Most of the new buildings and businesses in Kigali are in the hands of a tiny RPF Tutsi elite from Uganda in a country where 14 percent of the people are Tutsis and 85 percent are Hutus.

Eighty percent of students enrolled at institutions of higher learning are Tutsis, including at the National University of Rwanda, while 90 percent of their teachers are also Tutsis. Out of a total of 1,280 army officers, only 40 are Hutu, and out of 11,270 noncommissioned officers, only 30 are Hutu.

The RPF has conducted a methodical cleansing of Hutu clergy members within the Catholic Church, killing four Hutu bishops on June 5, 1994, and another Hutu bishop in November 1996. Out of nine dioceses in Rwanda today, seven are headed by Tutsi bishops and two by Hutu bishops. That is a complete reversal of the Catholic Church leadership pre-1994.

Corruption schemes are at unseen levels. State-owned companies have been sold to cronies of those in power at paltry prices; government contracts are being awarded exclusively to members of the RPF.

Discrimination is evil whether practiced by Hutus or Tutsis. Since the invasion of Rwanda on Oct. 1, 1990, the RPF has been a merciless grinding machine that keeps on grinding away. In the northern provinces of Byumba and Ruhengeri, which were spared the killing frenzy in the spring of 1994 because they were already under RPF occupation, 80 percent of families are headed by widows, thanks to the RPF's brutal and selective extermination campaign of all males in the area. Many of my friends and acquaintances perished in this campaign.

Rwandan prisons are teeming with well over 100,000 Hutu inmates suspected of genocide, many of whom have no case files. Given that for each inmate, there is a wife supplying a daily meal to supplement meager government food rations, that's a total of 200,000 able bodies removed from full-time economic production.

Meanwhile, more than 700,000 Hutu "genocide suspects" are being dragged before the so-called Gacaca courts — a tragedy of biblical proportions.

Gacaca is nothing but a one-sided government tool against Hutus. A new extortion trend has developed where innocent people, if it is known that they have a relative in the United States, Canada or Europe, are being hit with frivolous genocide charges and asked to pay to escape the Gacaca courts, knowing their overseas relatives will send the money.

From all accounts, there's no question that Kigali is growing, but who is benefiting from that?
The current RPF government has crafted an aggressive but too-good-to-be-true, window-dressing policy of making Kigali a clean, segregated, and for-the-rich-only city in order to impress visitors and aid donors.

This is a ploy that seems to be working, but which can be exposed if these visiting foreigners venture out beyond Kigali's glittery confines deep into the country, where misery will hug them. They may not get quite straight answers from their peasant interlocutors who are terrorized by ubiquitous "local defense" spies, but they will have their eyes opened.

Kagame has put in place an elaborate system of government that is politically and economically so cruel and discriminatory that it is the proper business of all decent, red-blooded human beings — Rwandan and foreign alike — not only to abhor and denounce, but also to fight and defeat it.

Paul Rusesabagina, who sheltered more than 1,000 people during the 1994 Rwandan genocide and was the subject of "Hotel Rwanda," wrote this piece for the Dayton Daily News from his home in Brussels, Belgium.

Source:
Dayton Daily News

posted by Mamadou Kouyate @ 7:07 PM