Open letter to Barack Obama and David Cameron about the current political crisis in Rwanda

By John V. KARURANGA,
President,
RWANDA PEOPLES PARTY – IMVURA
LONDON, UK.
London, 22/07/10

President Barack Obama,
The White House,
1600 Pennsylvania Ave, NW
Washington, DC 20500,
USA

And

Prime Minister David Cameron,
10 Downing Street,
London, SW1A 2AA
UK.

Your Excellencies,

RE: OPEN LETTER ON THE CURRENT POLITICAL CRISIS IN RWANDA

I write to you as a leader of a democratic party in Rwanda, the RPP-Imvura . Our party has not been allowed to register as a political party in order to participate in forth-coming presidential elections scheduled for 9th of August 2010. Rwanda, as you well know is, undergoing a serious political and social-economic crisis. Rwanda has gone through a series of genocides in its history, the worse of which occurred in 1994 when more than 1 million innocent people were massacred.

Since 1994, The Rwanda Patriotic Front, led by Paul Kagame has been in power. This is a party that has shown very little or no interest at all in democratic principles and practice, as all civilised people in the world know it. Kagame demonstrated his brutal and undemocratic nature very early on in his totalitarian rule when he sabotaged all genuine efforts in Rwanda to engender national reconciliation in the country. Indeed, the genocide has been his excuse for establishing and maintaining a military dictatorship over the people of Rwanda. He uses the genocide as a means to emotionally blackmail Rwandans as well as members of the international community. I say this with sadness, but the USA administration under George Bush Jr and the UK administration under Tony Blair became the strongest supporters of the brutal dictatorship of Paul Kagame in Rwanda.

President Bush described leaders like Paul Kagame in Rwanda as the “new breed” of African leaders who would lead some sort of renaissance in Africa. Your Excellencies, I submit that this was false optimism and the so-called “new breed” has turned out to be a bad and toxic breed as you can see with Kagame’s record. Mr Kagame has ruled in Rwanda for over sixteen years without bothering about democratic elections and has no fresh ideas to face the new challenges the country faces today. He is a liability to Rwanda; unfortunately Rwandans are paying a heavy price for this liability.

We are very concerned that your governments have continued to support the ruthless Kagame regime even as the list of his crimes grows. We are particularly alarmed that AFRICOM has been used to give the Kagame regime a veneer of credibility and are very hurt that Mr Tony Blair, the former British Prime Minister, is now an advisor to Paul Kagame. What is he advising Kagame on when we know Mr Kagame is responsible for gross and indescribable human rights abuses in Rwanda? This is what alarms us as Rwandan citizens. His role as an advisor to Kagame goes against British values of fairness and it is very difficult for us to understand how he can continue to play such a role and should plainly stand down.

Mr Kagame is now organising elections that everyone believes has been rigged before it is even held. All genuine opposition parties have been prevented from registering their candidacy. Instead he has sponsored his own candidates to stand against him, again to lend some veneer of credibility to these bogus elections. We question why there should be any election observers from the US and Commonwealth organisation in Rwanda because what will they observe? A charade? Instead of supporting this completely bogus exercise of election observation, the international community should boycott it and call for new elections where all parties will be allowed to register and to campaign openly.

We ask you to note Paul Kagame’s perverse policy of assassination of his political opponents inside and outside Rwanda. This policy has lately also targeted lawyers, human rights organisations, NGOs, foreign journalists and others involved in Rwandan civil society. Members of our own party in the UK and elsewhere are harassed and trailed on a daily basis and subjected to threats of violence and murder.

Of those recently assassinated, I include the following: Lt General Kayumba who was shot and wounded in a assassination attempt in South Africa, the journalist Jean-Leonard Rugambage who was murdered in front of his own house in Kigali, and the deputy leader of the Green Party, Mr Andre Kagwa Rwisereka who was beheaded as a chilling warning to all Rwandans who dare to oppose the Kagame dictatorship. His list of terrorist crimes grows by the day.

We are also concerned about the fate of the Rwandan refugees living in refugee camps in Uganda etc. Many have been returned to Rwanda against their will and despite the objections of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) which complained that this action was illegal and violated International Law, particularly Article 33(1) of the UN Convention of 1951 Relating to the Status of Refugees.

The RPP – IMVURA, wishes to take this opportunity to ask your Excellencies to use your influence to call upon the Rwandan government to enter direct Peace Talks with all opposition parties to resolve our political, economic and social problems once and for all, and to facilitate the peaceful return of the more than 2.5 million Rwandan refugees living in neighbouring countries and far afield.

Equally, we draw your Excellencies’ attention to recent examples in Africa where there have been peaceful changes of power. This happened in Ghana when President Kuffour peacefully handed over power to his successor Mr Mills and in South Africa when President Thabo Mbeki was forced to stand down by his own party, the ANC. Both of these former presidents are today respected elder statesmen in Africa. This is a role we would wish for Paul Kagame, so if he stood down and left politics for good, his safety would be guaranteed by any opposition party that takes over power after a democratic election. The people of Rwanda would be supportive of his efforts to take on another role as an elder statesman or any other non-political and non-military capacity.

We do not want Mr Kagame to be overthrown in a military coup or go back to the era of civil war because we do not believe coups and civil wars are a solution to Africa’s problems. What we want in Rwanda and in Africa are free and fair elections. We want democracy in Africa and we appeal to you to help us achieve this objective by peaceful means. The path Paul Kagame has chosen is only going to fuel further violence in Rwanda and ignite possible new genocide in a few years time. This will not be in your interests and the interests of the international community generally. I am sure you both would not want to see innocent Rwandan children slaughtered again and millions forced to flee into neighbouring countries to live a life of squalor and desperation.

Please help us stop this possibility by ending uncritical support to a brutal dictatorship whose violent actions are getting worse everyday. We ask you to look at Rwanda as a state with rights guaranteed under international law. Please don’t treat Rwanda as Paul Kagame’s toy, mouth dummy or plaything. Rwanda as a state and a people will still be there when Kagame is gone. And we are committed to a strategic partnership with both of your governments and to hold warm fraternal bilateral relations with your governments and peoples even when Mr Paul Kagame is gone from the Rwandan body-politic.

Yours sincerely

John V. KARURANGA,
President,
RWANDA PEOPLES PARTY – IMVURA
LONDON, UK

c.c.

Hillary Clinton; Secretary of State, USA State Department

Johnnie Carson, Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs
USA State Department

Nick Clegg MP, Deputy Prime Minister of the U.K

William Hague MP, First Secretary of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, UK

Andrew Mitchell MP, Secretary of State for International Development, UK

David Lidington MP, Minister of State, Commonwealth Appointments , UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office, UK

Baroness Neville-Jones, Minister of State (Security and Counter-Terrorism)

Henry Bellingham, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State

Anthony Blair, Former UK Prime Minister, London, United Kingdom

Kamalesh Sharma, Secretary - General, the Commonwealth Organisation, Commonwealth Secretariat, London UK

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