A Rwandan shooting: Who is out to kill the dissidents?

As an election looms, the politics of Rwanda become a lot nastier.

By The Economist
Jun 24th 2010
Nairobi

IT IS hard to imagine that a shooting in Johannesburg could spell instability in the distant heart of Africa. But that is what has happened after an unknown gunman tried to kill a dissident Rwandan general on June 19th. Lieutenant-General Kayumba Nyamwasa was lucky to escape with his life. Shot in the stomach, he tussled with his assailant, whose pistol jammed. South African police say they have captured the gunman and five accomplices. Some are thought to be Rwandan. The general’s wife says this was a plot by Rwanda’s president, Paul Kagame, to kill a former ally.

Mr Kagame’s spokesman has dismissed the accusation as “preposterous”. Plainly, the two men had come to despise each other. As a former head of military intelligence, the general had been close to Mr Kagame since their days in exile in Uganda. Both were commanders in the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), which took control of Rwanda after the genocide of 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus in 1994. The party has since dominated Rwanda, and Mr Kagame the party. Now, with a presidential election in August, Mr Kagame is tightening his grip.

Earlier this year General Nyamwasa fled Rwanda after an interrogation by a group of senior RPF officials. The general said that his treatment was “despicable”, that officials have become lackeys, and that basic freedoms are being stamped out. Mr Kagame, he said, had become a tyrant.

Rwandan officials—and the president himself—coolly brush such assertions aside. The general, says one of them, had long ago gone rogue, putting his own interests ahead of those of a united Rwanda. But it is unclear what the general has been accused of. Various allegations have been aired. He had too much money in his bank account. He was a traitor, even a terrorist; some officials linked him to a series of grenade attacks in Rwanda earlier this year. None of the accusations has been proven. The general denies them all, and says Mr Kagame is corrupt. This, too, is mere rumour. Even the president’s harshest critics usually concede he is personally austere.

But opposition within Mr Kagame’s own set may be brewing. General Nyamwasa seems to have teamed up with a former head of Rwanda’s overseas intelligence service, Colonel Patrick Karegaya, who has also fled to South Africa. This has made the RPF nervous. It even had the country’s football federation boss, Brigadier-General Jean-Bosco Kazura, arrested recently for making a trip to South Africa that had not been officially scheduled.

Rwanda has had a number of unexplained killings. For example, Seth Sendashonga, a moderate Hutu who served as interior minister after the genocide, was shot dead in 1998 in Nairobi. Some of Mr Kagame’s intelligence officers had been implicated in an earlier attempt to kill Mr Sendashonga, but the main suspect was granted diplomatic immunity. Dozens of Rwandan army officers are thought to have been shot, have disappeared or have had accidents. Some harboured secrets and knew about cover-ups of government revenge killings after the genocide.

Mr Kagame’s admirers say he is fighting for Rwanda’s national interest; rotten elements in the army must be eradicated. In any event, the political space is being squeezed. A Hutu politician, Victoire Ingabire, who had hoped to compete against Mr Kagame in the coming presidential poll, is facing trial for “genocide denial”. And an American law professor, Paul Erlinder, who sought to represent Ms Ingabire, was briefly jailed this month for challenging the government’s official history of the genocide. Mr Erlinder has been freed for medical reasons and has left Rwanda. He says he is alive only because he is foreign.

The government press has not been kind to him or to Ms Ingabire. “Now they must scurry back through the grimy crevices…from where they had crept,” says the New Times. Paranoia on all sides is rife.