Victoire Ingabire still in prison, Congo still a human catastrophe
By Ann Garrison
August 4, 2012
Rwandan opposition leader and political prisoner Victoire Ingabire has appeared in court in handcuffs and the shaved head and pink uniform of a Rwandan prisoner since her arrest in October 2010. She was not allowed to enter the presidential race that year against Rwandan Gen. Paul Kagame. The crowd behind her in this photo montage was marching to the Rwandan Embassy in Brussels to call for her freedom and that of all Rwandan political prisoners.
“The stumbling block is the refugees issue. For the last 16 years or so, the current regime has attempted to settle this refugee problem through military invasion. It is this problem which poisoned the relation between Rwanda and Congo – DRC – and Uganda. And we have to resolve this problem, not militarily, but through dialogue.” – Victoire Ingabire
In 2001, a U.N. Panel of Experts reported that militias allied with both Rwanda and Uganda were smuggling minerals across Congo’s eastern borders and that Rwandan President Paul Kagame and Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni were “on the verge of becoming the godfathers of illegal resource exploitation and ongoing conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.”
KPFA Weekend News
On the first day in court, the prosecution argued that Victoire Ingabire’s lawyers, Iain Edwards, left, and Gatera Gashebana, could not be trusted because they were defending a suspected criminal, Victoire Ingabire, center.
Rwandan political prisoner and opposition leader Victoire Ingabire has refused to return to the Rwandan courtroom where she was on trial, and she asked her lawyers not to return either. KPFA spoke to her British lawyer, Iain Edwards.
Transcript
Iain Edwards and Victoire Ingabire confer in court.
Habimana also testified that the prosecution’s lead witness was lying about his own contact with Ingabire and his own rank within the FDLR. Ingabire’s British lawyer Iain Edwards, speaking to KPFA from London, said that Habimana had no doubt given this testimony at great risk to himself, even though he is already serving life in prison. Edwards also described one of Rwanda’s unique rules of court, which he said most any other court in the world would consider a violation of a defendant’s right to fair trial:
Victoire Ingabire’s supporters will ask the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights to declare her a political prisoner.
She wants peace in her country. She wants the population to live in harmony. Where there are differences, to embrace those differences, and to live with those differences, but fundamentally to live in peace and harmony.
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In July 2010, Victoire Ingabire told Womens’ International News Gathering Service that the warring that followed refugees from Rwanda into eastern Congo must be brought to an end with dialogue, not invasion:
“The stumbling block is the refugees issue. For the last 16 years or so, the current regime has attempted to settle this refugee problem through military invasion. It is this problem which poisoned the relation between Rwanda and Congo – DRC – and Uganda. And we have to resolve this problem, not militarily, but through dialogue.”
Is it any wonder she’s been in Rwandan Gen. Kagame’s 1930 maximum security prison since October 2010? Twelve years of U.N. investigations have proven that what Kagame and his Rwandan Patriotic Front party have described, since 1996, as a hunt for the perpetrators of the Rwanda Genocide, who fled to eastern Congo, has been very profitable for Gen. Kagame and for Uganda’s Gen. Museveni and their elite collaborators, nationally and internationally.
In 2001, the first of the U.N. Panel of Experts on Illegal Minerals Trade in the Democratic Republic of the Congoreported that militias allied with both Rwanda and Uganda were smuggling minerals across Congo’s eastern borders and that Rwandan President Paul Kagame and Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni were “on the verge of becoming the godfathers of illegal resource exploitation and ongoing conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.”
Rwandan prosecutors asked that Victoire Ingabire be found guilty and sentenced to life in prison, but the verdict that was to be handed down on June 29 has been postponed to Sept. 7.
KPFA Weekend News Anchor Cameron Jones: Rwandan political prisoner and opposition leader Victoire Ingabire has refused to continue playing the role of defendant in her show trial in Rwandan President Paul Kagame’s kangaroo court and asked her lawyers not to return either. Ingabire has been in prison for almost two years and on trial for the past six months for challenging the constitutionally codified history of the 1994 Rwandan Genocide and the injustice of its aftermath in both Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. KPFA’s Ann Garrison has the story.
KPFA/Ann Garrison: Victoire Ingabire issued a statement saying that she had lost all faith in the Rwandan justice system, that she would not return to the courtroom and that she had asked her lawyers to do the same, after Rwandan security intimidated her first witness, Michel Habimana, a former FDLR militia commander now serving life in a Rwandan prison. Habimana was interrogated, his cell was searched, and he was ordered from the courtroom after testifying that Ingabire had never had any contact with the FDLR militia in the Democratic Republic of Congo, whom she is accused of conspiring with to commit terrorist acts in Rwanda.
Iain Edwards: There are various rules of procedure that would almost universally be thought of as very much a violation of a defendant’s fair trial rights. The rule in Rwanda that a person against whom the prosecution have reason to believe is guilty of an offense … such a person is unable to provide sworn testimony before the judges. The judges can in practice hear such a person, who is suspected of being guilty of a crime, but only by way of a person providing information. Consequently, their “evidence” will necessarily be given significantly less weight.
KPFA: Well, there was one point in this trial when it was reported that the prosecution stood up and said that Victoire’s testimony couldn’t be trusted, because she’s a genocide criminal, meaning guilty of genocide ideology and … and that you shouldn’t be trusted, you and Gatera Gashebana, because you were defending a criminal.
Iain Edwards: That was at the very beginning of the trial. That was a really bizarre afternoon in court.
KPFA: For Ingabire herself, Edwards had nothing but praise:
Iain Edwards: She’s been an absolute joy to represent. She is an extraordinarily courageous woman. She’s an intelligent woman. She’s a fiercely independent woman. She’s a person that I’ve got on extremely well with. She’s loyal and it’s my very firm belief that what she wants is the very best for the Rwandan people. She makes absolutely no distinction whatsoever between Hutu, Tutsi, Twa. She sees the Rwandan people as simply that, the Rwandan people.
She wants there to be reconciliation in Rwanda, something which just does not exist in the way that the government likes to portray it as existing. And, in order to achieve that goal, she is prepared to act with complete selflessness. She knew that she ran a very, very high risk of being arrested and imprisoned when she traveled from the Netherlands to Rwanda in January of 2010.
KPFA: In her statement, Ingabire said, “Shall I die or live, be detained or freed, what we have achieved will never go back. This movement is even stronger than I am.” Rwandan refugees all over the world have thanked her for finally making it possible for them to tell their stories, and her supporters will now seek to have her declared a political prisoner by the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights.
For Pacifica, KPFA and AfrobeatRadio, I’m Ann Garrison.
San Francisco writer Ann Garrison writes for the San Francisco Bay View, Global Research, Colored Opinions,Black Star News, the Newsline EA (East Africa) and her own website, Ann Garrison, and produces forAfrobeatRadio on WBAI-NYC, Weekend News on KPFA and her own YouTube Channel, AnnieGetYourGang. She can be reached at ann@afrobeatradio.com. This story first appeared on her website. If you want to see Ann Garrison’s independent reporting continue, please contribute on her website at anngarrison.com.
posted by Mamadou Kouyate @ 9:31 PM
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