Kagame retains autocratic control in Rwanda for another term

For three decades, Paul Kagame has been the authoritarian leader of Rwanda, a formerly poor and little-known central African country. On 15 July 2024, he was confirmed with pomp and fanfare for a further term of office. The national electoral commission, under the presidency of Oda Gasinzigwa, confirmed that this time, again, more than 98 per cent of the votes were cast in Kagame’s favour. As president of this “supervisory authority”, Gasinzigwa belongs to the closest circle of Kagame’s all-powerful party, the “Rwandan Popular Front” (RPF). With the support of the RPF, the guerrilla organization already under Kagame’s military and political command at the time, the Tutsi minority – once the ruling class in Rwanda’s monarchy (until 1962) – regained power through force in Kigali in 1994. Since then, the RPF has asserted its dominance in Rwanda with an ironclad system of repressive mechanisms against any form of real democracy.

According to the democratic opposition, the regularly recurring ritual of re-electing the president is a farce: “The recent elections were no exercise of democracy; they were a sham election orchestrated to preserve the existing regime. For thirty years, the RPF has exerted authoritarian control, stifled democratic freedoms and suppressed any opposition.”¹
  Kagame’s government, lacking democratic legitimacy, has relied on emergency powers since its inception. These powers are based on the official version of Rwanda’s history, repeatedly drilled into the population, that only the Tutsi were victims of genocide by extremist groups of the Hutu majority in 1994. Therefore, the Tutsi must continue to protect themselves with all their might against the Hutu’s ongoing genocidal desire for revenge. Since then, the government has denounced any criticism of Rwanda’s behaviour as a manifestation of a “genocidal” attitude that allegedly still prevails among large parts of the Hutu, especially those who fled to eastern Congo in 1994. Numerous studies, including many by the United Nations, have refuted this clearly distorted view and assessed the situation quite differently. Three of the most respected specialists on the subject, the French investigative journalist Pierre Péan, the Canadian-based African political scientist Charles Onana, and the Congolese historian Patrick Mbeko², who was also exiled to Canada, argue, based on historic evidence, that Tutsis were not the only victims of the Rwandan excesses, but that members of Rwanda’s other ethnic groups, the Hutu and the Twa, were as well, and their number of victims was even greater. Most of them fell victim to the RPF invading army in the war years of 1990–1994, in ethnic cleansing operations in the reconquered Rwandan territories under the command of the then-young Kagame. Others were killed in  the systematic bombing of immense refugee camps by the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire (AFDL) under Kabila in November 1996. According to Rwandan opposition circles, the remaining threat posed by extremist Hutu circles – still invoked by Kagame – is non-existent. The illusion of threat is maintained in order to divert attention from the country’s own support for guerrilla groups such as the M23. This is hardly mentioned in the political West, which pampers Kagame as a protégé of the United States.
  In the 2024 election, once again the most promising rival candidate, the fearless major opposition leader Victoire Ingabire, endured intense harassment and was banned from running by the electoral commission. In pseudo-election rallies reminiscent of classic dictatorships, Kagame again had the intimated population celebrate himself as the saviour of Rwanda. As reported by international autonomous media critical of the regime, Kagame personally insulted Ingabire at one such event the day before the election and threatened that if she still intended to be elected president of Rwanda, things would “end badly for her”.³ Considering how many courageous critics of the regime both inside and outside of Rwanda have paid for their commitment to democracy with their lives (Ingabire was also detained for a time), the open death threat from the mouth of this president is telling, in a highly alarming way.

Rwanda’s “economic
miracle” is based on illegal wars

In the West, this extreme form of authoritarianism does not detract from the fact that, after thirty years of iron-fisted de facto dictatorship, Rwanda is celebrated as an African paragon of capitalism. Visitors praise the cleanliness of its capital Kigali – but they are not allowed to travel freely in the country, where they could witness its widespread misery. The country is admired for its economic progress, primarily based on the export of sought-after materials such as diamonds and gold, as well as large quantities of the globally rare coltan and lithium, indispensable for cell phones and batteries in electric cars. The professional eulogists conveniently ignore the fact that this once destitute, hilly land with only modest tea and coffee exports, does not possess a single deposit of these valuable resources. They have been plundered in a classic proxy war by what our media call “rebel groups” in neighbouring eastern Congo for more than 30 years. A large part of these groups, including M23, notorious for its atrocities against the civilian population, consist mainly of Rwandan military personnel and mercenaries. This is the true reason behind the endless war in eastern Congo, which for 30 years has inflicted upon its martyred civilian population the same type of suffering that the Palestinians now endure every day. The difference is that our tightly aligned media do not want to know anything about it, know little about it and therefore generally do not report on it. The real reasons for this have already been mentioned several times in this newspaper.⁴ According to figures from reliable sources, this new 30-year war has already claimed at least eight million lives, a large proportion of them civilians. Around two million displaced people are trying to survive elsewhere in Africa.

In the front row
of regime supporters: Macron

Most Western media and the politicians they influence remain firmly on the “right side”: Kagame’s. French President Emmanuel Macron publicly acknowledged the official version of the regime’s history three years ago and confirmed and regretted France’s complicity in the 1994 massacres. This alleged complicity is mainly attributed to the President of France at the time, François Mitterrand (PS), who had maintained good relations with the moderate president Juvénal Habyarimana and ensured that a large part of the Rwandan population was able to flee through an escape corridor to neighbouring countries, in particular the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in the summer of 1994. A number of historians, lawyers and political scientists in France rightly deny that this was partly responsible for the massacres against the Tutsi. For reasons only known to Macron himself, the French president has continued to publicly praise Kagame as an African model student of the Western way since his visit to Kigali in 2021. At a recent international conference in Paris, amid the Olympic frenzy and in front of 50 heads of state, Macron had the following to say about his Rwandan friend: “President Kagame has developed modern infrastructures. He is a man who prefers action to big words, and who achieves results. [...] The President of Rwanda incarnates visionary and charismatic leadership, and this is reflected in his pragmatic actions and tangible results. He has shown an outstanding ability to transform Rwanda by pursuing concrete policies that have led to significant improvements in various areas.”⁵

Reality paints a different picture

The opposition, many of whom have been forced to leave the country – often paying a tragic price, with particularly courageous members being brutally murdered by the Rwandan secret service—sees things very differently. Emmanuel Neretse, a commentator and keen observer of Rwandan affairs, challenges Macron’s naive narrative:
  “[…] Paul Kagame is a ruthless and obscurantist dictator without the slightest regard or even respect for the people he has ruled since coming from Uganda in 1994. […] In Kagame’s Rwanda, political opposition is banned and any voice that differs from the views of the dictator and his state party, the RPF, is stifled. This is done through murder, imprisonment, forced expulsion or publicly announced death threats by the dictator himself [...]. Rwanda is a caricature of a police state.”
  Neretse goes on to discuss the true nature of the Kagame regime. For him, it is apartheid, which in Rwanda is characterized by the following conditions: “In this country, 10 per cent of the population owns all the wealth and lives in insolent opulence. The other 90 per cent of the population live in poverty and extreme misery. The regime keeps them in this state to prevent the emergence of a middle class that could protest against injustice and claim their rights. […] Kagame has created a bloated and overly-equipped army. It consists of 150,000 active soldiers under the command of more than a hundred generals, the same size as the entire French ground forces. This army is by no means a defensive force, as Rwanda faces no external threats. Instead, it serves the interests of imperialist superpowers, being used to destabilize neighbouring countries and rob them of their natural resources.”⁶

Grim conclusion

From a more global perspective, the current puzzling events have a rather simple, albeit disturbing explanation. Eastern Congo and its region, rich in strategically important raw materials, has always been regarded by the major Western powers – especially the United States, since 1945 – as “their domain”, which they have defended ruthlessly. Examples of this are, in historic order: The tragic events of 1994 in Rwanda including their prehistory with the US-backed war of intervention by the RPF; followed by the two wars of conquest by the Rwandan army and its allies against the colossus in the West, Mobutu’s Congo (Zaïre) in 1996/97 and 1998/2003 (extensively orchestrated and supported by the secret diplomacy of the United States); the subsequent sham investment by Kabila father and son according to American dictates, and the guerrilla war in eastern Congo, which has been going on for thirty years. Is ensuring that the great powers have access to strategic raw materials at bargain prices worth this much suffering? Here, again, the glimmer of hope on the horizon are other powers that do not want to assert their interests in international relations hegemonically and therefore also militarily, but rather through mutual agreements, in line with the principles of the Bandung Conference. China recently reaffirmed them emphatically.⁷ The international community should strongly support this – perhaps last – chance for world peace, especially Switzerland.  •

¹ Mukahoneri, Vestine. “Rwanda. Retour sur l’élection présidentielle du 15 juillet 2024. La honte pour la démocratie” in: Echos d’Afrique of 21 July 2024
² See Patrick Mbeko’s extensive account of the whole complex in his recently published book Rwanda. Malheur aux vaincus, éd. Duboiris, Paris, 2024
³ See Mukahoneri, Vestine. “Rwanda. Retour sur l’élection présidentielle du 15 juillet 2024. La honte pour la démocratie”, in: Echos d’Afrique of 21 July 2024
⁴ Previous publications in Current Concerns about the permanent war in eastern Congo: “The post-Mobutist Congo: The USA is betting on Rwanda”, in: Current Concerns No. 3 of 8 February 2018. “Dubious elections in the Democratic Republic of the Congo”, in: Current Concerns No. 5 of 5 March 2019. “Withstanding all blows: The autobiography of Congolese historian Stanislas Bucyalimwe Mararo is a legacy”, in: Current Concerns No. 20/21 of 4 October 2020. “After the elections in the Democratic Republic of Congo: A baseline study”, in: Current Concerns No. 4 of 27 February 2024. “East Congo – the perpetual humanitarian catastrophe continues (Part 1)”, in: Current Concerns No. 7 of 17 April 2024, as well as: “Eastern Congo – the long-term humanitarian catastrophe continues (Part 2)”, in: Current Concerns No. 9 of 7 May 2024
⁵ Emmanuel Macron at the opening of a summit in Paris on sustainable development through sport, July 25, 2024, Source: Neretse, Emmanuel. “France/Rwanda. Les louanges d’Emanuel Macron à Paul Kagamé, ignorance ou mépris?” in: Echos d’Afrique, August 1, 2024
⁶ ibid.
⁷ cf. Lawrence, Patrick. “Putin and Xi in Beijing: Steps into the 21st century” in: Current Concerns No. 11, 4 June 2024

(Translation Kaspar Rothenfusser)