by ANN GARRISON
“Dissidents say Kagame shuttered houses of worship because they were the last spaces in Rwanda where people felt safe from his totalitarian grip.”
He’s the President of Rwanda and the current President of the African Union, feted by the Brookings Institute , one of the most venerable ideological pillars of US capital interests. So why is Paul Kagame manifesting more and more signs of paranoia? Let’s consider just a few possibilities:
Assassination rumors
The Indian Ocean Newsletter reports that French intelligence warned Yoweri Museveni that Kagame was plotting to have his plane shot down over Rwanda, causing him to cancel a flight from Uganda to Burundi for a summit. If said plot had come to fruition, it would have been Kagame’s second presidential assassination by plane shoot-down over Rwanda. In 1994, his men shot down the plane carrying Rwandan Hutu President Juvenal Habyarimana and Burundian Hutu President Cyprien Ntaryamira from Arusha, Tanzania, to Kigali, Rwanda. That shoot-down triggered the infamous hundred days of ethnic massacres known as the Rwandan Genocide.
Is the claim credible? No hard evidence has been proffered. The Indian Ocean Newsletter is one of several regional reports included in Africa Intelligence Report, an online journal that describes itself as “the first information site on Africa for a professional audience” and charges substantial fees for all site access or per-article access. Credible or no, Kagame has his online attack dogs busy denying it.
“Kagame has been kidnapping or assassinating Rwandan refugees in Uganda.”
Are relations between Kagame and Museveni tense? No doubt about that. The two have been both partners and competitors in crime for many years, with recent emphasis on the competition. The most notorious moment of this partnership occurred in 2000 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where invading Rwandan and Ugandan forces fought each other over the gold and diamond smuggling trade.
More recently Kagame has been in the habit of kidnapping or assassinating Rwandan refugees in Uganda whom he considers his political enemies, triggering Museveni’s recent crackdown on Rwandan spies. He’s also been trying to force Rwandans who’ve crossed into Uganda fleeing famine to return home. He knows from firsthand experience that significant numbers of refugees outside Rwanda may return as an insurgency, maybe even an insurgency backed by Uganda, like his own.
Speaking of insurgencies
An armed insurgency against Kagame has been reported. All the Rwandan exiles that I know seem to believe this, but no one knows or wants to say how serious it might be. My own guess is that an insurgency could succeed only if significant numbers of Kagame’s own troops turned against him. He has been seen wearing a bulletproof vest in Rwanda. A video identified as Rwandan insurgents in training appeared on Facebook, where it was viewed 13,000 times.
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Black Agenda Report for more