Rwanda’s beauty ‘conceals police state’
Writer Anjam Sundaram spent five years in Kigali — and says that behind the president’s facade is a country where a hint of dissent could kill you
On Tuesday, Prince Charles flew into Kigali, ahead of this week’s Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who is chairing proceedings, joined him in the Rwandan capital yesterday.
I lived and worked in Kigali for five years as a journalist, but was refused accreditation to report on the event. My crime? Being critical of the Rwandan government.
Paul Kagame, Rwanda’s president, is using this elite gathering to burnish his international image and conceal his dictatorship.
Make no mistake: Rwanda’s human rights crimes are being whitewashed by events like these.
To arrive in Kigali is to confront a facade of modernity and progress.
There are no beggars on the streets, though the country is among the poorest on Earth. The electricity in Kigali rarely cuts out. The government touts its genderequal parliament (although parliament has almost no power).
Living in Kigali, it can be easy to believe the government’s claims that it is a beacon for Africa. Its streets are clean, its public services are efficent and the country feels very safe.
This is no doubt part of the reason that Britain has struck its astonishing deal to deport asylum seekers, many of whom are fleeing dictatorships, to Rwanda.
Rwanda, we are being told, has moved on from the horror of the 1994 genocide when more than a million citizens were slaughtered. The current gathering of international movers and shakers in Kigali only embellishes this story.
While living in Rwanda, I taught a class of Rwandan newspaper journalists in a media programme financed by the European Union.
Over the years, I witnessed my students and colleagues shot dead, imprisoned and forced to flee the country after they criticised Kagame. Sometimes their criticisms were benign, or made in obscure newspaper.
I wrote a book entitled Bad
News: Last Journalists in a Dictatorship, telling these brave Rwandans’ stories, as well as mine, as I tried to keep them safe. More than 70 Rwandan journalists who were killed, disappeared or fled are listed in the appendix. I did not list all the academics, activists, soldiers, politicians, priests and teachers who met the same fate.
The names of the brave reporters I taught are taboo, and cannot be spoken of without risks to their safety.
Kagame has declared many of them enemies of the state.
In Rwanda, such simple acts as taking notes or gathering in groups to discuss politics are transformed into possible acts of treason.
Punishments vary from assassinations to imprisonment, or more insidious events, such as bank loans suddenly needing repayment.
Prior to the 2010 presidential election, which Kagame won with 93 per cent of the vote (he won the subsequent 2017 election with nearly 99 per cent of the vote), I was reporting at one of his election rallies. A police officer stepped up and told me he had observed me look at Kagame and write.
“Looking and writing,” he said. “That’s not allowed.” I shut my notebook and for the rest of the rally wrote on the palm of my left hand, which I closed into a fist as I left the rally grounds.
The president is, through his security agents, all-seeing. He decides which stories can be told.
All of Rwanda is divided into “villages”, comprising about 100 families each, which report to and receive orders from the president’s office with great efficiency.
High-profile critics of Kagame are subjected to Rwanda’s sham courts, which are virtually powerless and part of the facade.
Global justice organisations, such as the Clooney Foundation, recently reported on the trial of the ex-hotel Rwanda manager Paul Rusesabagina, who had been living in exile in the US.
Rusesabagina, on whose life the Hollywood blockbuster Hotel Rwanda was based, was kidnapped in Dubai two years ago, brought to Kigali against his will, and now languishes in a prison with little hope of release, his popularity a threat to Kagame.
Rusesabagina’s daughter, Carina Kanimba, speaks to him every weekend for five minutes.
At the Oslo Freedom Forum last month, she told me: “My father’s lip hangs limp. His arm is in pain, and hanging at an unnatural angle, indicating a loss of control.” Kanimba says Rwanda has denied her father access to an independent doctor, and that a Rwandan doctor has diagnosed her father’s ailments as “psychological”.
The Rwandan government issues blanket denials to human rights reports documenting its abuses. The government says it is a democracy, and its society is free.
But Rwanda’s human rights crimes are being whitewashed by international sports and political events. This year Kigali hosted the Basketball Africa League, and then there is this week’s Commonwealth gathering.
While living in Kigali, I once happened to be on the terrace of a building, and noticed a hole in the walls. I went up to look.
To my surprise, I saw the president’s office. From the street, one could only see high walls and gates.
It was within that presidential compound that decisions were made about who would go to prison and who would be free, who would die and who would live.
So I was surprised to see this office from above so clearly.
I could see the buildings neatly laid out and manicured lawns.
A voice came from behind: “What are you looking at?” It was a security guard. He told me, gently, that I wasn’t allowed to look through that hole.
The guard asked why I was looking at the president’s office.
His calmness unnerved me. I told him that I looked for no particular reason; and immediately I felt guilty.
I wondered about the things I had seen and written about. I wondered if I had been observed all along.
When my journalism students were attacked, I was forced to look behind Kagame’s facade, to understand why it was so dangerous to speak up against his government, financed and trained in security matters by Western countries including the US, Israel and Britain.
The world might be marvelling at Rwanda right now. But don’t be deceived — for all its beaut,y Rwanda is, in reality, a prison like any other.