Kagame defends multimillion sponsorship of Arsenal
RWANDA has had words with some European donor countries after President Paul Kagame’s government defended its multimillion-dollar deal to sponsor his favourite football team, Arsenal.
Some politicians in Britain, the Netherlands and other donor countries – who criticised the decision after the World Bank reported that the east African country received more than $1 billion (R13.68bn) in foreign aid and development assistance in 2016 – were told it was none of their business.
This rare criticism from the West comes against a background where Rwanda is regarded as a model African state with Kagame responsible for transforming the country economically following the 1994 genocide in which a million Tutsis, and some moderate Hutus, were slaughtered by the Hutu Interahamwe militia.
Rwanda is ranked 41 among 190 economies in the ease of doing business, according to the World Bank 2018 annual ratings.
Kagame also evoked international sympathy when he led the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) in successfully defeating the murderous Interahamwe.
Despite this and Kagame’s progressive attitude towards gender equality, his rule has come at a high price for political opponents, personal liberties and the freedom of the press.
Several American investigators who visited the country and exposed atrocities committed by the RPF against Hutu civilians were hastily deported.
Walking around the super-clean streets of Kigali, one is hard-pressed to find even a cigarette butt – courtesy of neighbourhood committees which are forced into cleaning the streets. There are also no beggars within sight. “Over at least the last 12 years, Rwandan authorities rounded up poor people off the streets, arbitrarily detaining them in so-called transit centres (also called rehabilitation centres),” Human Rights Watch (HRW) told the 61st Ordinary Session of the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights in Banjul, Gambia, in November last year.
HRW said the conditions in these centres were often inhumane – many detainees were beaten.
State security forces in Rwanda summarily killed at least 37 suspected petty offenders and four others disappeared in Rwanda’s Western Province between April 2016 and March last year.
Most victims were accused of stealing items such as bananas, a cow or a motorcycle.
Talking to Rwandans in the street about politics remains difficult as most appeared afraid to talk, especially about the friction between Hutus and Tutsis, insisting that was in the past and a result of “foreign intervention”.
“Scores of people suspected of collaborating with ‘enemies’ of the Rwandan government were detained arbitrarily and tortured in military detention centres by Rwandan army soldiers and intelligence officers from 2010 to last year,” said HRW.
The subcommittee on the Prevention of Torture, a monitoring body of the Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture, ratified by Rwanda in 2015, conducted a state visit in November last year but was forced to leave following government obstruction and fear of reprisals against interviewees.
Rwanda’s silencing of critics goes beyond its borders. Kagame was accused of ordering the killing of the country’s former spy chief Patrick Karageya, who was found dead in a Sandton hotel in 2014. – African News Agency (ANA)