Do Not Disturb by Michela Wrong
Michela Wrong’s book offers evidence to support accusations of assassination, kidnapping and crushing of dissent by the Rwandan government. Is it valid? Review by Stephen Williams
The Rwandan capital Kigali, a place that is at once ordered and orderly, is proudly advertised by 63-year-old President Paul Kagame as an international city open to capital, enterprise and adventurous foreign tourists.
Since assuming the presidency in 2000, Kagame has become a donor darling of the international community. His government has received over $4bn in World Bank support, and has secured the UK as its largest bilateral donor.
But Michela Wrong, the renowned journalist and author, takes a divergent view. Her book raises a clear warning over the international embrace of what she contends is a deeply authoritarian regime.
Kagame’s supporters argue that the Rwandan government’s tight control of the political system and society are a crucial stabilising influence in a country scarred by the 1994 genocide, when armed Hutu militias murdered hundreds of thousands of Tutsis and moderate Hutus in the immediate aftermath of the assassination of President Juvénal Habyarimana, a Hutu. Yet Kagame’s detractors say that that the evidence of international extra-judicial assassinations and suffocating domestic repression over years are the manifestations of a paranoid dictatorship.
Wrong offers much evidence to support Kagame’s critics, focusing on disturbing case studies of apparently state-sponsored assassination, kidnapping and the crushing of dissent.
A friendship gone sour
Among the crucial cases at the heart of the book is the murder of Patrick Karegeya, a former Rwandan external head of intelligence turned dissident and exile, in Johannesburg in 2013.
Believed to have been carried out by a Rwandan death squad, Karegeya’s murder at the luxury Michelangelo Hotel in Sand
ton had all the hallmarks of a professional assassination. The killers left Karegeya’s corpse in his room, hanging the “Do Not Disturb” sign on his door (from which the book gets its title), giving them time to get to the airport and fly out of the country before the body was discovered.
Wrong lays out the history of the relationship between President Kagame and the exile, explaining their roles in the war that bought an end to the genocide and ushered Kagame’s Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) to power.
Karegeya and Kagame were close RPF colleagues when both were in exile in Uganda. Upon their return to Kigali after the genocide, Karegeya was appointed the head of Rwandan external security. But as Kagame began to consolidate power at the head of the movement, cracks developed in the relationship.
After disputing policy decisions and parting ways with his colleague, even being jailed for a time, Karegeya suspected his life was in danger. He not only took exception to Kagame’s domestic policies, but also to RPF operations in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). While Karegeya supported hunting down Hutu génocidaires hiding in the jungles of Rwanda’s larger neighbour, he was said to be less enthusiastic about Rwanda’s exploitation of the DRC’s myriad extractive resources, including coltan, gold, diamonds and timber.
As tension with his former RPF allies increased, Karegeya went into exile in late 2007, arriving the following year in South Africa. His charisma helped him amass a wide circle of friends and supporters as he attempted to organise an opposition movement from exile – a move that is likely to have sealed his fate.
Yet Karegeya is not the only government opponent to come to a mysterious end. Rwanda’s progressive Hutu interior minister Seth Sendashonga, another opposition figure in exile, was machinegunned to death in Kenya in 1998. Violent deaths in the RPF have a long history – in 1990, popular commander Fred Rwigyema was shot dead in mysterious circumstances attributed to either a French commando’s stray bullet or a targeted attack by internal rivals.
In 2014, Human Rights Watch published research stating that 13 former RPF politicians, military figures, intelligence agents and journalists who had fled Rwanda had been assassinated, kidnapped or attacked in countries including Kenya, Uganda, South Africa or the UK.
Provocative summary
The book’s final chapter offers a provocative summary bound to infuriate Rwanda’s president, which leaves no doubt as to the paranoid and authoritarian nature of his state.
Wrong quotes a former Western ambassador who received a warning from his country’s “intelligence guys” before a visit to Kigali: “‘On arrival,’ they told me, ‘you’ll be met by a very good-looking young woman or man. That’s a honey trap – don’t touch the local fruit. During your stay, don’t go onto the local Wi-Fi system with your laptop, smartphone or iPad, as they’ll use your system to hoover up your information. You should take it as read that your room is being bugged. Don’t say anything important or personal over the phone. Never leave your laptop or phone out of your sight. And during the duration of your stay, you should assume your luggage will be gone through not once, but twice.’”
It was the kind of briefing you would expect travelling to an autocratic police state rather than a donor darling. But world leaders and donors who have been wooed by Kagame’s charm and undoubted eficcacy in delivering development for his people are unlikely to expect such treatment from an apparently friendly state and will most likely continue building bridges with his government, despite the mounting accusations. ■
Wrong’s book has been much debated in African circles. This book will raise important issues, but it has also raised many eyebrows