
Rwandan political prisoner Victoire Ingabire is spending her second Christmas in Rwanda’s maximum security prison. Her ongoing trial, on charges of terrorism and genocide ideology, has implications not only for Rwanda, but also for the entire Great Lakes Region of Africa – most of all, for the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Victoire Ingabire left Rwanda almost two years ago in January 2010 to return to her native Rwanda in hopes of challenging Rwandan President Paul Kagame in the country’s 2010 presidential election. Her party was not allowed to register, she was not allowed to run, and she has spent the last year not as the president of Rwanda, but as a prisoner in Kigali’s 1930 maximum security prison.

Rwandan, Congolese and American activists rallied in Chicago Saturday to protest the appearance of Rwandan President Paul Kagame at “Rwanda Day,”

Presidential candidate Victoire Ingabire reported that her party’s treasurer, Alice Muhirwa, mother of two, fainted in a Rwandan courtroom due to untreated torture wounds inflicted by the Rwandan police. The FDU reported that Rwandan police refused to take Ms. Muhirwa to a hospital to be treated for bleeding caused by boot kicks to the stomach.

Fox News reached new extremes of irresponsibility today by reporting that Professor Peter Erlinder is in Kigali, Rwanda, to defend “the alleged perpetrators of the 1994 Rwanda Genocide.” Peter Erlinder is in Rwanda to defend opposition presidential candidate Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza. He was arrested within days after arriving.

Opposition presidential candidate Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza stood before a judge in Kigali, Rwanda, on April 22 after the Kagame government arrested and charged her with “associating with terrorists” and “genocide ideology,” a crime unique to Rwanda which includes “divisionism” and “revisionism,” meaning politics and/or attempting to revise the received history of the 1994 Rwanda Genocide.

I am calling upon the president of Rwanda, Paul Kagame, to let me recover my full freedom and liberties, so that I can enjoy my political rights which are the reason I came back home from exile, hold the constitutional congress of my political party, register the party, compete during the elections and let the Rwandan people decide.

Rwandan opposition presidential candidate Madame Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza, Rwanda’s first female presidential candidate, was released on bail one day after being jailed by the Kagame government of Rwanda. “Ingabire was arrested on trumped-up, political thought crimes,” asserted law professor Peter Erlinder, one of Ingabire’s U.S. lawyers.

Today, 62 percent of the people packed into Rwanda’s prisons have been charged or convicted of genocide-related crimes and some of the country’s most admired leaders are being accused of the “genocide ideology” thought crime. Most prominent are Victoire Ingabire, Kagame’s strongest competitor for the presidency, and Paul Rusesabagina, the hero portrayed in the film “Hotel Rwanda,” who is charged with “Double Genocide Theory.”

If Rwanda’s three viable opposition parties are allowed to register and participate in free and fair elections, they have a good chance, in coalition, of defeating Rwandan President Paul Kagame and his ruling Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) Party. Those three parties condemned the Feb. 19 deadly grenade attacks in Kigali, calling them “an attempt to instill fear in the population” prior to Rwanda’s August presidential election.