Tag: Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza

Rwandan police have arrested Peter Erlinder, the American lawyer who traveled to Rwanda’s capital, Kigali, on Monday, May 23, to join the defense team of Rwandan presidential candidate Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza. He is charged with “genocide ideology,” a crime unique to Rwanda which Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and even the U.S. State Department have denounced as a tool of political repression.

Violence, repression and human rights abuse continues to increase as 2010 elections approach in the East African neighbor nations of Rwanda and Burundi, whose ethnicity, politics and conflicts are closely intertwined. This week Burundi ordered Human Rights Watch’s researcher out of the country by June 5, after she published her report on political violence, “We’ll Tie You Up and Shoot You.”

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.

On April 30, in Edmond, Oklahoma, a team of lawyers and process servers attempted to personally serve Rwandan President Paul Kagame with an eight count lawsuit, which includes racketeering to acquire and control the resources of eastern D.R. Congo.

On Monday, April 26, police detectives in Kigali, Rwanda, interrogated Didas Gasana, editor of the weekly African language newspaper Umuseso for eight hours. Gasana now fears extrajudicial abduction or a prison sentence of up to 25 years.

Rwanda arrested presidential candidate Victoire Ingabiré Umuhoza on Wednesday, April 21, at her home in Kigali, and her Rwandan support team thank pressure from the international community for her surprise release on bail the next day. Supporters should be ready, should Rwanda Greens candidate Frank Habineza be arrested, to post the news and call for his release.

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.

On the morning of April 21, Rwandan police arrested presidential candidate and icon of peace and justice Victoire Ingabiré Umuhoza less than four months before the Aug. 9 presidential election. Mrs. Ingabire is currently at risk of torture or even death while incarcerated.

Godwin Agaba, Rwandan correspondent for the African Great Lakes regional outlet 256.com, is now in hiding, though still reporting. This week Godwin Agaba confirmed that Rwanda’s presidential election is effectively closed; all the viable opposition has been excluded.

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.