Tag: Kizito Mihigo

As Espérance Mukashema transitions to the Ancestors, her legacy uplifts the sorrows and fights against the genocides and continuing conflicts in Rwanda for the remaining and next generation of freedom fighters.

While this story has all the same characters as the movie “Hotel Rwanda,” it is not about the movie. This is Ann Garrison’s report about the current lived experience of the movie’s real-life hero, Paul Rusesabagina, being detained last year and going to trial last week under the charge of terrorism. Notorious for assassinations, attempted assassinations and other brutal authoritarian acts, Rwanda’s President Kagame is now also accused of violating US deportation and extradition law.

There has been another murder. Nine armed men killed Pastor Theoneste Bapfakurera when they mistook him for shopkeeper Theophile Ntirutwa, a member of your opposition party.

Rwandan opposition leader Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza remains in Rwanda, where President Paul Kagame’s government has forbidden her to leave. Earlier this month, gospel singer Kizito Mihigo, whom the government had also forbidden to leave Rwanda, died after being apprehended trying to cross Rwanda’s southern border into Burundi. The government said that he committed suicide, but few Rwandans believe that.

“Kizito Mihigo had been persecuted for advocating compassion for all the victims of the genocide, Hutu, Tutsi and Twa, refusing to blame all Hutu people for the Rwandan Genocide. Kagame has become fiercely vengeful with dissident Tutsis because they are breaking up his constituency.” – Professor Joseph Bukeye

On Sept. 15, Rwandan political prisoners Victoire Ingabire and Kizito Mihigo walked out of Nyarugenge Prison in Rwanda’s capital, along with nearly 2,000 more Rwandan prisoners whom President Paul Kagame had granted “executive clemency.” Victoire Ingabire is a politician and member of Rwanda’s Hutu ethnic majority. Kizito Mihigo is a gospel singer and a member of Rwanda’s Tutsi minority. Charging these two Rwandan leaders with terrorism was ludicrous to say the least.

Dr. Léopold Munyakazi was deported to Rwanda early this morning. The linguist, scholar and former French professor at Goucher College was arrested shortly after giving several lectures at Northeastern University college campuses in which he said that the Rwandan war of the 1990s was a class conflict, not an ethnic conflict, and that it was therefore incorrectly characterized as genocide.

In his 22 years as the powerful man in Rwanda and 16 years as the president of Rwanda, Paul Kagame has proved to be not only a tyrant and dictator responsible for large scale human rights abuse with an extreme and effective way of crushing dissidents and political opponents. Yet he has spoken before at the Harvard University School of Business, where he is invited again as a speaker this coming weekend.