Tag: Rwandan President Paul Kagame

Knowing that he is a predator of political and press freedoms, it is now opportune for Western donors to revisit their support for Kagame as well as their role in Rwanda’s reconstruction and reconciliation processes.

The identity, motive and/or sponsors of Professor Jwani Mwaikusa’s assassins, in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, may remain “unknown,” meaning “unproven,” for some time, but Professor Mwaikusa’s friends and colleagues know that whoever was responsible deprived the legal fraternity and the entire human race of an irreplaceable, independent and incorruptible mind.

First Vice President Andre Kagwa Rwisereka of the Democratic Green Party of Rwanda was found dead, his head almost completely severed from his body, near Butare, Rwanda, on the morning of July 14. All three viable opposition parties, including the Greens, have been excluded from the country’s 2010 presidential election, with polls now scheduled for Aug. 9.

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.

On Monday, May 26, Ugandan Bishop Christopher Senyonjo, fondly known as Bishop Christopher, spoke to a circle gathered round him at San Francisco’s African American Art and Culture Complex. He explained his counseling work with LGBT youth, his advocacy for LGBT rights and his opposition to Uganda’s infamous proposed Anti Homosexuality Act.

Floribert Chebeya Bahizire, the Democratic Republic of Congo’s leading human rights defender, was found murdered on Wednesday, June 2. On the evening of June 1, Chebeya was en route to a meeting with John Numbi, inspector general of the Congolese National Police, in response to a summons. The next day his body was found in his car.

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.”

Rwanda Chief Prosecutor Martin Ngoga warned leading opposition presidential candidate Victoire Ingabire that she might be jailed once again if she continues speaking to the press. He also said that "some defense lawyers at the ICTR (International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda) have badly deviated from their professional duties and turned into activists and advocates of genocide denial.”

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.

Rwandan President Paul Kagame took his turn on the red carpet in New York City this week and received a standing ovation for his role in “Earth Made of Glass.” While gathering up the accolades, his government is in the throes of a political crisis.

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.

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.

We now know where a lot of coltan and cassiterite stolen from Congo go, in the end. They go to Ghana and other parts of Africa as toxic electronic waste, often disguised as charity: European and North American "contributions" of worn-out, broken, no longer fashionable tech garbage.

The recent UNHCR Gimme Shelter campaign uses the iconic Rolling Stones song and Hollywood star Ben Affleck's video of suffering in Congo as a propaganda tool to peddle the international catastrophe of Western aid, intervention, plunder and depopulation in Central Africa.