Always on the run (Rwanda): We’re all going to die
- Detalles
- Categoría: Actualidad en inglés
- Publicado el Viernes, 21 Enero 2011 12:49
Donor darling Rwanda banned the independent media and silenced the opposition in the months running up to the last elections this August. FP followed Rwanda’s best known journalist Charles Kabonero “President Kagame thinks he owns Rwanda. But I am a shareholder too and I'm worried about my stocks.”
Early in the morning of June 25th the phone of journalist Charles Kabonero begin_of_the_skype_highlightingend_of_the_skype_highlighting rings. His normally high-wattage smile, a toothy manifestation of his abundant energy, turns into a thin, dark line. He looks at me and says: “This is very bad.”
Just the night before, his friend and fellow journalist Jean Leonard Rugambage was shot in Rwanda’s capital Kigali. Rugambage was followed and threatened by the Rwandan secret service for weeks and had planned to flee the country. But two days before he intended to join Kabonero in exile, he was killed. “I cannot even attend his funeral. I must send my mother. And if she were to die today, I would not even be able to go to hers,” says Kabonero.
In the seven years that he was editor of Rwanda’s popular independent weekly, Umuseso (‘Dawn’), Kabonero, who is only 29, grew into one of the most well-known and active promoters of independent journalism in his country. No one else managed to hold onto the position for so long – by its tenth anniversary all five editors of Umuseso had had to flee Rwanda. Founder John Mugabi received asylum in the Netherlands, his two successors in Canada. Kabonero eventually fled as well, but continues his work from neighboring Uganda.
But this morning, for the first time in the weeks that I’ve been following him, I see him doubt his decision to stay. The murder of Rugambage makes the third misfortune to befall a critic of Rwandan President Paul Kagame in little over a week. Five days before, former Rwandan General Kayumba Nyamwasa, who had accused President Paul Kagame of corruption from the ostensible safety of South Africa, was shot in front of his home in an upscale suburb of Johannesburg. He survived a bullet to the stomach. One day later, a politician from an opposition party in Rwanda was shot dead. The petite Kabonero collapses. “Were all going to die. What’s the point of going back to work?”
Donor darling
The small eastern African country of Rwanda is a donor darling. The EU-representative and Dutch ambassador in Kigali Frans Makken says: “We are dealing with a very effective government – effective in carrying out its development program, with a significant policy against corruption, an ombudsman, an audit chamber and an enormous accountability. Public funds are spent more efficiently and effectively here than in most other countries.”
Rwanda’s success is mainly due to the firm hand of its President, Paul Kagame. Kagame led the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), the Tutsi rebel army that invaded Rwanda in 1994 after the government of Habyarimana urged the Hutu majority (approximately 85% of all Rwandans) to slaughter nearly one million Tutsis and moderate Hutus.
Kagame’s government has enacted a series of reforms applauded by outside observers: it introduced compulsory health insurance (which costs Rwandans seven percent of their annual salary); it demanded officials to sign a code of conduct promising among other things they would not enter extramarital affairs; and it enacted a total ban on plastic bags, which were becoming a blight on the country’s landscape. However, it has also chipped away at civil liberties and with an increasingly big chisel: it established the right to intercept all telephone and email traffic; it created an anti-vagrancy law that calls for young people who hang out on the street to be arrested and put to work for a maximum of three years; and it has limited the rights of opposition parties and free media.
All but one of the opposition parties were barred from registering for the presidential elections of August 9 for various reasons. And many of the President’s opponents and critics have found themselves being prosecuted under legislation that was designed to prevent the resurgence of ethnic conflict. Among them Rwandan opposition candidate Victoire Ingabire and her American lawyer Peter Erlinder, who were arrested and accused of divisionism (i.e., creating an ethnic divide). The two independent newspapers, Kabonero’s Umuseso and Rugambage’s Umuvugizi, were banned for a period of six months for inciting hatred. Kabonero: “We wanted to create a different kind of media after the genocide, but we failed. The government has regained all control.”
Kabonero has emerged as one of the few critics the government has been unable silence. He talks fast, making grand gestures with his small hands to emphasize his point. He has a boyish look but uses strong, formal words and throws in a lot of irony. “President Kagame acts as the owner of Rwanda. But I am also a shareholder and I’m worried about my shares.”
Friends and family say, “There is something about him. He has no fear. And he is very smart.” Kabonero himself thinks he has no other option. “We all have a responsibility. Kagame has the responsibility and mandate to protect all Rwandans. We journalists to make sure he does. If we do not, and the situation worsens, it’s our own fault.”
Bananas
Kagame and Kabonero – the president and his critic – are both Tutsi, both grow up outside Rwanda. Kabonero’s father and Kagame’s parents both flee to Uganda in 1959, after the Belgians withdrew from Rwanda leaving Hutus and Tutsi’s to battle it out for power. Both families resettle near the country town of Mbarara in southwestern Uganda. Kagame is two at the time, while Kabonero’s father just started working as a teacher and marries a few years later. Charles Kabonero begin_of_the_skype_highlighting isend_of_the_skype_highlighting born as the second of eight (in East Africa children receive a Christian and an African first name, no surname).
In 1981,when Idi Amin forces all foreigners to leave Uganda, Kabonero’s family ends up in a refugee camp in Rwanda. “There was a shortage of everything, many children died,” says Kabonero’s mother with a soft, lilting voice. “I used to protect my children like a hen sitting on her eggs.”
Kabonero is seven when the family decides to return to their stretch of land in Uganda, where he and his older brother Henry can go to school. Kabonero grows up in a mud hut surrounded by banana plantations, hours from the main road. “He was always writing,” his mother remembers. “He would practice his signature and made whole descriptions of the people around him. I loved him, he was clever and had a good heart. If another child was wearing a dirty or torn shirt, he gave him his own, even though he received a sound beating from his father afterwards.”
At the age of ten Kabonero starts selling bananas during school breaks, to pay his tuition. After school he works on the land, like all his siblings – three sisters and three more brothers follow after him. There is hardly any contact with the outside world. Kabonero sees television for the first time July 9, 1994 when he is fourteen (not news of the genocide that was even then happening in his country, but a soccer game: Brazil-Netherlands in the World Cup quarter finals).
Kabonero continues his studies at a boys’ boarding school, as is usual there. But already in the second year he is expelled after attacking a rival school with some of the older boys. He doesn’t dare to tell his parents and therefore goes out to look for a new school himself. He ends up at Ntare High school in Mbarara – the same boys’ school once attended by Kagame and his Ugandan counterpart Museveni.
Four years after the genocide his father returns to Rwanda. Kabonero’s mother: “He took Kabonero with him, because we were worried about him. He hung out with friends much older than him and was having fierce discussions with them.”
On the first day of school in Rwanda, he meets Didas Gasana, a Rwandan returned from Uganda like himself. After high school Gasana finds a job at a newspaper, until university starts. “When I first saw his name in the newspaper I knew I wanted that too,” says Kabonero, who promptly also finds himself a job at the Rwandan Herald. Kabonero is immediately hooked: “Finally I could mean something.”
He publishes on the front page for the first time – an article citing foreign human rights organizations criticizing a human rights report released by the government. “I walked around with an edition of that newspaper for months. Every time someone asked me for a copy, I gave that one.”
Kabonero and Gasana interview former president Bizimungu, who had had a falling out with his former vice president, Kagame, over what Bizimungu regarded as unduly harsh crackdowns on dissidents. Shortly after, Kabonero and Gasana are arrested. Kabonero is captured in a hotel lobby (he asks the policemen if he can bring his bag – a rooky mistake: the bag contains background material for the interview, which is used as evidence against him). Gasana is released after a thundering sermon, but Kabonero is brought to ‘1930’, Kigali’s central prison, where he is thrown in with hundreds of potentially hostile Hutus, perpetrators of the 1994 genocide. But once they hear that he is a journalist, their hostility disappears.
The editors of Umuseso are arrested and brought in the same week. Kabonero leaves prison with a new job and valuable contacts. But at home, his father makes him choose: leave journalism or leave the house. Barely one year later Kabonero becomes director of the Rwandan Independent Media Group, which publishes Umuseso and also the English-language paper Newsline.
Land grabbing
Rwanda is a small, hilly country with ten million people who are mostly dependent on agriculture for their living. The country has less than one hectare of land per capita. The extermination of entire Tutsi-families and the voluntary exile of many Hutu-families set the stage for a massive land grab. Ever since 2003 Umuseso has been publishing stories about public officials stealing land. In 2007, Kagame puts together an investigating committee but it consists mainly of military leaders accused of the very crime the committee is supposed to investigate.
The report published by the committee is never made public. But after spending three days in the countryside, Kabonero manages to convince a boy from one of the regional governmental offices to make a copy for him. Kabonero is startled by what he sees. Some public figures have 300 or even 600 hectares of land. When he confronts a member of the committee, the regime knows Kabonero has the report and he changes into a taxi to safely reach Kigali. Umuseso publishes the full list of names.
In the same year, all government and government affiliated companies are prohibited from advertising in Umuseso. Almost all advertisers withdraw. Kabonero reduces staff and expenditures, and the newspaper manages to survive on the proceeds from the newsstand. He is offered a job with a generous salary at the state-affiliated newspaper The New Times but refuses, even after his father dies and he becomes responsible for the school fees of his younger brothers and sisters.
The state sets up a media smear campaign, claiming Kabonero had financial problems, but it cannot contain Umuseso’s popularity. Kabonero: “We wanted to inform Rwandans about what the government does, also about what is going wrong. The role of a journalist is to stand between the leader and the people, to listen to the people and their thoughts and return them to the government. We also tell them that they can expect something from their government – the government sees that as inciting hatred.”
“Kabonero writes what most Rwandans do not even dare to dream,” says one of Umuseso’s lawyers. The newspaper is currently fighting four lawsuits: two for a temporary and a permanent ban (while Umuseso was fighting the temporary ban, the government started procedures for a permanent ban), one because the newspaper reported on the affair of the mayor of Kigali with the minister of cabinet affairs, and one because the newspaper revealed the tax evasion of a Rwandan businessman in South Africa. The paper’s lawyer I spoke to is not very optimistic about the chances of a fair trial. “There is no independent judiciary. Once a case is political, judges are controlled from above.”
We sit in his small, windowless office; outside his wife and an employee serve as lookouts to halt unwanted visitors. “Normally I don’t talk so frankly with whites. It is that Charles told me that I can trust you,” the lawyer says in halting English. He is more fluent in French, but insists on English. Last year Rwanda changed her official language from French to English (the language from English-speaking neighboring countries returning Tutsi’s have lived in) alongside the local language Kinyarwanda. “Kabonero and Gasana believe in freedom of expression. I see how the authorities attack them in court. But they are convinced they are right and they love their work. I admire them for their courage. They are still young.”
Marked plates
The autorities and Umuseso are tied up in a cat and mousegame. The paper has sources deep within the system. “I want a clean conscience,” one of the paper’s secret sources I meet in Kigali says. “The RPF once stood for liberty, that is what we fought for.” Kabonero maintains a source in the three main government departments that, according to him, are tasked with the politically motivated kidnappings, beatings, and assassinations: police intelligence, military intelligence and national security.
A few times a week an employee of the newspaper goes to the parking lot of the Central Intelligence to record license plates. Cars that are parked there three days a week, must be owned by people working for the service. “We also know that they prefer Toyota Corolla’s, which are three-door – that’s useful if you want to abduct someone. And they prefer to use plates that begin with ‘IT’, which are reserved for non-governmental organizations and cannot be traced to an individual.”
In May 2009 four separate sources tell Kabonero there is a plan to abduct him. He finds himself constantly being shadowed. “During the day I worried about my sources, at night I feared for my life.” On May 16 Kabonero goes to Hotel Africana to watch the Arsenal-Everton soccer match. When it’s finished, he calls a friend to pick him up. They soon notice that they are being followed by a white Toyota Corolla. His friend tries to lose the tail – twice he branches abruptly off the main road but the Toyota stays with them.
Kabonero asks his friend to pull over. He gets into a taxi and turns onto the unlit, dirt road that leads to Kabonero’s house. Once he closes his front gate, the Corolla has disappeared, but they already knew where he lived. He hides the chase from his mother, brothers and sisters, but when he gets to bed that night, Kabonero realizes it’s time to put some distance between himself and the government’s security forces.
A week afterwards Kabonero sends a cousin ahead to Kampala with two big bags. That night Gasana and a colleague stand guard outside Kabonero’s gate without telling him. At five o’clock in the morning they call to wake him. Kabonero tells his family that he is going to Uganda for a few days, as he often does. At the border, the officer inquires about the ongoing legal proceedings against him but Kabonero points to his little bag and promises to be back within a couple of days.
He intends to return to his country in a few months time, when the situation has cooled. An NGO helps him get an internship in South Africa and he continues to write for his newspaper. When General Kayumba flees to South Africa, Kabonero is the first to interview him. But only days after the interview has been published, Kagame in a press conference accuses Kabonero and the fled general of plotting a coup against him. A temporary publication ban on the newspaper follows soon after and Gasana also has to flee.
With the elections of August only a few weeks away, Kabonero has no time to lose. He resuscitates their old English-language paper Newsline. “The president has continual airtime; we must ensure that also another sound is heard.”
Shake hands
Kabonero takes me to Nakivale refugee camp just outside Mbarara, Uganda, where still new refugees arrive every day. The residents are afraid to talk to us. “There are spies in the camp,” says someone. But once it becomes clear who the Rwandan at my side is, everyone wants to shake Kabonero’s hands. “When Umuseso still appeared, we used to send someone with the bus to Kampala to get it for us.”
Then the stories come. A farmer says he fled because he refused to join the RPF. His brothers, supporters of the party of former president, were killed by the RPF in the aftermath of the genocide and their land is now in danger of being confiscated by RPF members. Another says that in 2003 he was imprisoned for six months for campaigning for an opposition party. When the threats returned in 2010, he ran away. A third has a brother who deserted from the army. The regime suspected him of joining the Hutu extremists of the FDLR and have been harassing his family ever since. Many of the refugees we speak to were put in jail without charges.
Justice is another topic that was closely followed by Umuseso. In the years after the genocide the Rwandan prisons were bulging. To try all those suspected of genocide within a reasonable time, the government installs gacaca’s, folk tribunals, headed by a few village elders. The system seems to work in its early years, but eventually Kabonero and his colleagues register more and more abuse, “Gacaca mainly became a good way to silence Hutus who spoke out against abuses. Later it was also exploited by villagers who wanted to steal from someone else’s possessions.”
Foreign diplomats
Of all the countries that have sent waves of refugees fleeing to Uganda in the last decade – Congo, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sudan and Rwanda – Rwanda is the only one not considered a ‘failed state’. But why then do so many people continue to flee? According to the Rwandan government, they are trying to escape prosecution for acts committed during the genocide. Rwandans have thus infrequently been given official refugee status since 1998. There are even forced repatriations.
Many foreign diplomats play down the refugee issue and the repressive regime. Stability and a strong leader would, according to foreign diplomats, be more important. Kabonero responds: “A strong government? What we need are strong institutions. A strong parliament, strong commission for human rights. How is it that this genocide could take place in the first place? Because there was a government that had the power to suppress citizens and kill them. Foreign powers would rather support African tyrants, it is much easier to do business with tyrants. Our parliament for example has never received an explanation as to why we send troops to Darfur. But why would the US support a newspaper that asks critical questions about that?”
A few hours after the news of the death of his colleague, Rugambage, the phone goes again. A Ugandan radio program asks Kabonero to be their guest for the night. Gasana, who has been hiding in his hotel for weeks, tries to persuade Kabonero to say no. “It’s a live show, they’ll know exactly where you are.”
Kabonero takes fierce puffs from his cigarette and stares into the distance. “I’m going,” he says. “Many people thought that it would help to be silent and they were killed anyways.”
KFM radio station is located next to an abandoned railway track in a corner of Kampala; it looks like the perfect scene for an assassination. It is almost dark when a befriended motorcycle taxi takes us there. The small studio at the fourth floor contains only a table and six chairs. Presenter Charles Mwangushya announces his program “Hot Seat” in which journalists discuss the news. He asks Kabonero: “Rwanda has been seen as a success story in the region when it comes to overcoming ethnic differences. What is your opinion?”
“Rwanda was definitely a success story in terms of the number of killings, or the degree of dictatorship - Kagame uses the whole arsenal of a dictator. Many foreigners have been unilaterally informed by the government and state media. But if you look at what’s going on in Rwanda – the violation of human rights, the curtailment of freedom of expression; the lack of an independent justice - I don’t know what progress they are seeing.”
The next day, when Kabonero’s mother attends Rugambage’s funeral in Kigali, Kabonero starts looking for a new home. Rwandan spies are searching for him, a ‘friend’ from the Ugandan secret services advises him to move every three months. Exactly one week later the phone rings again. A source from Kigali. “They have requested a CD of the show. And they are not happy with the people you hang out with there. Charles, you have no idea how many people they killed already.”
Box:
Frans Makken, current EU-representative and Dutch Ambassador to Rwanda:
“In Holland there are also limits to the freedom of expression”
Ambassador Makken: “In a country in conflict, you see that socio-economic rights are given more importance than civil and political rights. Why? Because the important thing is that people have something to eat and to drink and are able to offer their children a future. You do not want to endanger that by giving broad democratic rights, that also offer space for militant organizations, including the Hutu rebels responsible for the genocide, who are still active in Congo and in the diaspora in Europe.”
“Rwanda is a young democracy with all the trappings of a democracy: a parliament, elections, legislation, democratic institutions, and more or less freedom of expression, albeit defined by law. That is sometimes criticized, and we do so in a dialogue with the government. But in a real dictatorship these elements do not exist.
“You can not deny that Kagame shows autocratic behaviour at times. But if you look at his vision for the country - no ethnic differences, emphasis on development of the whole population, stability above all - and his plans, including his vision for 2020, his agriculture, development and health policy, you can not say that he considers himself owner of Rwanda and is out on self enrichment. It is true that he and his party have a lot of power.
“Umuseso is suspended for a series of statements that have appeared in the newspaper earlier, but also more recently, and that went too far according to the government. The statements were deemed seditious. When a newspaper makes pronouncements that conflict with the law, it is only right that action is being taken. In the Netherlands, the press and freedom of expression are also limited. We cannot make any statements that endanger public order or are very offensive to certain groups or individuals in society.
“I find it difficult that the whole development of Rwanda is narrowed down to the people who have made live difficult for the president and encountered the consequences of that. Of course it happens, but there is room for everyone here to have a say. I would like to see more attention on the positive developments on the country.
“Whether the law is impartial? In 1994 the entire judiciary was eradicated and then rebuilt. Still many lawyers are inexperienced and perhaps occasionally biased. But you have to see if it is a systematic bias or arising from a few overenthusiastic individuals. Rwanda works on her justice system with all her might and where there are excesses, they will be raised by us when necessary. We do not search for those excesses, no, we are not a pressure group. We have monthly meetings with various human rights organizations and get our information from them.”
Text: Paulien Bakker,