Editor,

RE: "High turnout as Diaspora cast their vote” (The New Times, August 3).

I am truly flabbergasted. Didn’t all this Diaspora Rwandans get the collective memo from HRW, Amnesty International, the failing Western media organizations like The Economist, The Washington Post, The New York Times, BBC, AFP, RFI, France 24, and the lot that, being outside Rwanda and therefore out of reach of its ‘dictatorship’, they don’t have to go and vote in an ‘undemocratic’ election?

And, if they are going to vote, can’t they at least show a bit of fear? For heaven’s sake, are these Rwandans in the Diaspora as backward as their compatriots at home who are so thick-headed they don’t seem to understand what their Great White Saviors are telling them so clearly: There can’t be democracy if their country is too clean and well-ordered; if there is too much personal and property security; if government insists on the strict application of laws; if elections lack sufficient bloodletting to provide media entertainment and proof of African atavistic savagery; and if the government of the country refuses to know and faithfully keep to its subservient role to the Great White Fathers.

Clearly, these Diaspora Rwandans who voted in such large numbers and apparently in such a ‘false’ festive mood must have been intimidated by the Kigali ‘regime’ which, as everyone knows, has its agents everywhere!

BBC and The New York Times, did I get the broad strokes of your narrative right?

Mwene Kalinda