On August 17, 2020, Human Rights Watch (HRW) came out of self-imposed silence on Rwandan matters to publish a communiqué: ‘Rwanda: 6 Months On, No Justice for Kizito Mihigo’.

In my next article as part of a series on denial of the genocide against Tutsi, I will come back to the blunders that led HRW to go silent on Rwanda. For now, I want to address their recent communiqué.

In the communiqué, they acknowledge that: "On February 26, 2020, Rwanda’s National Public Prosecution Authority concluded that Mihigo’s death ‘resulted from suicide by hanging’ and that the autopsy report determined that he had died by ‘asphyxia/hypoxia, with hanging as the most probable cause.’”

However, they dismiss this medical and legal process and declare: ‘It is essential to carry out an effective, independent investigation with the involvement of foreign experts (meaning themselves), including the United Nations special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions.’

As is their habit, HRW mentions names of every senior official for being directly involved in Mihigo’s death: President, Speaker, Minister, Head of the Police, President’s Chief of Staff, etc. it is as though the entire government stopped everything they were doing to conspire against Kizito.

"Kizito Mihigo made serious allegations of torture and other rights violations against high-level government officials in key positions” -Mudge said. Who the hell is Mudge and how is his word more credible than that of a judicial system?

Ironically they claim to have written to the Justice Minister on August 10 to request information on investigations conducted into Mihigo’s death in custody but received no response. Of course, they were ignored. The government of Rwanda doesn’t take them seriously, and I am doing them a courtesy to respond because I am a just private citizen.

It is like saying Nyiramwiza of the Youth NGO for Detention Rights based in Kigali (made up name) declared that what the US Prosecutor General said on the death of Jeffrey Epstein in custody is untrue, therefore Youth NGO demands an independent investigation with international experts.

This is simply grotesque, Mihigo wasn’t as important as Mudge or genocide deniers made him to be, and if they made him believe all that during his life, they might have been at the source of his self-aggrandizement and subsequent suicide.

What seduced them in Mihigo, is that they were in the same business: that of disregarding what David Brooks calls the invisible moral fabric that holds up society.

Like every people who went through a violent history, Rwandans have taboos: One cannot deny the genocide, one cannot compare it to natural death and preserving the unity of Rwandans is paramount.

Elsewhere in the communiqué, HRW admits that Kizito confessed to all the charges but instead of referencing the tapes of his confession, they put a self-referring link leading to yet other accusations of the Rwandan government.

In this video, Mihigo is speaking to the media, immediately after his arrest, where he admits to having been lured by an acquaintance into a conspiracy to assassinate the president. He proceeded to be tried, sentenced and imprisoned. In this video, he is thanking the president after being released from jail, for the pardon extended to him before he completed his sentence.

And in this video again: a villager living around the border narrates to the Voice of America how villagers identified and arrested Mihigo while he was trying to escape to Burundi to join militia groups.

In all three videos, Mihigo is speaking with his usually confident demeanor, not showing any signs of coercion. At every time he was caught, Mihigo publically admitted his crimes and promised to change. At the time I spoke to Genocide survivors and asked them why they do not approach him and advise him to become a law-abiding citizen.  

They told me he does not speak to them anymore. They referred me to two articles: One by Ambassador Wellars Gasamagera, advising a person he considered as a lost son, and predicting a tragic end to his troubled life. The article was written in 2014, six years before his tragic fate.

When Mihigo came back from school in Europe, he was received by catholic priests who took him in. I suspect that’s where his ideological confusion was nurtured. And indeed when he was first arrested, Mihigo confessed on camera that he had been lured by some ‘prophecies of Magayane’ a long-dead foreseer, who predicted tragedy upon Rwanda. ‘The only solution I was persuaded, was to assassinate the president.’ – he said.

Recently I toured the country in research on reconciliation, and I was told by survivors that priests tell them, ‘if you do not forgive, you are no different from the people who killed members of your family’, I was horrified because forgiveness is a personal choice, not achieved by sowing guilt into already vulnerable survivors, or pressure by the same church whose leaders helped in planning and executing the genocide. But that’s how things are…

Perhaps the article that best captures Mihigo was written by renown author, Yolanda Mukagasana, about Mihigo’s change in character that exposed him to manipulation by genocidaires and their allies:

‘I cannot forget that sometimes I had to bang on the table to bring him back to reason because he had started to sing in various events including a 6 April commemoration mass organized by genocide revisionists who habitually sowed doubt about the commemoration of the Genocide against the Tutsi observed on 7 April’, she recounts.

Ironically, while Mihigo sang in genocide deniers events, he refused to sing in genocide survivors commemorations because they couldn’t pay him.

This, more than anything else troubled survivors, and Mukagasana to proceed: ‘Kizito, you stuck a knife in the wounds of the survivors like me who loved you, who believed in you. Above all, you tarnished the death of your father and betrayed the memory of the Genocide against the Tutsi.’ 

And to conclude: "I don't judge your deed. See how your death is being exploited by the enemies of your homeland. Nothing is more destructive than never being satisfied with who you are and what you have."

Indeed, Mihigo’s death is still being manipulated as his life was by genocide perpetrators and deniers: In a letter dated February 21, 2020, people claiming to be genocide survivors in the diaspora signed a petition demanding a "joint international investigation into the death of Kizito Mihigo.” 

The problem is that many of the signatories are known genocide perpetrators with impending extradition requests on their heads and their children grouped genocide deniers’ associations in Europe.

When Kizito was released, I gave him free counsel, alongside his co-detainee Victoire Ingabire, encouraging them to remain on the good side of the law, but I am afraid they chose to listen to the likes of HRW and genocide deniers.

They got what they wanted, I suspect Kizito is more useful to them in his death than he was alive. It is such a shame.