With Rwanda headed for presidential and parliamentary elections a few months from now, inevitably Victoire Ingabire has come out to announce her intentions to contest the top office in the land. This despite the fact she is legally barred from contesting any public office, let alone the Presidency, on account of her previous convictions for terrorism, genocide denialism and endangering state security. Ingabire’s gambit, claiming to run for office when she is barred by the laws of the country, indicates she in fact is playing another game, one that isn’t very hard to discern for any that follow Rwandan politics. She probably thinks she is “directing pressure” on the administration, from abroad and overseas. Her calculation lies in the fact she will always get sympathetic, bordering-on-propaganda coverage in international media that portray her as “the leader of the ‘suppressed opposition’ in Rwanda”. It is hackneyed, but it works. Western media, and quite a few others elsewhere in the world will lionize Victoire Ingabire as a “fearless fighter” for democracy in her country. That Western media, not to mention rights organizations and every kind of rich country pressure groups, will be using every trope in the book to re-enforce the image of Rwanda as this closed “dictatorship” where freedom or rights have no place. They will be re-enforcing that image with scary stories, of the so-and-so-disappeared-in-Rwanda genre – even though such stories will, at the slightest examination, turn out to be false. (Think of the lengthy report by Human Rights Watch in 2017 that claimed 37 Rwandans had been summarily executed by security forces, only for many of the individuals mentioned to later debunk those claims. An investigation by the National Human Rights Commission showed those people either were alive, or that whoever had died it was because of natural causes, and others simply didn’t exist. HRW had fabricated them!) The pro-Ingabire international media, rights groups and other organizations that shape Western opinion are fighting tooth and nail to impose Victoire Ingabire on us. They have been doing so for a very long time. Yet other interested parties – think the likes of Michaela Wrong, a British author with an axe to grind with the Rwandan president – are on the Ingabire bandwagon, using every opportunity to demonize, or cast doubts on the legitimacy of the Rwandan leadership. That is the world. It is a place where individuals or groups care about very little but their interests and will do everything to push those interests, whatever many people they throw under the bus, like us who only want to live a normal, peaceful life. It can be a very unkind, callous, cruel place, and I say this as an eternal optimist. As a Rwandan, speaking for myself, I think Ingabire is a clear and present danger, and I often wonder what a terrible thing it is that so many would want to impose her on us. Yes, I know that Victoire Ingabire as a citizen has rights, including the right to run for any office she wishes to. But she forfeited that right long ago, in January 2010. That was the moment she decided to break the law when upon arrival from the Netherlands, where she was in self-imposed exile, she turned up at the Gisozi Genocide Memorial to make a speech whose gist was that there were two genocides in Rwanda. It is a well-known ploy by deniers of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi to push the grotesque lie that there was another genocide, allegedly against the Hutu. It is a lie that equates the Rwanda Patriotic Front – the very liberation force that stopped the raging genocide – with the regime of Habyarimana, and afterwards the short-lived criminal enterprise headed by Sindikubwabo and Kambanda. For the deniers and, mainly, those with an interest in ultimately jeopardizing the administration of the RPF in Rwanda, it is a short step from claiming the Kagame administration is the same as its predecessors, to outright claiming in fact there was a genocide of Tutsis and Hutus, by the RPF! What, after all, is the goal of the propagandists who work in alignment with the interests of Ingabire when they incessantly claim “Kagame started the genocide in Rwanda?”, hideously reversing the roles to turn victim into perpetrator? The simple fact is that these people, Victoire Ingabire and a whole coalition of “Hutu Power” political adherents in exile (very many of whom ran away from Rwanda in the aftermath of the 94 bloodshed in which a lot of them participated) would love nothing more than inciting another bout of civil strife in Rwanda. They would love to roll the clock back to the days of “Hutu supremacy”, of which Victoire Ingabire is the current, undisputed high priestess. The vehicle by which they hope to roll that clock back is the FDLR – the offshoot group of the ex-FAR and Interahamwe militias. FDLR is the terrorist group that’s even now up to its old mission of killing any Tutsi whenever they can find them, and with whom Congolese ruler Felix Tshisekedi has found common cause in his campaign of genocide against his country’s Tutsi communities. Ingabire may claim her political party is (the unregistered) DALFA-Umurinzi, but that is mere cover. She in fact is the political head of FDLR (don’t take my word for it; find the court cases whose evidence includes receipts by Western Union showing how Ingabire would send funds to the group’s military leaders when she was in the Netherlands in the 2000s. She also was the group’s spokesperson, mobilizer and recruiter). I speak facts when I say Ingabire is the ideological heir of Gregoire Kayibanda, the spiritual founder of the extremist Parmehutu politics. You can draw a straight line from Kayibanda, on through Habyarimana, Sindikubwabo and Kambanda, to her. Victoire Ingabire wants to put the brakes to an ongoing political process that seeks to build a new Rwanda where no one is discriminated against, either because of their ethnicity, religion, gender, or sexual orientation. Some of her foreign supporters may champion her as their vessel of hope for a brand of adversarial politics that’s the norm in their own countries. Little do they know “Madam Victoire” has bamboozled them. Hers is a zero-sum brand of tribal politics of that has in our past resulted in so much upheaval, and horrific massacres, and countless other atrocities. Those are the facts.
