In its edition of Saturday, April 13, Uganda’s government-owned daily, New Vision published an interview with the widow of Patrick Karegeya, a Rwandan dissident who died from South Africa at the beginning of 2014. To an unsuspecting reader, this may seem like any other interview by the newspaper to its readership, but this is no ordinary interview, going by the pattern of stories that the daily has been running for the past months. The interview is essentially about the deteriorating relations between Rwanda and Uganda and the choice of the person to interview by a government publication is only telling which side the Museveni government is. And it is a pattern. The interviewee, Leah Karegera, uses the platform to spew vitriol on Kigali government, making unfounded accusations similar to what has been heard from other dissidents who fled accountability from Rwanda. To those that do not know, Leah Karegeya is a senior member of the terror group calling itself Rwanda National Congress (RNC). In RNC – the group that has been linked to a spate of grenade attacks that were more prevalent around 2010 – Leah Karegeya sits on the so-called Committee of the Wise Persons. She has been heard on different media platforms, including an online radio station openly calling upon Rwandans to join RNC and has through those talk-shows, made a case for another outfit called P5 platform. P5 is a merger of different groups that include RNC, the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), FDU-Inkingi, among others, who have an aim to violently overthrow the Kigali government. According to a UN Group of Experts report of December last year, the group, that the same report says receives support from Uganda, operates a training base in the Democratic Republic of Congo, in a region called Minembwe. Lest we forget, Leah’s husband, Patrick Karegeya, in August 2010 told The Observer, a Ugandan weekly, that “dictators don’t step down, they are brought down” in an apparent declaration of war on a democratically elected government in Kigali. The interview comes a couple of weeks after New Vision ran an interview with David Himbara another RNC honcho, which according to the transcript that was leaked online by a blogger, left no iota of doubt who was calling the shots. Uganda’s Government official daily paper has openly become a mouth piece of RNC terror armed group in the fight against government of Rwanda. editor@newtimesrwanda.com
