[RwandaLibre] Ex-Rwandan spy chief killing alights allegations

Ex-Rwandan spy chief killing alights allegations

LAGOS, Nigeria (AP) — The killing of Rwanda's former spy chief in
South Africa has critics revisiting serious allegations against
Western-backed President Paul Kagame that go back to the Central
African nation's 1994 genocide.

Former Col. Patrick Karegeya, a wartime ally from Kagame's days as a
rebel leader, was found dead last week in a bed in Johannesburg's
prestigious Michelangelo Towers hotel. Police said he was possibly
strangled.

Karegeya's friends and fellow dissidents accused Kagame of ordering
the assassination, pointing to a pattern of alleged killings of his
opponents at home and abroad. Karegeya fled to South Africa in 2007.

Officials in Kigali, the Rwandan capital, have not responded to
requests for comment. But the Rwandan high commissioner in South
Africa, Vincent Karega, told local broadcaster eNCA that talk of
assassination is an "emotional reaction and opportunistic way of
playing politics."

South African police say they are investigating the case but no
arrests have been made.

The killing comes five months after Karegeya claimed to have
incriminating evidence that would prove Kagame, who is lauded by
Western leaders for ending Rwanda's genocide, actually provided the
catalyst for the mass killings.

In a July interview with Radio France International, Karegeya charged
that Kagame ordered the downing of a jet that killed the Hutu
presidents of Rwanda and neighboring Burundi, the event that triggered
the genocide in which some 800,000 Tutsis and some moderate Hutus were
killed over three months.

Karegeya said on RFI that he was willing to hand his evidence to a
court in France that is investigating because the plane's pilots were
French.

A long-suppressed U.N. report published in 2010 noted that Kagame in
1994 refused to have peace talks as thousands of mainly Tutsi Rwandans
were being killed, buying the time that allowed his forces to reach
Kigali and take control.

It accused Kagame's Rwandan Patriotic Front of then going on to
massacre Hutus in Rwanda, including at Kibeho refugee camp in April
1995 before the eyes of Australian and Zambian U.N. peacekeepers, an
attack allegedly led by Karegeya.

The same report, which carried a lengthy denial from Kagame's
government, accused the Rwandan-led forces of "a possible genocide" of
Rwandan and Congolese Hutus in eastern Congo in the mid-1990s.

Rwandan experts have said the U.N. failure to publish an earlier 1994
report on RPF massacres gave Kagame a blank check to continue the
killings.

Defense lawyers at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, the
court for perpetrators of the genocide based in Tanzania, long have
contended that the court has provided "victor's justice" by ignoring
massacres by Kagame's forces.

Kagame is feted by current and former U.S. and British leaders who
point to how he has transformed an impoverished and war-ravaged nation
into an efficient technology hub with some of the highest rates for
literacy and health in Africa. That has come at the cost of a
dictatorship that ruthlessly suppresses opposition and routinely
jails, disappears and kills opponents, according to critics.

Analysts say the West panders to Kagame because of its great guilt
over not ending the Rwandan genocide. And Kagame, who blames French
troops that allowed perpetrators of the genocide to escape into Congo,
played to British and American interests in diluting French influence
in Central Africa when he changed Rwanda's official language from
French to English. That put Tutsi exiles who grew up in
English-speaking Tanzania and Uganda at a great advantage over
French-speaking Hutus. Rwanda's other official language is
Kinyarwanda.

Initial opposition to Kagame came, predictably, from members of the
Hutu tribe, but in recent years it has come increasingly from former
Tutsi allies like Karegeya and others who fear the brutal suppression
of Rwanda's majority people, the Hutu, might lead to another genocide.

About 85 percent of Rwandans are Hutu who were held in serfdom by
Tutsi royalty in the 18th century. After World War I Rwanda fell to
Belgian colonizers who entrenched divisions by ruling through the
Tutsi monarch and educating only Tutsi males. Hutus who revolted had
limbs amputated by Tutsis, on the order of the Belgians.

When independence and free elections came in 1961, they were won by
Hutus. The first Tutsi attempt to regain power came a year later, with
an invasion from Burundi. The Hutu government responded with brutal
reprisals against Tutsi civilians.

Under Kagame, Hutu politicians have been killed or jailed in Rwanda.
Journalists and judges also have been killed and imprisoned with the
most fatal year being 2010, when Kagame was re-elected in polls that
human rights activists called greatly flawed.

Kagame, who says many of his enemies deny the genocide, recently has
taken to demanding that the children of Hutus apologize for the
genocide that occurred before they were born.

"Kagame is actually blowing the country in the path of another
genocide," said former Lt. Gen. Kayumba Nyamwasa. He was Kagame's army
chief of staff until 2010 and has survived two assassination attempts
that are the subject of a South African court case and that left him
with a bullet lodged in the base of his spine.

(Copyright 2014 Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material
may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)

http://m.cnsnews.com/news/article/ex-rwandan-spy-chief-killing-alights-allegations


--
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