Rwandan opposition leader Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza. She spent eight years in prison before her release in 2018 following a pardon by President Paul Kagame. Photo by Shant Fabricatorian/AP.
The Rwandan government has waged psychological warfare to maintain power since 1994. From its kit of repressive tools, the regime has relied on violence and the logistics of fear to wear down a series of adversaries and their supporters. A Rwandan human rights activist who dared to denounce the crimes of Paul Kagame’s government in the mid-1990s told me that authorities coldly assassinated most of his colleagues in the country, one after another, and then began to target his family members until he finally went silent and fled. He now lives a quiet, peaceful life in the suburb of a large North America city. To this day he refuses to be named. Rwanda’s history of transnational repression—of going after perceived enemies abroad and punishing their family members back home—is nothing if not successful.
Rwandans call this strategy of slow predation kwica uruhongohongo, a Kinyarwanda expression for methodical cleansing. The ruling Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) isolates and ostracizes its opponents by eroding their support base and preventing reinforcement. The strategy has worked to spectacular effect against most of Kagame’s political rivals except for one person: Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza.
At the moment, Ingabire is the only opposition politician in Rwanda who dares to challenge the government on its policies and past record. Others who have attempted to take on the regime have been silenced, jailed, tortured, co-opted, or killed. Ingabire’s resistance and resilience have come at a terrible price for those around her, however.
In 2016, one of Ingabire’s staunchest political supporters, Iragena Illumine, went missing. The young mother of four was a member of Ingabire’s political party at the time, United Democratic Forces (FDU-Inkingi). She has not been seen since. In 2017, authorities arrested Boniface Twagirimana and six other FDU-Inkingi members, charging them with state security crimes and offences against President Kagame. In 2018, Twagirimana, a father of two, was reportedly transferred to another prison and has since disappeared. His friends and colleagues believe he was murdered. In 2019, Ingabire’s 30-year-old assistant, Anselme Mutuyimana, was kidnapped from a bus station and later found strangled to death in a forest. Mutuyimana had previously spent six years in prison on charges of inciting insurrection for holding an illegal political meeting. The same year, a popular member of her party, Eugene Ndereyimana, 29, father of two, went missing and has not been seen since. A few months later, the national coordinator for her party, Syldio Dusabumuremyi, a father of two, was stabbed to death at his place of work. Two days before the murder, he had confided in Ingabire that he feared he was going to be killed. In 2020, Théophile Ntirutwa, a member of her party, survived an assassination attempt. He was later imprisoned under politically motivated charges and remains behind bars. One of her close aides, 30-year-old Venant Abayisenga, disappeared in June 2020. He has not been seen or heard from since.
The spectre of death continues to stalk Ingabire to this day. A few weeks ago a friend warned her of an impending threat on her life after she told British media that Rwanda was not a safe place for Britain to send asylum seekers.
In a recent interview, Ingabire said she is afraid, once again, that someone close to her might be targeted. But she refuses to be silenced or give up. “I get attached to people who work with me,” she told me. “It has hurt me deeply that their lives have been destroyed. I do feel remorse but this doesn’t prevent me from moving forward. On the contrary, it strengthens my resolve because I know that this struggle is justified.”
After years of being persecuted, Ingabire said Rwanda’s government underestimates her mettle. “They don’t really know who I am. They think I’ll weaken or break when the people around me are killed. But it hasn’t happened.”
Ingabire was never able to register FDU-Inkingi as a political party. It currently exists as an opposition movement in exile. In 2019 she formed Dalfa Umurunzi (Development And Liberty For All), hoping that Rwandan authorities would allow her to register the party, hold meetings and recruit supporters. But the government has still not allowed her to legally register Dalfa and politically organize, on the grounds that she has not been ‘rehabilitated’ after her prison conviction. In 2010, Ingabire left the Netherlands after 16 years in exile and returned to Rwanda in a bid to introduce democratic reform. On her first day in the country, she went to a memorial site to honour victims of the 1994 genocide and urge reconciliation. She acknowledged that Tutsis were victims of genocide yet questioned why there were no memorials to honour Hutus, who were also targeted in the violence that engulfed the nation. She insisted that individuals who committed genocide and crimes against humanity should be prosecuted. Her speech appeared to dispute the RPF’s official narrative of the genocide and was viewed as a tacit call for members of Kagame’s army to be prosecuted for committing massacres against Hutus in 1994. In her first few months in the country, Ingabire, an ethnic Hutu, tried to register her party and appeared to be on the verge in 2010 of mounting a serious electoral threat to Kagame. She was swiftly arrested and charged with inciting revolt, promoting genocide ideology, inciting divisionism and forming an armed group to destabilize the country. She denied all the charges.
In 2012, Ingabire was convicted of genocide denial, threatening state security and conspiring to undermine the government. She was sentenced to 15 years in prison. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International said the trial was flawed and suggested that witnesses may have been intimidated and coerced into giving false testimony. The African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights in Tanzania said her trial and conviction were unfair. The court ruled that Rwanda had violated Ingabire’s right to various aspects of her defense and to freely express her opinions within the law. The judges found that Ingabire had not minimized the genocide against Tutsis and had not spread false rumours about the government, charges that were central to Ingabire’s conviction by Rwandan courts.
Ingabire spent eight years in prison before her release in 2018, following a pardon by President Kagame. Under Rwandan law, a person can exercise his or her full rights, including running for office, after five years following their release from prison if they make a request to a court to be ‘rehabilitated.’ Ingabire has indeed made that request but has not been granted a response. She therefore is still unable to legally register her party and run against Kagame in elections in 2024. Bernard Ntaganda, a Rwandan opposition politician who was released from jail in 2014, requested to be rehabilitated but has received no response either.
In 2017, Kagame faced no effective challenger in presidential elections and garnered 99 percent of votes. With the next presidential and parliamentary poll only seven months away, Kagame is headed for yet another sweeping victory. Rwanda’s strongman is once again unwilling to face a real contender.
In the meantime, Ingabire’s centre of gravity remains intact. She said Rwandans yearn for freedom and better governance. They also understand the importance of memory, which in Rwandan culture runs so deep it is impossible to destroy. She said she wished the West would understand that memory and reconciliation are essential for creating long-term stability in Rwanda. “When I talk about reconciliation; the West accuses me of being polarizing. For there to be true reconciliation, we have to recognize all crimes, the crimes of genocide and crimes against humanity… victims who are Tutsi and victims who are Hutu. This is not dividing society; this is reality. If we are not reconciled, there will always be distrust and there will never be lasting development in Rwanda.”
Judi Rever is a journalist from Montréal and is the author of In Praise of Blood: The Crimes of the Rwandan Patriotic Front.
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