(CNN) America’s disastrous love affair with Rwanda’s Paul Kagame. Rwanda’s journey from its 1994 genocide to a model of orderly development made it a go-to country for those who want to invest in an African success story, taking in hundreds of millions in new overseas investments each year and making it one of corporate America’s ideal places for charitable donations. But the love affair between the United States and Rwanda’s hardline president Paul Kagame, should be seriously reconsidered after 27 years of systemic human rights abuses.
To name the alleged abuses is to name what’s typical of despots everywhere: election-rigging, a captive judiciary, a well-oiled propaganda machine that silences truth, and the assassination of opposition leaders, journalists, and regime critics at home and abroad. The Rwandan government has consistently denied involvement in attacks against its critics, but after opposition figure Patrick Karegeya was killed in a South African hotel room in 2014, Kagame’s Minister of Defense was quoted as saying, “When you choose to be a dog, you die like a dog, and the cleaners will wipe away the trash so that it does not stink for them.”
Today Kagame is facing a fresh round of scrutiny over his latest transgression: the alleged kidnapping of Paul Rusesabagina, the protagonist from the film ‘Hotel Rwanda,‘ a US permanent resident and a widely-admired humanitarian figure. The Rwanda government has denied that he was kidnapped, but Rusesabagina described himself as a hostage when he appeared in a Kigali court last month on terrorism charges.
The charges are widely seen as trumped-up and the outcome of the trial should not be in doubt. Rwanda’s justice system pivots on a single principle: the will of Kagame. This was underscored this month when Rusesabagina told the High Court that he will no longer attend his own trial because “I don’t expect any justice in this court.” He has good reason to believe so, saying he’s been denied access to his own lawyers for months and after six months he still hasn’t been allowed to examine the indictment and 5,000+ case files that detail the charges against him. The court’s denial last week of motions brought by Rusesabagina and his attorneys has also denied him the right to cross-examine witnesses or review evidence.
Kagame has long harbored animosity against Rusesabagina, who gained international fame and was awarded the US Medal of Freedom from George W. Bush in 2005 after the movie “Hotel Rwanda” depicted his acts of wily heroism in shielding 1,268 people within the Hotel des Mille Collines, a luxury hotel he managed in the heart of Rwanda’s capital, during the genocide. Rusesabagina used his platform to make increasingly vociferous criticisms of Kagame’s regime, a stance that turned him into an official pariah in his home country.
Source: CNN
