“My sister and my mum are doing well, they are staying strong, they have managed to hold it together since a year, since they have been incarcerated”
“My father, financially supported the RPF in the early 90’s, when the RPF attacked Rwanda to take over power over from the previous regime, my father was a member of RPF which eventually took power in 1994, with kagame as the head of RPF, so he had been part of the RPF.
“From the time The RPF took power in 1994, my father had been constantly harassed, they found business people who had been living in Rwanda all those years, my father was one of them, they managed to make most of them their slaves, those who did not comply, some of them fled the country and others were killed, so was my father on the 4th of February 2015”
“My sister has been jailed because she wanted to run for presidential elections in 2018”
“My mother , Adeline, has been jailed because she exchanged what’s app messages with her sister living in Canada, telling her her grievance , explaining her how she was grieving after my father was killed on the 4th of february 2015. The authorities found watts app audio in her phone, in which she was explaining her sister how upset she was after the killing of my father by the governement”
“They are both facing 22 years of prison”
“I myself have been incarcerated as well, over the same charges as my mother because of a text message I sent to my siblings expressing my frustration, calling the Rwandan system being a mafia’s state, so when they took my phone, they found the message, and that was good enough for being incarcerated.”
“This interview probably putts me in danger, but we have seen so much as a family, we have seen so much as Rwandan that at some point, you have to get to a point where you come out, I was jailed for a text message, if we are not allowed to exchange messages between family, what are we allowed to do?”
“Buildings and clean street are not a measuring factor of progress for me, let’s first respect human lives, let’s first respect people who have different opinions and exchange and be able to sit down and have different point of views, and then we’ll talk about progress”
“What is Kagame afraid of if everything is going so well? My guess is that When what you are holding on is not legitimate, when you sell a lie to the outside world, you are constantly in fear of losing that thing you have been selling to everyone because you yourself you know it’s not real, so you live in constant fear”
“Those who challenge the power are not given a seat in parliament, they are a given a seat in prison “
“They are so many opportunities, so many peaceful solutions to change the outcome of what is happening in our country, and If we don’t do something today, when are we going to do it? When everyone is dead? Because everyone has been silenced all along, people are harassed, people are tortured, some have disappeared, you can kill a man, but you can’t kill an idea”.
“I just pray that after this interview, nothing happens to me, so many things already happened during the last three almost four years now, but we have to keep going, we can’t go and hide under the bed and hope for the things to get better, we have to make change, the change will come from ourselves not from hiding and keeping quiet, but from speaking out and forcing a dialogue, and forcing for things to change, it will happened, I’m positive about it”
Anne Rwigara speaking from Kigali, on September 7th, 2018.
Converted to text by Saleh Musoni Karuranga
