Ms. Wrong, your last book “Do not disturb” was recently translated in French with the title “Rwanda: Assassins Sans frontières”. Last year you wanted to present your book in Brussels, but apparently agents of the Rwandan government threatened the owner of the restaurant “Horloge du Sud” and the event was cancelled. Can you tell us more about this incident?
Since my Rwanda book was published in 2021, I’ve been subjected to a sustained campaign by the Kigali government and its supporters – some of them Western intellectuals who should know better, sadly – to prevent me speaking in public. This is not unique to me: any journalist, academic or analyst who dares criticize President Paul Kagame’s style of rule is subjected to this kind of treatment. But it’s still very unpleasant.
The campaign, which is coordinated by Rwanda’s presidential press unit and – at one point – a British PR agency, relies on social media. Whenever it’s announced that I will be speaking at such-and-such a place, on such-and-such a day, my prospective hosts will be flooded with tweets, emails and anonymous phone calls accusing them of planning to inviting a racist, a neo-colonialist, a foreign spy, a whore and – above all – a “genocide denier”. Not surprisingly, many panic and cancel.
Last spring I’d been invited by an African debating club to speak at the Horloge du Sud – a popular West African restaurant in central Brussels. Three Rwandans went to the venue and physically threatened the staff, the owner was engulfed by the usual tsunami of abuse. So he pulled out. We got the last laugh, though. Staff at the African debating club reacted brilliantly. With hours to go, they located an alternative venue, recruited some strapping young members as security, and it was standing room only on the night. I sold a LOT of books! People wanted to show they would not allow themselves to be bullied in that way.
I’ve had similar experiences in the UK, in France, in South Africa and even – bizarrely – just recently, in New Zealand.
Just for the record, I’m not a “genocide denier”. I’m one of the journalists who covered the genocide in 1994, so it would be insane for me to pretend it never happened. But “genocide-denier” is a knee-jerk accusation the regime hurls at anyone who dares raise the issue of Kagame’s appalling human rights record or his military intervention in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The Rwandan authorities count on people being so repelled they won’t bother to check what lies behind the slur. What is particularly disgusting is seeing the regime hurl it at people who lost family members in the genocide, like the gospel singer Kizito Mihigo, who died in a Rwandan police cell. It’s grotesque, but it happens every day.
A team of international journalists recently published a report called “Rwanda Classified”. According to this report, Paul Kagame is able to kill political opponents even abroad and it seems that recently he gave the order to kill two Belgian citizens, who were murdered in South Africa. What do you think about these accusations against the Rwandan dictator?
Many of the revelations made by the “Forbidden Stories” consortium of journalists, which included 50 reporters from 17 different media outlets, were not new. Anyone who has read my book, or the reports published by Human Rights Watch, Freedom House and Amnesty International will know Kagame believes he has the right to reach across his borders and target men and women he regards as “enemies of the state” in friendly African countries, in Europe, North America, the Middle East and Australasia. What differed was the level of detail provided.
These are not vague allegations, they are well documented operations, which have resulted in the deaths, disappearances, kidnappings and beatings of Kagame’s former closest aides, prominent Rwandan businessmen, members of the Rwandan opposition, activists and journalists. These operations are very brazen and they have succeeded in creating an atmosphere in which even Rwandans living on the other side of the world, with no relatives or assets back home, are terrified of speaking out. “You can run but you can’t hide,” is what Kagame is telling them.
What I find astonishing is that the police and intelligence services in the countries where these attacks are staged usually know exactly what is happening. In fact they often warn Rwandan exiles to take precautions when they get tip offs that an operation is imminent. Yet in most countries – South Africa and Belgium are rare exceptions – no action is taken against the Rwandan embassy which is usually coordinating these operations. And countries like France and Britain – until just recently – still roll out the red carpet for Kagame, a leader who makes a mockery of their rule of law. In Britain our last government actually insisted that Rwanda was a “safe” destination for unwanted asylum seekers even while human rights groups were publishing reports saying the exact opposite and its own Home Office was giving fleeing Rwandans safe haven in the United Kingdom. Luckily that government is out of office now and the asylum project has been scrapped.
In the specific case you refer to, Thomas Ngeze, a Rwandan-Belgian citizen, was found hanging in a hostel room in South Africa in 2018. Ngeze’s family asked Belgian lawyer Pieter-Jan Staelens to investigate the supposed “suicide”. Staelens’ body was then found in a burning car. The two men’s families are convinced they were murdered by Rwandan agents. It was good to see Forbidden Stories probing that deeply disturbing case, but unfortunately they didn’t clear up the mystery of how those two young men died.
Few weeks ago, some armed men tried to stage a coup d’état in Kinshasa, claiming that they wanted a new Zaire. In your book “In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz”, you describe the sufferings of the Congolese people during the dictatorship of Mobutu in the 1970s and 1980s: was Mobutu`s Zaire better than today’s Congo?
It was very poignant to see that the men involved in that failed coup attempt – which was very swiftly neutralized – were not only talking about “Zaire”, a country that officially vanished in 1997, but also brandishing the distinctive national flag of the era, a black arm brandishing a flaming torch.
There’s certainly an affection, a nostalgia, now in DRC for the Zaire of the 1970s, when Mobutu – “the Leopard” – was a regular guest at the White House, the Elysée and Buckingham Palace, when Kinshasa was an exciting, sexy African capital famous for its fashion and its music, and when Mobutu hosted the famous “Rumble in the Jungle” boxing match. You can see it in the songs being written by local bands and the clothes youngsters are wearing. The infamous “abacost”, which Mobutu invented as a rejection of the Western suit (“à bas le costume”) and which was regarded as deeply old-fashioned when I lived in Kinshasa, is even being worn by choice now, this time by hip young men.
But the people flirting with this sense of nostalgia tend to be so young they can’t remember what the Mobutu era – in particular the latter years – was really like. I can. I still remember the sense of drift, the stagnation created by Mobutu’s disastrous economic management, the soaring inflation – over 9,000 per cent at one point! – the deepening poverty, the pervasive feeling of hopelessness, frustration and anger. The French translation of my book finally means every Congolese can read it, and I hope it will be part of the wider discussion taking place in DRC right now about how the country moves on from the anarchy, violence and corruption of the past, and assumes what should be its rightful place as one of the key players on the Africa continent. To go forward, societies need to understand what happened in the past. I think that process is now taking place in DRC.