So long as justice and accountability for RPF past and current crimes are ignored and delayed, Peace and Stability will remain illusive and impossible in Rwanda=>ASIF]
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| Paul Kagame, the Rwandan Tsunami |
Forget Gaddafi. Blair’s NEW best friend is a despot guilty of even bloodier slaughter
At the former Prime Minister’s side throughout was a rake-thin and bespectacled black man whom Blair was conspicuously keen to introduce to the assembled movers and shakers. Not surprising, perhaps, given that the event — at which Mr Blair was officially the chairman — was arranged in sole honour of Paul Kagame, the president of the African state of Rwanda.
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| Friends: Tony Blair greets Rwandan President Paul Kagame, The Rwandan Tsunami Eyes will see and still not believe |
And this being Mr Blair, the subject on his lips throughout the stylish meeting, held during the World Economic Forum in Davos, was cold, hard cash. Or, more to the point, how much he could persuade the super-rich investment bankers to plough into businesses in his close friend Mr Kagame’s emerging economy.
It is a task to which Mr Blair is devoting much of his time. Both he and his wife Cherie are regular guests of Kagame, flying in on a fabulously luxurious private jet (of which more later) and staying in a smart suite at the Rwandan capital Kigali’s finest lodgings, the Serena Hotel.
Their relationship, it has to be said, is something of a love-in. Mr Blair describes Kagame, a former rebel soldier in the once war-torn country, as a ‘visionary leader’ and ‘great friend’. For his part, the grateful Kagame has called on his people to name their children after his new English chum.
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| By Paul Kagame, the Rwandan Tsunami in Dem. Rep of Congo |
Meanwhile, Mrs Blair recently paid a misty-eyed tribute to his regime’s promotion of the rights of women.
Which, one imagines, must have put an ironic smile on the face of one of Rwanda’s leading female journalists, Agnes Nkusi Uwimana, now languishing in Kigali’s grim Central Prison.
Last month, the newspaper editor began a 17-year sentence for publishing critical articles in the run-up to the country’s blatantly fixed presidential elections last August that saw Kagame — the country’s leader since 2000 — returned to office with a 93 per cent majority.
Another writer on her paper was jailed for seven years. Meanwhile, their paper was summarily closed down by presidential order. Indeed, the increasingly dictatorial Kagame has now closed down all the independent media outlets the country once had.
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| By Paul Kagame, the Rwandan Tsunami in Kongo |
No wonder Amnesty International has condemned the jailing, while the White House recently attacked Kagame’s growing political suppression.
Even so, Miss Uwimana and her journalist colleague can count themselves lucky. Others have suffered much worse fates.
The sham elections, at which 53-year-old father-of-four Kagame banned the two major opposition parties from standing and stood against three members of his own ruling coalition, were marred by the mysterious deaths of some of his political opponents and critics.
In June, the acting editor of another newspaper was shot in the face and killed. The journalist, Jean-Leonard Rugambage, was silenced because he exposed corruption involving Kagame and claimed he had uncovered the government’s involvement in the attempted murder of a former Rwandan army general exiled in South Africa.
Worse was to come. A month later, the vice-president of the country’s Democratic Green Party, which had been due to stand against the president’s Rwandan Patriotic Front ruling party, went missing before his almost decapitated body was discovered. Kagame’s government denied any involvement.
In October, the woman leader of the central African country’s most prominent opposition party, FDU-Inkingi, was jailed under new defamation laws brought in by Kagame to stifle opposition.
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| By Paul Kagame, the Rwandan Tsunami in Kibeho |
