War Crimes and Rwandan Realities

By STEPHEN W. SMITH -JULY
19, 2015

Gen.
Emmanuel Karenzi Karake, the head of the Rwandan intelligence services who is
now free on bail in London pending an extradition hearing in October, is an
exemplar of the tightly knit group of diaspora Tutsis that ousted Rwanda’s
Hutu-dominated government and rose to power during the 1994 genocide. Once a
victim of human rights abuses, he now stands accused as a perpetrator. He is
also a hostage — not of any justice system, but of an increasingly lone and
erratic dictator, President Paul Kagame, who uses and abuses his inner circle
as he grows more desperate to stay in power. General Karake was arrested on
June 20 at Heathrow airport on charges brought by a Spanish investigative
judge, who accuses him of crimes against humanity and war crimes committed
between 1990 and 2002 in Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. In particular,
he is suspected of ordering the killing, in 1997, of three Spanish nationals
working for the relief organization Medicos del mundo.

The fact
that General Karake was arrested in Britain, a country he has visited with
impunity for years, and hitherto one of post-genocide Rwanda’s staunchest
allies, suggests that Mr. Kagame himself is no longer beyond the reach of
international justice. It also shows that the fate of the two men, so close for
many years, is inextricably linked. General Karake has nothing to gain from a
break with Mr. Kagame, beyond a stiff sentence from a foreign tribunal. But the
reverse is equally true. Both men can only be free and powerful in Rwanda. The
arrest was only the latest twist in the wandering life of Mr. Kagame’s spy
chief. Both men were raised in Uganda, where their parents sought refuge after
a revolution in 1959 led to the creation of a Rwandan “Hutu Republic.”

The
young Mr. Karake earned degrees in business and international studies from
universities in Uganda and Kenya, and an M.B.A. from the University of London
before joining the Rwandan Patriotic Front, fighting to reclaim power in
Kigali. The civil war, started in 1990 by the RPF, culminated in the massacre
by Hutu extremists in 1994 of an estimated 800,000 civilians — mainly Tutsis
but also Hutus who opposed the killing.

After the rebels took Kigali, Mr. Karake
became a member of Mr. Kagame’s inner circle — mostly English-speaking Tutsi
returnees from Uganda — that now rules Rwanda. But even as the new government
won the favor of a Western leadership riddled with guilt for failing to halt
the genocide, Mr. Kagame and his men orchestrated revenge killings. During the
second half of 1994, at least 40,000 Hutus were killed inside Rwanda. Between
October 1996 and May 1997, another 200,000 perished as they fled across Zaire,
now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Many died of hunger or disease or at
the hands of RPF fighters and their Congolese rebel allies, whom a U.N.
investigation accuses of crimes against humanity and possibly “acts of
genocide.” 

In 2007, General Karake was appointed deputy commander of the
African Union peacekeeping force in the Sudanese province of Darfur. Though he
was promoted deputy commander of the larger U.N. mission in Darfur in January
2008, the United Nations was embarrassed by allegations by Human Rights Watch
that forces under his command had massacred Congolese civilians in the battle
for Kisangani in 2000. Nevertheless, the U.N. extended the general’s tenure
beyond its expiry in October 2008 after Mr. Kagame threatened to pull the
Rwandan contingent out of Darfur. Both the United States and Britain, which
have praised Mr. Kagame for his efforts to lift Rwanda out of atavistic
poverty, also exerted pressure on the United Nations.

Ms. Ingabire Victoire regularly tortured and brutalized in her dark and dirty cell

Since then,
in the face of an increasingly vindictive and megalomaniac leader, the phalanx
controlling Rwanda has broken up. Many of Mr. Kagame’s closest supporters have
opposed the president’s iron-fisted methods on the grounds that they jeopardize
not only their own future but the future of the minority Rwandan community.
Rebuked and punished by Mr. Kagame, several of his former associates have fled
into exile. Some have been assassinated, including one of General Karake’s
predecessors, Col. Patrick Karegeya, who was murdered in a Johannesburg hotel
room on Jan. 1, 2014. General Karake fell from grace in April 2010 when he was
arrested for “immoral conduct.” Like many colleagues, he was cashiered and
detained, but eventually rehabilitated after he was made to understand that his
destiny is entangled with that of his boss.

Mr. Kagame can’t leave office
without risking arraignment by the International Criminal Court, a threat from
which even a trusted successor could not shield him — and Mr. Kagame no longer
trusts anyone. Ignoring constitutional limits, he is orchestrating a “popular”
movement to seek another term in 2017. Another election “victory” lies ahead,
unless justice catches up with him. Thus the president is defending General
Karake as if he himself were being forced to remain in London. He has denounced
his spy chief’s arrest as a continuation of “colonialism” and accused the
British of “arrogance and contempt” for complying with what is in fact a legal
obligation. Mr. Kagame has also called on his foreign allies for support.
Cherie Booth, former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s wife, leads the Karake defense
team. Two of the Rwandan leader’s most steadfast supporters have been Mr. Blair
and Bill Clinton, who has said that one of his greatest regrets as president
was not intervening to stop the genocide in 1994.

The
post-genocide regime in Rwanda has many friends around the world for understandable
— and in most cases, honorable — reasons. Horrified as we were by the bloodbath
in 1994, and ashamed by our inability to prevent or stop it, who would want to
believe that the good face Mr. Kagame has put on Rwanda — creating an image as
a prospering and healing nation — is in fact a lie? Today, opposition voices in
Rwanda have been completely silenced.

Yet, it is
precisely the outside world’s need for a soothing moral tale — for a Manichean
narrative to believe in — that betrays the reality in post-genocide Rwanda and
renders us complicit, yet again, in more bloodshed. In a place where the
absence of democracy and gross violations of human rights have already led to
the ultimate collective crime, we simply cannot afford to continue to avert our
gaze from Mr. Kagame’s violent and arbitrary rule.

General
Karake’s case is a searing reminder of the need to hold Mr. Kagame accountable.
He too belongs in the dock, standing trial before the International Criminal
Court in the Hague.

Stephen W.
Smith, is professor of African studies at Duke University and a former Africa
editor of Le Monde and Libération.

The Truth can be buried and stomped into the ground where none can see, yet eventually it will, like a seed, break through the surface once again far more potent than ever, and Nothing can stop it. Truth can be suppressed for a time, yet It cannot be destroyed => Wolverine