It has been 30 years since the Rwandan genocide, a mass murder carried out across the geographically tiny African nation over a period of 100 days, killing between 500,000 and one million civilians – the fastest genocide in history. In New Zealand, this anniversary was marked in a curious fashion with a social media campaign directed against a British journalist touring the country.
Michela Wrong, an award-winning African correspondent for Reuters, the Financial Times and BBC, covered the original 1994 massacres, in which extremists in the nation’s Hutu ethnic majority massacred members of the Tutsi minority, along with perceived Hutu moderates and collaborators. “The entire country smelled of carrion,” she recalls. She also documented the period of recovery and reconstruction after the genocide.
Then in 2021, Wrong published a book documenting the current Rwandan government’s policy of “trans-national repression”. Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad was about the persecution and assassination of critics and perceived enemies of the authoritarian government and its leader. The regime is not amused.
For more than 20 years, Rwanda has been ruled by Paul Kagame, a former military officer described by the New York Times as “the global elite’s favourite strongman”. Kagame is much celebrated for his nation’s rapid economic development, for delivering dramatic improvements in health and education, and for turning one of the continent’s bloodiest regions into a safe and well-lit place. Most of Rwanda’s income consists of international aid, and his success is regarded as proof the West’s development model can work, that not all of the money is stolen or spent on weapons and presidential palaces.
He has transformed Rwanda’s capital, Kigali, into a city that hosts international conferences and major sports events. Plastic bags are banned. There are very few beggars (although Human Rights Watch argues they’re rounded up, taken to rehabilitation centres and beaten). Smoking in public is against the law.
Kagame has delivered talks on human rights at Yale, Harvard and Oxford. He boasts more honorary degrees than Barack Obama. He has attended Davos, met Bono, Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, who called him “one of the greatest leaders of our time”.
The West sees him as a bulwark against the expansion of Islamic jihad across the sub-Saharan region. His well-equipped, well-trained army is highly praised for its peacekeeping work. It helped defeat an Islamic insurgency in Mozambique, where Rwandan troops currently guard a $30 billion gas project run by France’s TotalEnergies.
Maintaining good relations with the West and protecting Rwanda’s brand as an African success story is essential to the regime. The British government recently passed a law authorising the deportation of UK asylum seekers to the landlocked country of almost 14 million squeezed into a land area about a tenth the size of New Zealand.
Murder of an ally
In January 2014, Patrick Karegeya was found murdered in a luxury hotel in Johannesburg. Karegeya was a childhood friend of Paul Kagame’s. They grew up together in a refugee camp in Uganda and became central figures in the Rwandan Patriotic Front, a political party in exile dominated by members of the Tutsi minority. The RPF invaded Rwanda in 1990 and seized control in 1994, bringing the genocide – carried out by extremists of the Hutu majority – to an end. Karegeya rose to become head of military intelligence under the new regime, but was imprisoned in 2005, convicted of desertion and insubordination. He fled the country in 2007, helping to establish the Rwandan National Congress: another political party in exile. After his murder, Kagame denied responsibility but also commented, “You can’t betray Rwanda and not get punished for it.”
Cynical nexus
Michela Wrong has published four books of nonfiction on Africa, and they’ve been censored by governments embarrassed by her reporting. But the latest has been the most contentious by far. Do Not Disturb – named for the sign hung on the door of Karegeya’s room by his assassins – describes the West’s general attitude towards the darker side of the Kagame regime. It was read and blurbed by John le Carré before its publication and the cynical, amoral nexus of intelligence, commerce and geopolitics described in his novels is the stuff of Wrong’s journalism.
She uses Karegeya’s family background, dramatic life and violent death to tell the story of post-colonial Rwanda: a bleak chronicle of coups, dictatorships, massacres and regional wars. She documents the current regime’s history of repression, human rights abuses, targeted assassinations and military belligerence against its neighbours, which has helped trigger two conflicts in the Great Lakes region.
Rwanda’s government is intensely image- conscious. Shortly after arriving here in early May, Wrong discussed her book on RNZ’s Saturday Morning. Several hours later, a flood of posts appeared on X. Marked with the hashtag #RacismIsWrong, they contained images of Wrong and accused her of racism and hate speech.
She was scheduled to give a number of talks to the New Zealand Institute of International Affairs, an NGO founded in 1934 to foster discussions of international issues. Hundreds of tweets called on the NZIIA to cancel the talks. The events went ahead, although the information about them was removed from its website.
At her Wellington session before an audience of about 100 people, Wrong discussed Rwanda’s involvement with the M23 movement – also known as the Congolese Revolutionary Army, a rebel militia group that has operated in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo over the past 10 years – the region is heavily contested because of its enormous mineral wealth. It primarily comprises Tutsis, the same ethnic group as Kagame and most of his government.
In June last year, Human Rights Watch condemned the group’s involvement in unlawful killings, rapes and other war crimes. In 2013, a UN investigation found the Rwandan government had created and supported M23. “They’re the best-equipped rebel group I’ve ever seen in Africa,” Wrong said. “New boots. Matching uniforms. Israeli-made weapons identical to those used by the Rwandan army.” She is afraid a major regional conflict is about to break out and believes the West’s tolerance of the Kagame regime is destabilising a very volatile region. (The day after her talk, M23 captured Rubaya, a mining town known for its production of tantalum, a key component of smartphone capacitors.)
Keating a critic
After she finished speaking in Wellington, Colin Keating rose to address the room. A former New Zealand ambassador to the UN, Keating was president of its Security Council when the 1994 genocide began and he urged council members to deploy peacekeepers to the region to curb the violence.
Most of the permanent members of the council, most prominently France, the UK and the US, resisted. The organisation was bogged down in Bosnia and Cambodia; the US had just conducted a humiliating withdrawal from Somalia. Rwanda’s conflict was seen as a civil war rather than a mass extermination. Subsequent investigations into the UN’s failure to act – now regarded as the organisation’s most shameful failure in a long history of shameful failures – found that Keating was almost the only senior official to argue for intervention. He was subsequently awarded the Rwandan government’s Campaign against Genocide medal.
Keating, now retired, had arranged with the NZIIA to make a few remarks on the situation in Rwanda, but instead delivered a lengthy speech accusing Wrong of conducting a vendetta against Rwanda, of careless speech and irresponsible language. Speaking on such a grave matter required facts and a commitment to the truth, he scolded Wrong.
It was true, he conceded, that the regime was authoritarian – but was it not also peaceful after a long and violent past? And perhaps Rwanda did have a military presence in Congo, but surely that was purely a preventive measure to ensure another genocide did not break out?
“They’re the talking points of the regime,” Wrong told the Listener the morning after her talk. “They find these people who have this historical connection to the genocide, who don’t see how things have changed since then, and play on their conscience.”
Keating flew to Auckland the next day to speak in response to Wrong again at her next talk, held at the University of Auckland. In a phone conversation with the Listener, Keating denied any connection or support from the current government of Rwanda. “I’m acting on my own. I’m free to say what I want. And I admit that it’s not a democratic regime.”
Keating had criticised Wrong for her inaccuracies and stressed the importance of truth but could not speak to any inaccuracies or falsehoods in Do Not Disturb.
“I’ve read excerpts of her book,” he said. “But I don’t think it’s useful to speak to specific points in it.” In a follow-up email, he clarified: “I was never invited to discuss the book … I was invited to discuss peacekeeping and regional security issues in Wellington, and the lessons of genocide in Auckland.”
X-bombed
Subsequent to Wrong’s Wellington talk, X filled with more images accusing her of hate speech and genocide denial. Her contacts in the intelligence community have informed her that the images were generated by a London-based PR company contracted by the Rwandan government; she has previously written of this tactic – it’s been employed against her before.
She suspects the originating social media accounts were run by the security agencies in Kigali, then picked up by members of the Rwandan diaspora. By now, there were dozens of accounts tweeting thousands of versions of the same message.
“It’s interesting,” she says. “I’ve just travelled through Australia giving the same talks without generating any response at all. The very fact that it was launched with such suddenness and vehemence says something very telling about how Paul Kagame’s regime sees New Zealand and the government. I have to assume that Australia, where there was no such [social media] campaign, is seen as having a government the Rwandan authorities can’t mess with.”
Her first book, 2001′s In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in the Congo, observed the collapse of the Democratic Republic of Congo after the overthrow of Mobutu Sese Seko. One of the most notorious African despots of the 20th century was seen as a key Western ally during the Cold War. His regime was propped up by torrents of aid money, mostly used to construct vast palaces of gold and marble, and to fund his family’s shopping trips to Europe via chartered Concorde jets.
“There was this brief moment in history in which Western nations and development agencies thought multi-party democracy might be a good thing in Africa, that its citizens should have free speech and human rights,” says Wrong. “But we’ve come full circle. We’re back to propping up authoritarian regimes for dubious geopolitical reasons.”
Spotless veneer
She is sceptical of the glowing statistics published about Rwanda’s economic development. “The road from the airport to the hotels and conference centres is spotless. And that’s very impressive to the politicians and economists who fly in. But if you drive across the border from Uganda, you’re driving through shanty towns.”
There’s a Rwandan term – guteknika – invented to describe the data doctoring and faking of statistics required to support the dubious official narrative. She notes that private investment in the country is still very modest: odd, considering its allegedly dazzling growth, and that some statisticians and economists believe that poverty in Rwanda is increasing rather than decreasing. Kagame’s regime bitterly contests such claims.
The country is scheduled to hold its presidential election in July. In 2017, Kagame was re-elected with 98.8% of the vote. Some opponents were disqualified and Amnesty International described “a climate of fear and repression”.
The election followed a constitutional amendment abolishing presidential term limits, allowing Kagame potentially to remain in power until 2034. In 2020, the UN’s World Happiness Report found the country is one of the unhappiest nations in the world, ranked 151st out of 154.
One of Wrong’s interview subjects for her book, a former chief of staff for Kagame now living in exile and fearing for his life, describes it as a painted grave. Nice on the outside, nothing but bones on the inside.