RIB spokesperson Modeste Mbabazi has told RBA that disclosing the figures is intended to discourage whoever is harboring similar destructive ideas.
“They are 47 suspects, 39 of who have been arrested while 9 others are still at large. I would like to let you know that there will be no tolerance for anyone committing a crime related to undermining genocide, denying genocide or genocide ideology because we know inconveniences of genocide,” he said.
Of the reported cases, 19 are from Southern Province, 12 from Eastern Province, 9 from Northern Province while 3 allegations from Kigali city.
“25 years ago, the country came to its knees. It was total devastation; there was no private sector, no government services, just blood flowing across the country,” said Kagame.
“Everything was a priority and the biggest challenge was where you start from. We started from scratch, we started by putting pieces together, bringing people back together, reconciliation, justice, security, rebuilding schools, hospitals, and different public services,” he added.
In a period of 12 years, Rwanda created a traditional justice system through Gacaca court where over one million suspects were tried.
“25 years on we look back and find things have come together in a way that even ourselves are very much surprised. We have reconciled people of our country, national unity has been holding, justice has taken place, there has been forgiving,” observed Kagame.
President Kagame explained that it was challenging because the country experienced a situation where people killed neighbors and family members. “ We had situations where people would kill their family members. For example, a man or a husband at home kills children who don’t look like him, looking like a mother who is from a different identity. So you have a society in this kind of situation. It is really not only troubling but also extremely difficult to try and think of how to move the country forward.”
He explained that women have been empowered with 61.25% in parliament and 50% in the cabinet.
In the 2019 World Bank Doing Business report, Rwanda is the 2nd in Africa in easing doing business and 29th in the World.
President Kagame told NBA board of governors and executives that “Africa is open to doing business with the world, they have a lot to offer but Africa has a lot to offer as well. This is the moment to invest in Africa.”
“You don’t have to wait, invest now and grow with Africa. What we have understood is to create trust among people and trust with their leaders. Trust doesn’t just come about, you have to invest in it. Trust is the single point that binds things together. You have to figure out how you bring things together and people must feel they are relevant,” he added.
In partnership with International Basketball Federation (FIBA); NBA expanded to Africa launching Basketball Africa League (BAL) where it will provide financial, technical support and building infrastructures for the league.
It is expected that nine countries including Angola, Egypt, Kenya, Morocco, Nigeria, Rwanda, Sénégal, South Africa and Tunisia will begin the tournament in January 2020.
This was addressed by Christabel Dadzie, the Human Resource Manager at Ashesi University College and Founder of Ahaspora, while in Rwanda.
“We are encouraging Africans, mostly the youth in the West, to return to their home countries. We are putting in place a guideline and facilities to help them return. They must repatriate the knowledge they got so to advance the African continent. Our approach is to organize a platform for young Africans so that they exchange constructive ideas for the benefit of Africa,” said Christabel Dadzié.
The Mo Ibrahim Foundation’s 2018 report revealed that 60% of the African population is under 25 years old. More than 70,000 African intellectuals migrate annually to other continents in search of remunerating jobs.
The Rwanda Education Board (REB) issued a report in July 2017 making about 120 young people receiving scholarships abroad. According to the report, they consume each year around 6 to 8 billion francs, and that, at the end of their studies, only half of them return to the country.
January Gasana, the former CEO of REB, said these young people studying in the West, are asked to return home, free ticket offered, do everything to show that they are not wanting to return to participate in the reconstruction of their country.
Christabel Dadzie, the founder of AHASPORA, also went to university in the US 13 years ago. She decided to return to her country Ghana, after college, to start an organization sensitizing the Ghanaian youth in foreign universities to come back to their country to build self-confidence, development, and leadership in their country.
” I loved my homeland for an important reason. Everything I do in my homeland is totally different from how I would do it in the USA. There, social wealth is there enough. Yet at home, there is a person financially unable to afford school. A good financial or counseling action on their behalf can help the person finish university studies. Why do I have to stay in the West when my presence in the country is more needed,” said Dadzié
Dadzié added that African states are struggling to put in place promotional policies that allow their citizens living in the diaspora to return home to do business and invest.
The suspect was arrested in Kayonza district as he fled.
The executive secretary of Gatore sector, Antoine Iyamuremye has told IGIHE that they learnt about the murder on Thursday morning around 9:00 am after being alerted by neighbors.
“Residents called us around 9:00 am informing us that they visited late Nyiransabimana at her home where they found no person but saw blood. They followed traces of blood until they found her body covered with grasses in a canoe,” he said.
“We immediately rushed to the crime scene. We called the woman’s phone that was answered by the husband saying that he is around. When we used another person to call him, his husband said that he is in Kayonza. We alerted security officials in Kayonza to arrest him,” added Iyamuremye.
He noted that the suspect had borrowed the boat on the pretext of using it to produce banana beer which he never did before.
Nyiransabimana leaves three children. She was a community health worker and
singer in ADEPR choir.
President Kagame was accompanied by a delegation including Ambassador Valentine Rugwabiza representing Rwanda to UN.
As Rwanda entered the commemoration period on 7th April 2019, Guterres called on world population to fight against the evil wherever as the best way to honor victims of the 1994 Genocide against Tutsi.
“As we renew our resolve to prevent such atrocities from ever happening again, we are seeing dangerous trends of rising xenophobia, racism, and intolerance in many parts of the world. Particularly troubling is the proliferation of hate speech and incitement to violence. They are an affront to our values and threaten human rights, social stability, and peace. Wherever they occur, hate speech and incitement to violence should be identified, confronted and stopped to prevent them leading, as they have in the past, to hate crimes and genocide,” reads part of the message.
“I call on all political, religious and civil society leaders to reject hate speech and discrimination and to work vigorously to address and mitigate the root causes that undermine social cohesion and create conditions for hatred and intolerance. The capacity for evil resides in all our societies, but so, too, do the qualities of understanding, kindness, justice and reconciliation. Let us work together to build a harmonious future for all. This is the best way to honor those who lost their lives so tragically in Rwanda 25 years ago,” reads the message.
The 149-page book was launched on Wednesday at Kigali Marriot Hotel with the attendance of relatives and friends.
{{The book is a narrative.
}}
Uwineza begins with the letter she wrote to her mother killed on 10th April 1994, her two elder sisters and her brother communicating to them of her sorrow and nostalgia after their death.
The letter Uwineza wrote in 2015 was her medical prescription following a long period experiencing trauma, with bad dreams especially related to her life during the genocide.
In her book, Uwineza directs a reader at the first days of genocide. She recalls how she lived happily with her family until she started days of gloom on 7th April when she woke and saw a soldier standing by her side who pulled her to the place where her mother and relatives were kept waiting to be killed.
Uwineza who was 10 years during the genocide, narrates how her mother was shot in the leg, how they spent nights in bushes hiding until 10th April when her family was taken out of nuns’ center known as Les Petites Soeurs de Jesus in Kicukiro. She never saw them again. Uwineza also narrates how she met her father again who was abroad during the genocide and her brother Johnny who survived.
After RPF Inkotanyi soldier rescued her, Uwineza tried to forget the bitter life she passed through but her efforts were futile.
“I lived as a person with two facets. A 10-year miserable old child holding an African print wrapper and an old person. I seemed to be a person with no problems physically but I had unending chagrin within me. I did things enabling me to forget the ten year-old child but could not be seen on the outer part,” she recalled.
In 2015, Uwineza had tough trauma and taken to a hospital where the doctor recommended her to write what she remembers happened to her during the genocide. The book came from what she wrote as a medical prescription.
“I started writing my feelings on a paper. Two years later, I still had scars but I felt hope within me. I recalled the last word my mother told me ‘go and live’. I realized that I had nonsense life over 22 years,” she unveiled.
Uwineza encouraged Rwandans to write their history especially survivors of the 1994 Genocide against Tutsi to desist denials.
“The past will be forgotten if we don’t write. I will write so that the person denying the 1994 Genocide against Tutsi won’t convince me. I won’t engage in battle with him but I will influence through writings because the truth always prevails,” she said.
Wilberforce Murengezi, the father of Uwineza commended her daughter’s efforts to write a book featuring history and testimony of her family noting that God made it possible to rebuild hope despite endured sufferings.
Dr. Jean-Damascène Gasanabo, Director General of the Research and Documentation Center on Genocide within the CNLG said that Uwineza’s book is a contribution to the country and encouraged the youth to write and using all platforms lest genocide history is forgotten.
Apart from losing a parent, sister and brother, other 30 relatives from Uwineza’s wide family were killed during the genocide.
The book ‘Untamed, Beyond Freedom’ is sold at Rwf 15,000. It is available at Ikirezi library and Amazon online library.
“It was around midnight and we were in my boss’s car, preparing to go home when all of a sudden men dressed in military clothes, who had come in a double cabin pickup, surrounded us,” narrates the emaciated looking Mucyo.
“They were banging on our car’s windows and ordering the boss and his wife to get out.”
Kayobera and his wife, like Mucyo, are Rwandan nationals. Mucyo says the couple ran a string of businesses in the Ugandan capital. Mucyo managed two beauty spas for them in Rubaga. He was carrying 1.3 million shillings at the time the men accosted them.
He narrates that when his boss and his wife got out of the car, the soldiers immediately snapped handcuffs on them, shoving them into the pickup. “Two of them then came back and barked at me in Swahili, “Wewe mujinga unabaki kwa gari namna gani!” (Fool, you think you will be the one to remain in this car, how?!)
Mucyo says one of them, “Gave me three hot slaps in my face while another dipped his hands in my bag, saw the money (1.3 million) and pocketed it.” Mucyo says he never got that money back, and the fellow that took it did not record it. He just stole it.
The abductors were CMI operatives, Mucyo, and the others would find out shortly.
To anyone that’s been reading about the agency’s harassment of Rwandan citizens, everything they did to Mucyo and the Kayoberas will sound familiar.
The criminal theft of money or property; the arrest by abduction – meaning abruptly and with no warning accosting victims, handcuffing them, shoving them into a vehicle, slapping hoods over their heads, all with no arrest warrant, and without telling the abductees what it is they are supposed to have done – all are hallmarks of CMI methodology.
“They shoved hoods, which are partly big hats, over the heads of all the three of us and drove off. We had no idea where they were taking us,” Mucyo narrates. He says Kayobera told the men: “If it is me you are looking for I am here; this is my wife, and this is my employee release them. There is no reason to take all of us.”
He pleaded with the CMI operatives that he and his wife had three little children back home (the three are 9, 6 and 3) who needed at least one of the parents to be with them. The men told Kayobera that was none of their business and told him to shut up.
Mucyo fell victim to CMI just because he was an employee of Darius Kayobera. The businessman, in turn, fell victim because – he is convinced – a person that he lent money to run a business, in fact, was a CMI informer.
“My boss told me, when we were in detention, that the man, called Ibrahim – a fellow Rwandan – caused problems between the two when Kayobera asked him to repay him the money he lent him,” Mucyo says. Ibrahim wrote Kayobera a check that bounced.
Kayobera through his friends learned that Ibrahim was a CMI informer. The fellow would resort to telling CMI that Kayobera was a ‘Kigali spy’. “That is how we ended up in the hands of CMI,” Mucyo shakes his head, as if still in disbelief.
One of CMI’s ways is just acting on information with zero attempts to verify it.
When the vehicle stopped they were at Mbuya, the headquarters of the agency. “We did not immediately know this place, but we would find out from other detainees that it was the CMI head office,” the weak-looking Mucyo narrates.
Other Rwandan victims of the place, such as Roger Donne Kayibanda described to this news website how once there they order one to take off his belt and shoes, and to hand over properties like wallets, watch, and portable thing. That happened to Mucyo, Kayobera and his wife.
“When one of the men saw Kayobera’s phone, he threateningly asked him for his mobile money pin code. There was 800,000 shillings on the Boss’s account and they made a transaction and withdrew the money,” Mucyo says.
“Then they took Boss’s wife away to the women’s place of detention, and then took me and Boss to a corridor, telling us that’s where we would stay!”
Mucyo describes the torture that followed. “An officer came deep in the night and barked, ‘You Mucyo, come here!’ A soldier came and shoved me upstairs – still with my hood on – and took me to what they call the statement room”. The young Rwandan says the interrogating officer told him to tell him everything about himself: where he was born, when, where he went to school, why he came to Uganda.
“I told him everything. When I was done, all of a sudden the man barked at me ‘I want you to tell me the truth, who sent you to Kampala and what did he send you to do?!”
“I said I had told him everything. “I said I only came to do business and no one sent me,” Mucyo replied. The man told the soldiers to take me downstairs, for “some special treatment”.
He narrates that two soldiers took him down into a dungeon and proceeded to beat him up, kicking and punching him, in the ribs, in the stomach everywhere. Then, he says, the men took me upstairs to another office.
“In that one, the officer spoke to me in fluent Kinyarwanda. He told me, ‘Mucyo, bite! (Hi) The only thing that will save you here is the truth! He too ordered me to tell him everything about myself. Afterwards, the man said, menacingly, “Why don’t you say the truth that it is Rwanda that sent you here?!”
Mucyo told him nothing like that happened.
“He then ordered the soldiers to come to take me ‘upstairs’”, says Mucyo.
Upstairs, there was another man, another Rwandan, Mucyo says. The two soldiers ordered me to take off my clothes. “There was a bathtub in the upstairs room, full of ice water. They told him to lie in the water, up to his neck.
Then after a few minutes, as he was shivering and shaking, they told him to step out of the tub.
Then as Mucyo watched they told the other Rwandan to sit in a metallic chair next to a wall. One of the men got hold of a couple of wires that were sticking out of a wall socket. The other ordered the Rwandan to stick his feet out. “The man with the wire suddenly shoved them onto the soles of the man’s feet.”
Mucyo says the Rwandan leaped up with a piercing scream, eyes bulging, and came thudding down on the floor. “You see that”, one of the torturers told Mucyo, “that is what happens when you do not tell the truth!”
Mucyo says they then took him downstairs, as he was shaking with fear.
He says one of his fellow prisoners, another Rwandan called Damascene Rugengamanzi, advised him to bribe an officer to save himself from further torture. Mucyo describes how he did exactly that. He called one of the officers that regularly came down the dungeons, and offered him half a million shillings.
“I gave him the contacts of my friend that stayed with me in Mengo. The officer also got me a paper and pen and I sent written instructions to my friend to give the officer the money.”
That probably saved the young man. The beatings lessened. After three months at Mbuya, CMI transferred him to its Kireka post.
The story Mucyo tells further reveals the intricate relationship between CMI and Kayumba Nyamwasa’s RNC. The officer that spoke fluent Kinyarwanda to him, Mucyo is convinced, is an RNC operative. The prisoner he was handcuffed to, Damascene, kept urging him “to tell the CMI torturers that he was ready to join Kayumba’s army”.
“That is the only thing that will save you, otherwise these men will torture you until they break your bones,” Damascene urged.
It would seem this Damascene himself must have undergone the same torture and was ready to be recruited into RNC, Mucyo thinks.
In the end, he was adamant that nothing would ever make him join the terrorists, not even death would!
Then one morning the officer I had given money appeared in the doorway of the Kireka jail and told me to step outside. They were deporting me to Rwanda.
That was this month, last Saturday on 6 April 2019. They dumped me at Kagitumba border post. On his deportation papers they had written, “illegal entry”, though he was in Uganda lawfully, he says.
“They had also robbed me of all my money, and I had nothing, But I was so thankful to be back home.”
Kayobera and Claudine still languish in CMI detention, held incommunicado, and have not been produced in court. They have not been allowed consular access. Their children have been deprived of parental care, and endure the distress of missing a mother and father.
People wonder when such lawless abductions, arrests, and torture of innocent Rwandans will ever come to an end in Uganda.
The Acting CEO of RGB, Dr. Usta Kaitesi revealed that the visit is significant to the institution which has the mandate of protecting and follow up the implementation of good governance principles.
She said that current Rwanda governance is different from the past which led to divisionism and warned against rampant genocide ideology.
“There should be no genocide ideology cases because it is the root cause of genocide. But we should understand that with the commitment of Rwandans and leadership, it was tremendously reduced compared to the past,” said Dr. Kaitesi.
“Even one person remaining with genocide ideology should be redeemed and teach him/her because it spreads to the community and neighbors among others,” she added.
Dr. Kaitesi said that it is everyone’s responsibility to remind each other on the wrath of genocide and join hands to from using social media platforms to inflame genocide ideology.
She explained that the day reflects a choice of promoting Rwandans unity and accountability.
The ceremony held at the beginning of the 25th commemoration of the 1994 Genocide against Tutsi, was marked by a moment of silence and light the flame of hope.
Felix Bagambiki, representing Rwanda in DRC held a talk on genocide history narrating how Tutsi were killed and persecuted at different times since 1959 until the execution of genocide in 1994 by the then governments.
Bagambiki explained how the international community abandoned Tutsi at the time and commended RPA soldiers that fought tooth and nail to stop genocide.
He recalled how RPF lead Rwanda in the right direction after stopping genocide noting that Rwanda is moving fast in development with apparent transformations.
The ceremony was concluded by displaying a film dubbed ‘7 jours à Kigali- La Semaine où le Rwanda a basculé’. Produced by Jeune Afrique journalist Mehdi Ba in collaboration with Jeremy Frey., the film on the 1994 Genocide against Tutsi is made of testimonies of genocide survivors and foreigners who were in Rwanda during the genocide.
