Author: Publisher

{Passport-free travel, a common market, and a single currency. Sound like the EU? It’s Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi, and they’re being warned to take things slowly.
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{Traveling without a passport or visa, which is a right within the European Union, may soon be possible for around 135 million people in East Africa. Since January 1, Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda have allowed their citizens to travel freely across the three countries. At border control stations, an identity card, whether for work, school or voting, is all that’s required. Travelers no longer suffer high visa costs and nerve-wracking administrative processes.}

That’s because Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda are members of the East African Community (EAC). Their goal: more inter-African trade through a common market with unified immigration and custom laws. “We must deepen trade amongst each other,” said Kenya’s President Uhuru Kenyatta, current EAC chair. “This way our private sectors will develop the strength, resilience and stature needed to take on the world.”

{{Safety concerns}}

Burundi and Tanzania also belong to the EAC. At this point, both countries have kept their borders closed due to fears of terrorist attacks by members of the Somali al-Shabaab militia. Tanzania is the only country bordering all four EAC countries, says Samuel Sitta, Tanzania’s minister for East African Cooperation.

Sitta criticizes that technical requirements for free travel have not yet been mastered: As before, border control machines cannot read all passports. “Fragile arrangements are a security threat,” he said. “Our region has no peace, and as we speak, there is war in South Sudan.”

Tanzanian security forces believe members and sympathizers of al-Shabaab would be able to obtain identity cards and travel within EAC countries. Some are even thought to be current EAC citizens. With new freedom to travel comes an increased risk of attacks and assassinations.

{{Boom times?}}

Security concerns are also rife in Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda. There, however, the fears are trumped by potential trade benefits. Freedom of movement for workers, goods, services and capital have awoken hope for more investments in the region: streets, rail lines and power grids.

“The infrastructure has been a challenge obviously,” economist Martin Otieno told DW from Nairobi. “But what we’ve seen in recent years is that governments have renewed their commitment to making the free movement of goods, people, commerce, trade and investment much easier.” Otieno added that it’s the private sector which is the chief driver of regional integration and which is now pressing governments to hold to their promises.

The five states of the EAC are now working on their next large-scale project: They want to establish a currency union like the eurozone, with the hope that it would strengthen the economies and make East Africa more attractive to foreign investors. Governments signed a framework agreement in December 2013 in Uganda’s capital, Kampala, with the currency zone to be implemented within ten years.

DW

{Rwanda’s Minister of Defense, Gen. James Kabarebe, reveals that insecurity suffered by people in exile is behind the murder of Patrick Karegeya, former head of foreign intelligence in Rwanda

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According to the Minister of Defense, General James Kabarebe said “A citizen has value when his country ensures his security. I wonder how a normal man can dare to flee the country when the security is guaranteed to him”

Karegeya was strangled to death in a hotel room in South Africa where he was in exile since 2007.

The Minister commented on the death of Karegeya during an exchange with Rubavu resident on “Ndi Umunyarwanda”

“Don’t waste your time listening languages spread here and there that this was strangled on the 7th floor in such a country. When you have opted to live like a dog, you die like a dog and those responsible for hygiene take the corpse away to a dump to avoid bad smell. This is for those who have chosen this life. They are victims of such treatment. We cannot do anything. We’re not responsible, “he said.

{Driving licence tests in driving schools which kick-off on January 6 in Kigali will continue to the Northern Province and candidates are called upon to keep time and come with all the required particulars for both provisional and practical tests.}

“Provisional and practical driving tests in driving schools started on Monday. We will now continue to the Northern region and the districts of Rubavu and Nyabihu from the Western region,” Supt. Jean Marie Vianney Ndushabandi, the spokesperson of the Traffic and Road Safety department, said.

“From there, we will go to the Southern region and other parts of the Western and end in the Eastern region,” he added.

He appealed to candidates not to forget their particulars like photocopy of identity card, old driving licence for those seeking category and code.

“Candidates should keep times and avoid cheating or sitting for someone else because it’s illegal and the consequences are severe,” he warned.

RNP

REIMS, France — {ABOVE his desk in a peaceful and tidy townhouse with pots of geraniums hanging from the windowsills and walls covered with photos of his children, Alain Gauthier keeps 24 files labeled with the names of some of the men and women accused in one of the most appalling crimes of the 20th century.}

Mr. Gauthier and his wife, Dafroza, have been collecting information for 13 years on each of the 24 Rwandan men and women they suspect of having participated in their country’s 1994 genocide. The suspects are members of the Hutu ethnic group who now lead comfortable lives in France and deny any involvement in the slaughter of more than 1000 000 people — most of them Tutsi — in just 100 days.

“Here, the fugitives live in denial,” said Mrs. Gauthier, 59, a chemical engineer and a Tutsi from Rwanda. “They’ve always denied, they have created another story, they have completely erased that part of their lives. They were obliged to do so, otherwise you end up in a mental institution. You can’t live with a crime like that.”

“What drives us is that the killers be judged, for history, for the victims,” Mrs. Gauthier said. “It is our turn, us as alive people, as survivors to claim for justice because if we don’t do it, nobody will, and nobody will make amends for what happened.”

But most important, by bringing civil lawsuits against Hutus suspected of being fugitives, the couple has challenged French authorities and the news media over the country’s longstanding protection of Rwandan fugitives.

France, which has long been accused of providing weapons and military training to the Hutus before the genocide, has never convicted anyone accused of complicity in the Rwandan genocide. But after restoring diplomatic relations with Rwanda in 2009 — they were broken in 2006 when a French judge accused a group of Rwandans of having plotted in 1994 to shoot down the plane of Rwanda’s president at the time, touching off the genocide — Paris appointed five judges to investigate the matter of the Rwandan fugitives and opened a police section specializing in crimes of genocide. Next month, the judges are scheduled to bring their first criminal case against a Rwandan fugitive accused of genocide.

For the Gauthiers, these are crimes that cannot be erased. They say that only by bringing the accused to justice can they help the victims and their families to forgive and move on. In France, they are frequently likened to Serge and Beate Klarsfeld, the couple who pursued Nazi criminals in the 1950s.

Mrs. Gauthier, a graceful woman from Butare, one of the largest cities in Rwanda, lost her mother and about 80 relatives in the genocide. Mr. Gauthier, 65, is a retired high school principal who lived in Rwanda as a young man, teaching French at a local junior high school, which is how they met.

FOR the Gauthiers, the news that French authorities were prepared to bring their first genocide case was vindication for 13 years of labor. They had found the defendant, Pascal Simbikangwa, five years ago, at his home in the slums of Kaweni, a city on the island of Mayotte, a French territory in the Indian Ocean.

“They were alone, they fought, and their work is colossal,” said Maria Malagardis, a journalist for the newspaper Libération, who wrote a book, “On the Track of the Rwandan Killers,” about the couple.

The Gauthiers consider themselves amateur investigators, in that neither studied criminal law and both have spent their working lives in unrelated fields.

Born in 1954, Mrs. Gauthier grew up in Kigali, the Rwandan capital, where she met her husband. From 1973 to 1977, she was forced to live as a political refugee in Belgium, where she studied chemistry. In 1974, she went to visit Mr. Gauthier in southern France, where he had moved after his years in Rwanda, and they married in 1977.

{{New York Times}}