Kagame’s prisons, courts and killing spots: Ingabire, the Netherlands and the West

by Ann Garrison, Didas Gasana and Charles Kabonero

Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza, her head shaved and wearing her pink prison uniform, makes an appearance in court. In jail since Oct. 14 and reportedly tortured, she was recently denied bail. She had returned to Rwanda last January to challenge Paul Kagame for the presidency but was not allowed to run. Many commentators predicted she would have won a free and fair election.

The argument over who has been most to blame for the bloodshed in recent East Central African history intensified even further this month with testimony further challenging the history of what we know as the 1994 Rwanda Genocide at the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda.

Rwandan President Paul Kagame’s former bodyguard, Aloys Ruyenzi, testified at the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda that the president of the Interahamwe, the militia said to have massacred the Rwandan Tutsi population in 1994, was himself a Tutsi and Rwandan Patriotic Front agent.

Ruyenzi, in an interview in the Newsline East Africa, also described what he called “killing spots” where, he says, the Kagame regime continues to sort, classify and then systematically execute those it perceives as enemies with bayonets or, if they resist or run, with pistols.

Read more at the San Francisco Bay Newspaper, http://goo.gl/J8ANy.