Rwanda: In the Shadow of the Baobab - Kagame Blows Cold and Hot On a Third
Mandate
By Kris Berwouts, 18 March 2013
Analysis
In October 1990, after Fred Rwigyema's death on the third day the struggle
to conquer Rwanda, Paul Kagame took over the command over the Rwandan
Patriotic Front (RPF) and led it to victory in July 1994.
He became Vice-President and Minister of Defense in the transitional
government installed after the Rwandan genocide. In March 2000, President
Pasteur Bizimungu felt that he could no longer contribute to a regime
dominated by the RPF. He resigned and Kagame became the Head of State. He
has subsequebtly won presidential elections in 2003 and 2010.
In 2017, when his second mandate as an elected President expires, he will
have led the RPF for 27 years and will have been Rwanda's most powerful
individual for 23 years (for 17 of which he has been the country's
President). The Constitution, adopted by referendum in May 2003, foresees a
maximum of two consecutive mandates for the Head of State. This means that
he cannot stand for a new term in 2017.
Very soon after his re-election in August 2010, speculation and rumour
developed about the chances that Kagame, with or without a review of the
Constitution, would seek a third mandate. On February 27th 2013 he gave a
<
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2013/02/27/uk-rwanda-kagame-idUKBRE91Q17Z2013
0227> press conference on the issue stating that he is not interested in
running again.
This press conference was a reply to earlier announcements by opposition
parties such as Victoire Ingabire's FDU-Inkingi and Frank Habineza's Green
Party that they would oppose changes to the Constitution allowing Kagame to
continue. But at the end of the press conference, Kagame left all options
open. He isn't seeking a third mandate and doesn't 'need' this job, but he
doesn't exclude the possibility of bowing to the will of the people if they
want him to stay on. "At the end of the day, let's remember that Rwandans
have to decide," he said.
2010: a landslide victory
On 9 August 2010, Kagame was re-elected with an overwhelming 93% of the
vote. In the election itself he faced three candidates who were considered
by the traditional opposition as "satellite candidates, phoney opposition
players intended to maintain the illusion of pluralism".
The months before the elections had been very tense when the more genuine
opposition parties started to prepare their campaigns: the Social Party
Imberakuri (PSI) led by Bernard Ntaganda, the Green Democratic Party (GDP)
with a leadership that came mainly from the anglophone community and which,
according to many, was a result of the discontent within the RPF; and lastly
the Unified Democratic Forces (UDF-Inkingi), formed around presidential
candidate Victoire Ingabire, who had returned to Rwanda in January after an
absence of 17 years.
The leaders of these parties confronted hostility and significant verbal
aggression from the authorities and media. Victoire Ingabire in particular,
with her clear message and direct, flambuoyant style received a lot of
national and international attention. However, when the election actually
arrived, none of these candidates were able to formally run for office.
In the end, all went well for Kagame. When you have almost complete control
over the legislative, executive and judicial institutions, when an
independent press has almost completely disappeared, when that section of
opinion which has not openly sided with you has attained an extraordinary
level of sophistication in the noble art of self-censorship, when for a
large part of national and international opinion you represent the ending of
genocide and the return to stability, you don't lose elections.
The annus horibilis
In the months before the elections the focus of tensions changed. General
Faustin Kayumba Nyamwasa, a long term companion of President Kagame and
former Commander in chief of the Rwandese army, left Rwanda and its regime
to join the dissident Colonel Patrick Karegeya in exile in Johannesburg.
Karegeya is a former intelligence chief, but above all central to the
running of the Congo Desk - created during the war in Congo to manage the
exploitation of natural resources in the eastern DRC.
In the months after Nyamwasa's departure, others left too - influential and
high profile people like Theodore Rudasingwa (Kagame's former director of
cabinet), Gerald Gahima (former Prosecutor General and Vice-President of the
Supreme Court) and Kagame's private secretary David Himbara.
All of a sudden, Kagame wasn't struggling with his traditional enemies but
with his frustrated comrades-in-arms. The ruling inner circle was losing its
coherence and had to fight against its own disintegration. When it looked at
itself, it was confronted with the
<
http://www.oenz.de/fileadmin/users/oenz/PDF/Kris_Berwouts_Cracks_in_the_Mir
ror_Rwanda_2010.pdf> cracks in the mirror that belied the united and serene
image which it wanted to show to the public in Rwanda as well as
internationally.
Three weeks after Kagame's re-election, the French newspaper Le Monde leaked
the draft of the
<
http://www.un.org/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=S/2010/596> UN's DRC
Mapping Exercise Report which aimed to document the most serious violations
of human rights in the DRC between March 1993 and June 2003.
In paragraph 517, the report states: "The systematic and widespread attacks
described in this report, which targeted very large numbers of Rwandan Hutu
refugees and members of the Hutu civilian population, resulting in their
death, reveal a number of damning elements that, if they were proven before
a competent court, could be classified as crimes of genocide."
This was nothing less than an earthquake for Rwanda. For a decade and a half
the regime functioned as the incarnation of genocide victims over those who
had perpetrated it. The report, published on October 1st 2010, suggested
that this might only be one side of the story, that the reality of Rwanda's
traumatic recent history might be much more complex.
The report is nothing more than a very extensive inventory of the most
important human rights violations in one decade, and as such it is not a
basis for prosecution. Most of the facts reported by the UN researchers were
known, but for the first time they were brought together in one
comprehensive document and acknowledged at the level of an official UN
document.
Thirty months after the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights
published the report, there has been insufficient follow-up by governments
in Africa's Great Lakes region and by the UN itself.
Damage control
The landscape of Rwanda's political and military elite has changed a lot
with Nyamwasa's departure. There are many indications that Nyamwasa and
Karegeya tried to organize an armed resistance on Congolese soil, bringing
together people from backgrounds as different as the part of the CNDP that
had stayed loyal to Nkunda, certain Mai Mai groups, the FRF, bits of the
FARDC and FNL.
Contact was even made with some people within the FDLR. All these forces had
their reasons to be against Kagame and the ambition was to unite them in an
ad hoc movement against the regime in Kigali. To do that, they had to
reconcile water and fire. They tried but failed, this was because of several
factors.
By the end of 2010 it became clear that they would not able to raise
international support for an armed initiative. The main reason for this was
that Kayumba Nyamwasa did not have a sufficiently high profile to incarnate
the reconciliation of water and fire.
He had always been considered a hardliner of the regime, whose conflict with
Kagame was about the President's attempt to dismantle the parallel economic
structure that Nyamwasa and Karegeya had organized around the plundering of
Congo's minerals.
It has never been easy to distinguish between hawks and doves inside
Rwanda's regime, but Nyamwasa was definitely not to be considered a dove. He
did not seem to have much added value to Kagame in terms of democracy,
reconciliation nor good governance.
For the same reasons, the political party he founded with Karegeya, Gahima
and Rudasingwa isn't much of a threat to the RPF: Kayumba Nyamwasa and his
crew aren't a credible alternative to Kagame. 2010 was his annus horibilis,
but Kagame won back the full control over the regime.
Since 2011, a change of generation has taken place around Kagame. People who
are or could be influenced by Nyamwasa lost space and made way for younger
men and women with a different profile: born in the late seventies or early
eighties, ambitious, well-trained technocrats rather than military, polyglot
intellectuals rather than the leaders who grew up in the refugee camps,
fought in the bush against Obote and Habyarimana, eventually getting rich
through the plundering of Congo.
The people who shaped Kagame's Brave New World were replaced by the people
who grew up in it (mostly receiving training and education abroad).
Not another Mugabe
Over the last few months, some Rwanda watchers have seen indications that
Kagame is interested in a Buyoya-type of exit scenario: remain present and
influential with a rather low profile on the national level, and play a role
on the international scene as a mediator in conflicts. Other people believe
he's constructing a more Medvedev - Putin inspired leapfrog.
Both sides believe that Kagame would like to avoid the political damage and
loss of credibility if he continues. He is not looking forward to gaining a
reputation as the new Mugabe or Museveni. His main concern will be to gain
guarantees that he will not be persecuted by international justice.
Speculation has inevitably started on who could succeed him. At some point
Richard Sezibera seemed in pole position. Born in 1964 and presently
Secretary General of the EAC, Sezibera served as Minister of Health and as
Ambassador to the US, Rwanda's Special Envoy to the Great Lakes Region and
as Kagame's Senior Advisor. He is a medical doctor who practiced for many
years in Uganda and Rwanda and has a Master of Arts in Liberal Studies from
Georgetown University.
Another person referred to internally as a potential successor is Donald
Kaberaku (1951), currently President of the African Development Bank. He
studied in Tanzania and the UK (obtaining a PhD in economics from the
University of Glasgow). In October 1997 he was appointed minister of finance
and economic planning in Rwanda and is considered as one of the masterminds
behind the recovery of the Rwandan economy after the genocide.
Sometimes other names appear - they seem to come and go in waves. But
Sezibera, in particular, is to be taken seriously.
The M23 misadventure
At the time of writing these lines, the latest offshoot of the RCD-CNDP tree
'M23' has been involved in several days of heavy internal fighting between
the factions loyal to Bosco Ntaganda and Sultani Makenga. The draft of a
peace agreement between M23 and the DRC government is circulating, but it
remains to be seen if it will ever be signed.
M23 started nearly one year ago as another rebellion led by Congolese Tutsi.
A settlement might be found around an old school arrangement which
integrates the rebels in to the army, giving them grades and control over
men and mines. Things might calm down for a while until the next time
someone believes that his community's interests are best served by a new
rebellion.
This episode has weakened everybody - including the Rwandan government. It
seems they overplayed their hand. As soon as it became clear that Kigali was
very actively supporting M23, its most loyal partners took extraordinary
measures. Nations like the UK, USA, Sweden, Holland and Germany suspended at
least a part of their aid. Rwanda received heavy criticism and now knows
that any future moves and actions will be looked upon with great suspicion.
As usual, the events in Congo have divided the Tutsi and, more generally,
the Rwandan community in Congo as well as in Rwanda. Unlike earlier
Tutsi-led rebellions, M23 wasn't able to mobilise a lot of support among
Congolese Hutu and the Banyamulenge. The Tutsi of South Kivu declared from
the very beginning that they had nothing to be gained from the M23 rebllion,
with which they did not identify at all.
The backbone of M23 were Tutsi from the North Kivutian territories of
Rutshuru and Masisi, and since the Framework Agreement was signed in Addis
Ababa, they are mainly fighting each other. What separates them (strategy,
geography, clans, economic interests, political affinities) is felt within
the inner circle of power in Rwanda and affects cohesion there.
Not really, Mr. Blair
I do truly believe that the Rwandan regime is working on a succession
scenario. However, anybody who has traveled to Africa knows that nothing,
apart from scrub and mushrooms, grows underneath a baobab tree. It is very
difficult for new and younger leadership to emerge in the shadow of a strong
leader. Kagame led the RPF for more than 22 years and turned the country
into a virtual one party state.
It is not easy to replace such a leader, even in the most serene conditions.
And conditions aren't serene in Rwanda after one year of the M23. The
country has been weakened by the events, as has any other actor in Central
Africa involved in it, with the possible exception of Museveni.
Kagame has, however, managed an effective policy of damage limitation.
Important international partners threatened to leave, but some of them have
come back already. On February 22th Tony Blair wrote a letter, together with
Howard G. Buffet,
<
http://www.tonyblairoffice.org/news/entry/howard-g.-buffett-and-tony-blair-
now-is-no-time-to-cut-aid-to-rwanda/> Stand with Rwanda.
According to Mr Blair "Slashing international support to Rwanda ignores the
complexity of the problem within DRC's own borders and the history and
circumstances that have led to current regional dynamics.
Cutting aid does nothing to address the underlying issues driving conflict
in the region, it only ensures that the Rwandan people will suffer - and
risks further destabilizing an already troubled region ... Cutting aid to
Rwanda also risks undoing one of Africa's great success stories."
I do not belong to the group of people who believe that the alpha and the
omega of Congo's scourge, woe and disaster can be reduced to Rwanda's role
in it, but I do believe that a huge part of Rwanda's success story is due to
the surplus it extracts from Congo's minerals, and that the Rwandan
government is aware that it needs to consolidate this extraction if it wants
to prevent the walls of its reign from tumbling down.
Congo's complex problems are the fruit of its own colonial and post-colonial
history, but the fall of Mobutu's empire and the difficulties of reinventing
and rebuilding the new Congo after the departure of le Président-Fondateur,
have been complicated by the fact that Rwanda exported its problems on to
Congolese soil.
Of course, "the international community should support the three regional
governments - DRC, Rwanda, and Uganda - in their efforts to build a
sustainable solution to the conflict", as stated by Mr Blair, but I don't
really think this will happen without a delicate balance between support and
pressure.
Not only pressure on the DRC (as it seems is the case in the Framework
Agreement signed last month in Addis Ababa), but on all partners involved,
Rwanda included. Pressure which does not foresee measures or sanctions is no
pressure at all.
Kris Berwouts has, over the last 25 years, worked for a number of different
Belgian and international NGOs focused on building peace, reconciliation,
security and democratic processes.
Until recently, he was the Director of EurAc, the network of European NGOs
working for advocacy on Central Africa. He now works as an independent
expert on Central Africa.
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Received on Tue Mar 19 2013 - 19:10:17 EDT
