Africa’s most ruthless dictator just murdered another critic abroad. News in Canada? Barely. Canada has backed Paul Kagame while he’s assassinated countless opponents, including a president that ignited the 1994 genocide.
On Monday the remains of Rwandan dissident Sgt. Maj. Robert Kabera were found just outside Kampala, Uganda’s capital. The popular YouTuber, who fled Rwanda in 2020, was beheaded.
Kabera was a critic of Rwanda’s ‘president for life’. For more than three decades Kagame has brazenly assassinated critics across East Africa. Rwanda also assassinated (or attempted to) several former top officials in South Africa. After former Rwandan spy chief, turned Kagame critic Patrick Karegeya, was strangled to death in a South African hotel in 2014 Kagame boasted about it and the regime’s number two said, “when you choose to be a dog, you die like a dog, and the cleaners will wipe away the trash.”
In another brazen move, the regime snatched Paul Rusesabagina, who became a celebrity from the film Hotel Rwanda, from Dubai in 2020. Several western critics have also been targeted by Kagame’s henchmen in Europe. Author of Rwanda’s 30-Year Assault on Congo: The Crimes, the Criminals, and the Cover-Up and In Praise of Blood: The Crimes of the Rwandan Patriotic Front Judi Rever, who lives in Montreal, was placed under protection by Belgian State Security Service in 2014 when they discovered a credible plot against her.
Trained at the US military’s officer academy in Kansas, Kagame has long been Ottawa’s favoured African dictator. Despite Rwanda launching a new invasion of eastern Congo in late 2021, Justin Trudeau repeatedly met Kagame and deepened diplomatic ties. Last year Mark Carney’s government announced sanctions over Rwanda’s occupation of Congo, but Ottawa has barely changed course. Canada’s high commissioner met Kagame two months ago and Ottawa continues to provide some aid to Rwanda.
Canadian assistance has taken many forms. Famed ‘humanitarian’ Canadian general Romeo Dallaire has greatly enabled the “Butcher of Africa’s Great Lakes” region. Three decades after Rwanda first invaded Congo purportedly to target genocidaires, Dallaire promoted Kigali’s apologia for mass slaughter there. As I detailed last year in “Dallaire continues to justify Kagame’s crimes”, the former general explicitly justified Rwanda’s most recent phase of violence in Congo as defensive even though Rwanda has been pillaging of eastern Congo’s minerals for thirty years.
Dallaire assisted Kagame when he was dispatched to the country in late 1993. In his 2005 book Le Patron de Dallaire Parle (The Boss of Dallaire Speaks), Jacques-Roger Booh Booh, a former Cameroon foreign minister and overall head of the UN mission in Rwanda, claims Dallaire had little interest in the violence unleashed by Kagame’s RPF despite reports of summary executions in areas controlled by them. RPF soldiers were regularly seen in Dallaire’s office, with the Canadian commander describing the Rwandan army’s position in Kigali. This prompted Booh Booh to wonder if Dallaire “also shared UNAMIR military secrets with the RPF when he invited them to work in his offices.”
Another Canadian enabler of Kagame is Governor General Louise Arbour. As chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), Arbour wasn’t interested in evidence suggesting Kagame’s RPF was responsible for assassinating Rwandan president Juvénal Habyarimana, Burundian president Cyprien Ntaryamira and most of the Rwandan military command, which sparked the 1994 genocide. According to French government investigators and the National Post, she refused to investigate evidence implicating the RPF in shooting down Habyarimana’s airplane. In 1996 former ICTR investigator Michael Hourigan compiled evidence based on the testimony of three RPF informants who claimed “direct involvement in the 1994 fatal rocket attack upon the President’s aircraft” and “specifically implicated the direct involvement of [Kagame]” and other RPF members. But when Hourigan delivered the evidence to her in early 1997, Arbour was “aggressive” and “hostile,” according to Hourigan. Despite initially supporting the investigation surrounding who shot down the plane, the ICTR’s chief prosecutor now advised Hourigan that the “investigation was at an end because in her view it was not in our [ICTR] mandate.”
When the Globe and Mail confirmed Kagame was responsible for the political killing that unleashed the genocidal violence in 2016, Arbour sought to shift the blame for failing to fulfill the court’s mandate onto ‘Africa’s Hitler’.
As part of supporting US/UK dominance of the region, Canada has enabled a politician who played a significant role in the violent capture of state power in three countries (Uganda 1986, Rwanda 1994 and Congo 1997). Paul Kagame’s ruthlessness is remarkable; Ottawa’s assistance shameful.
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