There is no political crisis in Rwanda, it's the rules

They have things as vague as, “insulting the memory of the dead,” or “offending a group of people because of their sexual preference.” What precision is there in that law? How do you interpret it? How do you think a Rwandan judge will interpret it in a way that will stop people from expressing themselves?

Maybe it is the usage of the words “genocide denial,” “negating the genocide,” “divisionism” and “genocide ideology?”

But it is the same with these other laws. What we are looking out for in our society are those things that could take us back to what we witnessed in this country.

In some of these other countries, it was the Holocaust, bigotry, racist behaviour. You can’t make a difference in measuring the degree of these things, it is all vague.

People outside the country should know that Rwanda has moved on in terms of political concepts and mindsets.

Don’t you think the recent throwing of grenades in Kigali and the arrests of the two military generals is creating some kind of panic?

Again, this is the psyche we are talking about. With our history, Rwanda has enemies. When the leadership stopped the genocide, it didn’t stop people who think genocide.

All is not that fine in Rwanda. Though we have been a very secure country, we have people outside the borders who want to come back and finish the work of the genocide; we have people internally, too, who are unhappy and disgruntled with the current leadership.

This government has fired people because of failure to account and people linked to the genocide. Why would it be surprising that someone can plant a grenade? This country still has enemies.

Rwanda’s military has high standards of discipline, shouldn’t it be surprising that generals are arrested on counts of misconduct?

The Rwanda Defence Forces is made up of human beings, but still there is almost no tolerance for certain behaviour in our army. To me it is not surprising and alarming.

It is the timing that makes people bundle everything together to create a situation of panic.

Won’t the refusal to grant a human rights researcher permission to work in Rwanda be interpreted as a clampdown on freedom of expression?

Human Rights Watch sent a worker who exhibited very suspicious behaviour. Submitting pre-dated documents with signatures that don’t match… it is only normal that immigration services would find something wrong with that.
If you want to do your work properly, please don’t send fraudulent people. HRW is an American NGO. American immigration laws say that a consular will deny anybody a visa just because of the way they feel about his or her motive.

They have no obligation to explain to you why. HRW has to abide to what everyone else abides to. Rwanda is not a banana republic where we can be blackmailed.