Nerves on edge as election nears in Rwanda

The New Sombrero bar, with its plastic chairs, pastel blue walls and dark corners, used to buzz with students in this university town in southern Rwanda. But the place has been nearly empty since its owner was killed last month.

The problem isn’t that people feel uneasy visiting a bar belonging to a dead man. It’s that Andre Kagwa Rwisereka was the vice president of the opposition Democratic Green Party, and people worry that coming to the New Sombrero would be seen as a sign of support for the party.

“They know what happened and then they fear,” said a university student outside the bar who refused to go into the New Sombrero and didn’t want his name used for fear of retribution. “It’s up to you to compare why this bar … which was once very busy as others, is now somehow quiet. You can visit other bars and see, and you compare for yourself.”

This sort of anxiety pervades Rwanda. The tiny landlocked nation has shown remarkable progress since the 1994 genocide that killed more than 800,000 people. But critics charge that the man responsible for that turnaround, President Paul Kagame, is cracking down before the country’s presidential election Monday.

Kagame, often praised for his vision and firm hand, has drawn increasing criticism since a recent spate of forced newspaper closings and the killings of several journalists and opponents of the ruling Rwandan Patriotic Front.

University students in Butare say the campus is infested with spies who report back to the ruling party. Journalists in Kigali, the capital, say they must censor themselves.

Jean-Bosco Gasasira, the editor of the banned newspaper Umuvugizi, has taken refuge in Uganda.

“I can’t be so opportunistic and say there is no development in Rwanda,” he said in a telephone interview. “We have clean streets, maybe some buildings, but let me tell you, development without democracy is nothing.”

It is undeniable that Kagame’s achievements are extraordinary, more than just clean streets and buildings. A visit to Kigali makes that clear: The petty corruption and police bribery that dog many other African nations is nonexistent. Rwanda’s economic output has doubled in six years, and health indicators are better across the board.

Chief among Kagame’s accomplishments, Rwandans say, is that people live largely in peace 16 years after a genocide that targeted the minority Tutsi ethnic group and moderate members of the Hutu majority.

“People think, ‘You know, these people can never live together,’ ” said Sam Dusengiyumva, the country director for the Cambridge, Mass.-based One Laptop Per Child program, who lost his parents and four siblings in the genocide. “Actually, we are living together. Of course, we are still feeling some sorrow and we are still feeling some fear, but we manage to live together.”

That does not mean that the situation is not tense. For all of Kagame’s successes, the problems in his country of 11 million are huge. Looking down as you fly over the tiny country, it looks as though every single scrap of land is cultivated. Sixty percent of the country lives below the poverty line, and electricity reaches only 10% of the people.

Critics argue that the presidential election is a sham meant to legitimize Kagame’s rule. In Kigali, election posters for the ruling party adorn shop windows, cars, streetlights and billboards all over town, while Kagame’s opponents barely advertise.

In fact, the three candidates running against him are not members of opposition parties; they are RPF allies.

In the meantime, real opposition parties say they have been frozen out of the election. The leader of one such party, Victoire Ingabire, was arrested and charged under the country’s genocide ideology law after she remarked that Hutus had also been killed in the genocide — a fact widely accepted by scholars outside Rwanda — and their killers must be brought to justice.

“We have a parliament here which cannot question the executive. We have a justice system which would fear to stand on its own legs,” said Frank Habineza, president of the Democratic Green Party, which also hasn’t been allowed to register. “We have institutions that are not independent, that are now working well. We have one institution that is functioning very well, and that is the institution of the presidency.”

Umuvugizi and another newspaper, Umuseso, were banned for at least six months this spring. In June, an Umuvugizi editor was shot to death, while investigating allegations that Kagame was linked to an attempted assassination of a former Rwandan general in South Africa. The BBC’s service in Kinyarwanda, the Rwandan language, was briefly shut down, as was Voice of America.

Government officials say rogue newspapers were banned because they deserved to be.

“There’s something that must be understood. Why are these newspapers being stopped? Because these newspapers are propagating the same ideology that sent us into the abyss,” ruling party spokesman Wellars Gasamagera said.

“I remember when one newspaper was stopped for six months. People here on the streets were relieved. Some people say it is banning the freedom of expression, whatever, but I wish you could feel how people felt relieved.”

Wadhams is a special correspondent.