At first I thought it was all my fault. “‘You’re brainwashed by the government’s ‘propaganda machine’”, foreign colleagues told me, all enamored of Ingabire Victoire. They wondered how I personally and all Rwandans could not see the star that Ingabire really was. They painted a heroic profile of her, compared her to Aung San Suu kyi, the Burmese heroine, turned advocate of a government that oppresses the Rohingya people. Imagine my surprise then, when I ventured into a proper genealogy between the Burmese Aung San Suu Kyi and the alleged RWandan alter-ego one. It’s so uncanny I couldn’t keep it to myself:
| Names: Aung San Suu Kyi | Names: Victoire Umuhoza Ingabire |
| Education: Educated at the University of Delhi, then in Philosophy, Politics and Economics at the University of Oxford and at the University of London (SOAS), where she was elected as an Honorary Fellow | Education: According to journalist Edwin Musoni, Ingabire failed to attain the pass mark for public secondary school in spite of government policy favoring Hutu children. She was sent instead to G.S. Rambura, a school for mediocre Hutu students. According to her website, she has a BA from the Netherlands; school unknown…
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| Experience: She was the first woman to serve as Minister of Foreign Affairs of Myanmar, then Minister of the President’s Office, Minister of Electric Power and from 2012 to 2016 she served as a Member of Parliament. Before that she worked for the UN. She is the Author of: ‘Freedom From Fear’, ‘Letters from Burma’, ‘Voice of Hope’, etc.
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Experience: She was an accountant in Holland and currently a famous inmate in 1930 Prison in Kigali, Rwanda (Update: Released on a Presidential pardon) |
| Political Career: The First and incumbent State Counselor of Myanmar and Leader of the National League for Democracy. She became the General Secretary of the National League for Democracy (NLD), which won 81% of the seats in Parliament, but the results were nullified, as the military refused to hand over power, resulting in an international outcry.
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Political career: Member of CDR (Coalition for the Defense of the Republic) extremists whose sworn mission was to exterminate every last surviving Tutsi in Rwanda
President of RDR and FDU-Inkingi both based in Europe and both denying genocide perpetrated against the Tutsi. |
| Prize: Aung San Suu Kyi won the Nobel Peace prize in 1991. Rafto Prize, Sakharov Prize, Jawaharlal Nehru Award, Order of Australia, US Congressional Gold Medal, and Presidential Medal of Freedom, etc. | Prize: She never won but she was nominated (by her friends) for the Sakharov Prize.
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Use of Prize: Aung San used the Nobel Peace Prize’s 1.3 million USD money to establish a health and education trust for the Burmese people. |
Use of Prize: She used the short fame from the Sakharov nomination to fundraise for the FDLR. The Dutch Police found at her residence in Holland evidence of her collaboration with, and funding of the FDLR a terrorist rebel movement based in Eastern DRC that openly claims to aim at ‘finishing the job’ of exterminating Tutsi.
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| Father: Maj. Gen. Bogyoke Aung San, Hero, former head of state; Freedom Fighter; Father of the Burmese Nation; He was Assassinated!
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Father: Pascal Gakumba. Killer, genocide perpetrator. Sentenced to life in Prison; He committed suicide. |
| Mother: Maha Thiri Thudhamma Khin: Nurse, politician, member of parliament, diplomat – Ambassador to India, former activist, Burma’s first Minister of Social Welfare
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Mother: Thérèse Dusabe: Also a Nurse…of death. Killer, notorious nurse at the Butamwa Health Centre, Kigali, where she opened Tutsi women’s wombs. Sentenced, in absentia to 25 years in prison. She lives in Belgium, on the list of Genocide fugitives Tracking Unit and under Interpol arrest warrant
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| Husband: Michael Vaillancourt Aris Historian, writer, freedom fighter, academic and lecturer in Asian history at Oxford. In the last years before his death, he helped to establish a specialist Tibetan and Himalayan Studies Centre at Oxford. | Husband: Lin Muzeye: killer, genocide perpetrator, sentenced in absentia to 25 year in prison. The Dutch government is in the process of revoking his Dutch citizenship and open way for his arrest and extradition to Rwanda to face justice for Genocide, extermination and Crimes Against Humanity. |
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Associates: Ghandi, other fellows at SOAS, and all her counterparts Nobel Peace Prize laureates, namely Mandela, Desmond Tutu, the Dalai-Lama and now shockingly: Bob Dylan. |
Associate: Among FDU Inkingi officials who accompanied Ingabire when she returned to Rwanda to run for president, there was Joseph Ntawangundi. He had been convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity and left Rwanda. He thought if he came back as a politician, Human Rights Watch and other watchdogs would try to exempt him of his crimes. He was arrested and later entered a guilty plea. He is still in prison. |
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Detention: Put under house arrest for no crime, for almost 15 of the 21 years from 1989 to 2010, becoming one of the world’s most prominent political prisoners. |
Detention: sentenced to eight years in jail for crimes of terrorism, endangering state security and denying the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi. (Update: Offered, with other prisoners a presidential pardon and released.) |
None of the things mentioned above reflect my opinion, it is all documented facts. While we would welcome a leader such as Aung San Suu Kyi (Update: This was written before the Rohingya controversy) our well-wishers insist Ingabire is good enough for us; she is the person who must bring democracy to Rwanda, like her alleged alter ego has done in Burma. Rwanda has achieved progress, they all admit, but at the expense of democracy. I thought I’d missed something, yet the more I dug the more confused I got as to the true intentions of those promoting Ingabire as our democracy champion.
It is prima facie assumed that if development is being achieved, there must be infringement on democracy and freedom. Meanwhile, Rwandans assure the UN, Rights watchdogs, the international community, etc., that they are achieving development, while providing formidable freedoms and democracy to the people, in fact, we’ve all spared some time to pitch in, all to no avail.
But wait a minute; is there something we aren’t told? Is what is demanded of us incompatible with progress? Could we be loved, if we were hopeless, helpless? Are we assured of fish handouts, should we promise never to dream of learning how to fish?
Perhaps we started off on the wrong foot then. We are playing a game of pretense are we? Can we drop the act and speak openly to one other? Will they finally tell us: ‘We designed this thing to ensure that you lot never come out of poverty, but you aren’t being good students.’ Is there something sinister behind our progress, or perhaps behind their theories? Whose system is rotten, really?
Tired of our answers to everything, new things are made up for us: Human Rights Watch reports that in Rwanda there are hidden detention facilities where street children and vendors are routinely tortured.
I looked up torture and this is what I found: Torture, from when it was introduced during the 500-1500 C.E Medieval Inquisition by Pope Innocent IV, as Ad extirpanda, to when it was recently re-baptized by America’s CIA as ‘Enhanced Interrogation Techniques’, has had one specific goal: To extirpate Information. Confession of sin in the case of the Church and vital terror plans in the case of the CIA; whose leaders insist that torture of alleged terrorists at Guantamo bay is necessary and helped save American lives.
While they’ve repeatedly reported torture in our ‘hidden jails’, watch dogs haven’t indicated the type of vital urban planning – or national security information, that the police, or the city council stand to extirpate from street vendors and street children. I visited the reported ‘secret facilities’ they are a secret to no one. “Iwawa” for instance is a youth rehabilitation center on an island in lake Kivu where parents send their children for drugs rehab. The center is fully booked! At anytime of the year, there is a long waiting list, waiting for a slot to open, for parents who made a demand for their children, whom they usually send to study in the West and pick up drugs and alcoholism instead habits. The center is as effective as it is popular.
Dystonia books are written with typical Hollywood baiting intents: ‘In Praise of Blood’. Allegations with unattributed sources or shameless boomerang self-quoting; Filip Reyntjens quotes Michela Wrong, who quotes Anjan Sundaram, back to Human Rights Watch and off to Sonia Roley and turn to Lewis Mudge whom happens to work for Human Rights Watch, and so on.
How do I know their names? Easy; they once wrote an anti-Rwanda compendium and featured in a genocide denial documentary. I still have the book; ‘Remaking Rwanda’; its table of content is a list of all people who tried and failed to, well, remake Rwanda. And the film: ‘Untold story’, its credits would give a genocide survivor a heart attack…
Hired guns: Michela wrong; Anjan Sundaram, Judy Rever, all claiming to risk their lives to tell the Rwandan hidden story. Publishing titles with typical immodesty; ‘The last Journalist in a Dictatorship’, ‘Remaking Rwanda’, ‘Untold Story’, yet they find the strength to accuse Rwanda of propaganda. To paraphrase Julian Assange, Dystopia novellas: ‘by someone who wasn’t there, doesn’t know, doesn’t belong and doesn’t understand…’ We, living here are constantly baffled…
In all that, Trump is elected, Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson run the separatist UK and Angela Merkel seeks a fourth term while Marine Le Pen is at the brink of ruling France. The “democracy” Kool-Aid will be hard to drink, this time.