The thing to know about Rwandan President Paul Kagame is not just that he is a dictator responsible for human rights abuses but that, despite this, he has a great many friends.

According to Anjan Sundaram  Rwanda is a state of Surveillance, although  Kagame,is credited with commanding the rebel force that put an end to Rwanda’s genocide over 20 years ago, he has turned Rwanda into a state of fear and a political prison.

Bill Clinton once hailed him as among “the greatest leaders of our time.” Tony Blair called him a “visionary.”  And the American Billionaire Bill Gates works closely with him. Despite Kagame’s dictatorship he has been allowed at Harvard University to speak on Democracy and received honorary doctorates from a number of universities in the United States and Europe.

The U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is also a fan, of the Rwandan Dictator telling Kagame , “I hope many African nations will emulate what Rwanda is doing. I highly commend you.” The praise inside Rwanda, in the press and public forums, is even more effusive. When I ask Rwandan citizens why there is no criticism of their president, I am told there is nothing to criticize”

Unfortunately known or unknown to the UN Chief, the political “opposition” consists of parties that refuse to speak out against Kagame even during elections, and recently the Kagame Parliament  scrapped the constitution’s two-term limit for presidents so he can run in 2017 for a third time.

Anjan Sundaram argues that the current Rwandan regime is no different from that of the previous regime that committed genocide, and according to him, what Kagame is doing is a time bomb which will explode any time.

Rwanda is like other dictatorships like Libya, Iraq and Syria, before they collapsed and Dictatorships destroy institutions like Judicially, Parliament, and Media raising the prospect of future violence. The opposition has been silenced, whoever, opposes Kagame will be killed, incarcerated or goes to exile.

Rwanda is like the former Soviet Union or now the North Korea, where silence is regarded a sign of peace or the so called lit clean roads as a sign of progress.  Kagame’s regime has silenced or killed independent media, and the only news that is fed to Rwandans is only good news like all the other dictatorships on the globe.

The many crimes that the Kagame regime hides is never exposed and is unlikely will ever be exposed because of the power he holds and the regime will crash all decent voices and many politicians and independent media have fallen victims of the most repressive regime on the African Continent.

Anjan Sundaram has argued that Kagame has maintained the same system of his predecessors that caused genocide for his own benefit.  Whoever criticizes Kagame, is killed or disappears, all people have the same talk even the leaders surrounding Kagame, for example  when Patrick Karegeya Kagame’s former spy chief and friend who became one of his fiercest critics was found dead in a South African hotel room in January, 2014 the Rwandan foreign minister, asked for the government’s response, tweeted, “This man was a self-declared enemy of my Gov & my country, U expect pity?” The Rwandan defense minister added, “When you choose to live like a dog, you die like a dog.” And Kagame himself remarked in a speech, “Shouldn’t we have done it?”

Not only was the president justifying a murder he was warning his critics that betraying Rwanda brings consequences. In fact, in Kagame’s 22 years as the de facto leader of the country, more than a dozen prominent dissidents have been assassinated, imprisoned, exiled and tortured. According to Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, in recent years perhaps half a dozen well known investigators, journalists and opposition politicians have also been found dead in mysterious circumstances, including a Rwandan Transparency International worker who was investigating police corruption.

Foreign governments, notably the United States, Britain, Germany and the Netherlands, are nonetheless lining up at Kagame’s door with praise, and money, desperate for a foreign aid success story after 50 barren years in Africa. Total publicly reported foreign aid to Kagame’s government stands at some $1 billion annually, of which the U.S. government provides about a fifth. It’s not surprising that these Western countries, as well as international institutions like the World Bank, believe Rwanda is one of their best hopes in the region: Kagame’s government known for doctoring statistics says it lifted more than 1 million people out of poverty.

The current Rwanda’s government under Kagame is responsible for the death of hundreds of thousands and has in fact killed more than his predecessors combined, Rwanda today is no different from the former Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin and Cambodia and Pol Pot in which 49 and 3 Million people died respectively. The West shares the same responsibility for what is happening in Rwanda under their watch.

Angel Uwera

Kigali.