Rwanda’s Khashoggi: who killed the exiled spy chief?

In five-star hotels, the “Do Not Disturb” sign exerts a strange kind of magic. Privacy is the rich man’s prerequisite, and staff are trained never to enter a room when the sign dangles off the door handle, whatever they suspect might be taking place within: a session with a professional escort, a drug deal, an alcoholic binge. None of their business.

The Michelangelo hotel, in Johannesburg’s upmarket Sandton district, looks a tad dated these days, but it is still one of the most popular meeting places for African government ministers, celebrities and local VIPs – the kind of establishment that prides itself on its discretion. So when, on 1 January 2014, a young Rwandan accountant called David Batenga turned up at the Michelangelo and demanded that staff open room 905, the initial reaction was blank refusal. The guest had hung out the “Do Not Disturb” sign, the receptionist told him.

In South Africa the Christmas and new year break is a time when schools, shops and government offices close and everyone heads for the beach. Karegeya had moved his family to the US a few years earlier out of concern for their safety, so he was hungry for company. The visit of Apollo, a young man with something of a playboy reputation, had looked just the ticket.

But now Karegeya wasn’t picking up calls or answering messages – unusual behaviour for a man who was rarely off his various smartphones. He hadn’t even called his wife and their three children to wish them a happy new year. It was totally out of character. Batenga had spotted his uncle’s car sitting in the Michelangelo’s parking lot, he told the hotel receptionist – he must be on the premises.

Inside room 905, where the television was playing at full volume, Karegeya lay on his back on the double bed, his hands on either side of his face, streaks of dried blood around his nose and ears. Normally light-skinned, his complexion had turned livid: he’d almost certainly been strangled, then covered in a duvet. A curtain cord and a bloodied towel had been stuffed into the room’s safe. Apollo was gone.

Apollo, Karegeya’s family and friends claim, had been the decoy in a carefully prepared trap. Karegeya had been a key member of the rebel group that took control of Rwanda after the genocide in 1994, and was appointed head of external intelligence by Paul Kagame, Rwanda’s leader and his longtime friend. But he fell out with Kagame and fled the country in 2008, setting up an opposition party in exile in South Africa. Apollo befriended Karegeya and the two became drinking buddies in Johannesburg – Karegeya’s grieving family suspect on direct orders from Rwandan intelligence.

Karegeya had every reason to believe that the regime he had done so much to establish was now out to kill him. He and the other three founders of the opposition party in exile, the Rwanda National Congress (RNC), had been tried in absentia by a military court in Rwanda, which found them guilty of threatening state security and sentenced them to 24-year prison terms. One of the charges – which all four denied – was responsibility for a spate of grenade attacks in Rwanda’s capital, Kigali, in 2010.

But Karegeya had sent his government bodyguards packing. A freewheeling, irreverent spirit, he found the constant supervision unbearable and decided instead to rely on his decades of intelligence experience and network of contacts to keep a step ahead of his enemies. One basic rule: all meetings must take place in public. He had apparently broken that rule on New Year’s Eve at the Michelangelo.

“The only way they could get to my uncle was via a friend,” said Batenga. “To get him into that room, it had to be someone he trusted implicitly. That was always Uncle’s weak point, and they knew it: the faith he placed in his friends.”

The reaction to Karegeya’s murder in Rwanda – especially among his former friends and colleagues – was jarringly gleeful. “When you choose to be a dog, you die like a dog,” Rwanda’s defence minister declared, “and the cleaners will wipe away the trash so that it does not stink.” The country’s prime minister, Pierre Habumuremyi, said: “Betraying citizens and their country that made you a man shall always bear consequences to you.” When Karegeya’s daughter expressed her shock at the triumphalist celebration of her father’s murder, Rwanda’s foreign minister, Louise Mushikiwabo, replied with a tweet: “This man was a self-declared enemy of Gov & my country, U expect pity?”

When quizzed by a western reporter, Kagame delivered an answer calculated for the benefit of his country’s international allies and donors. “Rwanda did not kill this person – and it’s a big ‘no’.” Yet he could not resist a follow-up: “But I add that, I actually wish Rwanda did it. I really wish it.”

Kagame’s message to Rwanda’s domestic audience was far more direct. He chose to deliver it, of all places, at a prayer breakfast in Kigali, and it was presented with an admonishing finger and a cold smile. “Whoever betrays the country will pay the price, I assure you,” he told a small crowd of nervous-looking dignitaries and their wives.

“Any person still alive who may be plotting against Rwanda, whoever they are, will pay the price,” Kagame said. “Whoever it is, it is a matter of time.”

This week, five years after Karegeya’s murder, an inquest into what happened at the Michelangelo hotel will finally open in a high court in Randburg, a north-west suburb of Johannesburg. State prosecutor Yusuf Baba has told magistrate Jeremiah Matopa he intends calling at least 30 witnesses. Hearings are expected to stretch into February.

“This is South Africa’s Khashoggi,” a member of the South African judiciary told me. “And by rights, it should receive the same kind of press coverage and raise the same kind of questions.” The murder of the Saudi dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Turkey last October prompted worldwide condemnation – but there was only a brief spasm of conscience among allies and trading partners of the Saudi monarchy before business as usual largely resumed.

The inquest into Karegeya’s killing will raise thornier ethical questions about the engagement between western donor nations and the countries emerging from civil war and famine, many of them African, they seek to help. The 1994 Rwanda genocide, in which up to a million Tutsis and Hutus died, was sparked when President Juvenal Habyarimana’s jet was downed by a missile whose provenance remains hotly disputed. As fighting escalated, the UN actually evacuated its peacekeeping force from the country. Western states that did nothing to prevent the massacres have treated Rwanda with kid gloves ever since, in part out of a frequently acknowleged sense of guilt.

After the genocide, Kagame was hailed as one of Africa’s “renaissance” leaders, along with Yoweri Museveni of Uganda, Isaias Afwerki of Eritrea and Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia. These were all men who had seized power at the barrel of the gun, but who were considered visionary social and political reformers, dedicated to raising up “the poorer of the poor”. In recognition of what many saw as a unique, and inspiring, collaboration between western funders and African recipients, they were dubbed “donor darlings”.

The passing decades have rubbed the gloss off both Museveni and Isaias, while much of Meles’ legacy is being briskly dismantled in Ethiopia by a new prime minister. That leaves Kagame – whose country of 13 million people annually receives $1.1bn in aid – as the most prominent champion of a brand of authoritarian economic development embraced by many aid officials but deplored by human rights activists.

But Kagame’s tenure has been dogged by controversy ever since his rebel army, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), seized control of the country in July 1994. In the years after the genocide, international criticism focused on brutal events in the forests of eastern Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, or DRC) where the RPF hunted down those who had committed the genocide, slaughtering alongside them hundreds of thousands of Hutu civilians.

“This inquest is making Kagame really jittery,” said David Himbara, who once worked as Kagame’s economic adviser and now runs a Rwandan pro-democracy group from Canada. “It happens to coincide with a surge in US concern over human rights in Rwanda, and some very aggressive rhetoric from Kagame. It’s going to remind the world of Rwanda’s record on human rights just when he wants the issue forgotten.”

Public examination of exactly how Patrick Karegeya died will shed light on the chasm between Rwanda’s impressive achievements in alleviating poverty and its record of suppressing political freedom. The process is likely to reignite a long-simmering debate about how far the global development industry is willing to compromise moral principles in the service of stability.

Who wanted Patrick Karegeya dead? What is striking about this story is the intimacy of the links that bind its protagonists. Karegeya, Kayumba and Kagame were all Tutsis, part of a Kinyarwanda-speaking community whose territory historically fans out from Rwanda, spreading into the Congo, Burundi, Uganda and Tanzania. Traditionally, a Tutsi minority made up Rwanda’s cattle-keeping aristocracy, while Hutu serfs tended to crops. In 1959, an emerging Hutu elite enjoying the support of both colonial Belgium and the Catholic church launched a revolution. The Tutsi royal family was ousted and hundreds of thousands of Tutsis, running from Hutu persecution, settled in neighbouring countries.

Kagame, who is of royal blood, grew up in a Ugandan refugee camp dependent on food rations, bitterly aware of his family’s fall from grace. Karegeya and Kayumba, by contrast, both came from well-integrated Ugandan Tutsi families. But as youngsters during the 1970s they all bumped into one another at festivals, weddings and market days. Karegeya and Kagame attended the same secondary school in Kampala. In the early 1980s, when the Ugandan president Milton Obote began victimising their community, all three joined the armed resistance led by Museveni, an ambitious leftist revolutionary.

Their plan was to learn how to fight, in order to return home. Once Museveni seized power in Kampala in 1986, these trusted Tutsi cadres established their clandestine army-in-waiting, the RPF, within the Ugandan military. For four years they raised money and made plans. In October 1990, taking advantage of Museveni’s absence at a UN summit in New York, the RPF invaded Rwanda, taking a huge cache of weapons, trucks, boots and uniforms. It was an exodus with biblical overtones: the boys were going home.

For Karegeya and his fellow RPF commanders, this was a frantic, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants period. The Rwanda they took control of in 1994 had been devastated by the genocide. Putrefying bodies were piled high in churches, schools and stadiums, crops lay untended, buildings had been looted and shrapnel-shredded, the civil service and judiciary were either scattered or dead. Across the country’s borders lurked the late president Habyarimana’s former soldiers and extremist militiamen, plotting to invade.

During these years, Rwanda intervened repeatedly in neighbouring Zaire, spearheading a regional alliance that backed rebels who toppled the military dictator Mobutu Sese Seko in 1997 (at which point Zaire became the DRC). But Kigali then fell out with Mobutu’s successor, Laurent Kabila, and went on to support a series of rebel movements that operated in the country’s eastern Kivu provinces. All the while, the government Karegeya was part of was quietly helping itself to DRC’s deposits of coltan, diamonds, gold, tungsten and its timber. Rwanda’s new leaders were challenged by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International over human rights abuses, and repeatedly investigated by the UN for their role in the Congo conflict.

At the height of his power, Karegeya would unapologetically and aggressively defend Rwanda’s operations abroad, both military or covert, telling friends the Tutsi community’s very survival was at stake. Just like Israel, he would say, a government that knew from experience that no western power would ever come to its rescue retained the right to intervene well beyond its own borders. But with the passage of time, he began nurturing doubts.

To outsiders, the RPF seemed a close-knit brotherhood, bound by ties of genuine friendship, business, marriage and blood. Kayumba and Kagame’s wives established and ran a school together, the three couples constantly socialised, their children played with one another, and Kayumba is godfather to one of Kagame’s sons.

But the harmonious facade was deceptive. As Kagame emerged as the dominant player, unhappiness among former close aides grew. The RPF, paying lip service to ethnic reconciliation, had originally been careful to nominate Pasteur Bizimungu, a Hutu, as president, with Kagame (widely recognised as the real decision-maker) holding the title of defence minister and vice-president. In 2000, Kagame did away with that pretence, wresting the presidency from Bizimungu and arresting him when heset up a political party. Disenchanted former RPF members cite that event as a turning point in their perceptions of Kagame and his ambitions.

Always free with his opinions, Karegeya made his feelings known about what he saw as the drift towards totalitarianism. When he tried – unsuccessfully – to join his family in the US in 2012, he told the Department of Homeland Security in his application form that he had quarrelled with Kagame over Rwanda’s 1998 invasion of the DRC, the arrests and killings of journalists, the president’s denial of basic citizens’ rights and the consistent manipulation of Rwanda’s media, business and political process.

“It was not just me. Others were also unhappy,” he told a French journalist in the last interview he gave. “Some have paid the price. Others decided to remain silent for ever. It is a matter of choice. If you speak publicly, the consequences are bad. Some are dead, others were imprisoned, others in exile … ” He drew analogies with France’s Louis XIV. “It became clear that at some point, there was no difference between [Kagame] and the State. As you say in France: ‘The State is me.’ And now that he has all the powers, he behaves as an absolute monarch.”

High-profile Rwandans who decide to leave the country have developed a strategy. First, persuade a friend to drive you to the Ugandan border. Then, before you are in sight of the customs post, stop the car and get out. While your friend drives across the frontier and undergoes the necessary security checks, you swim across the river, and reunite with the car at an agreed spot on the other side.

Three years later, Karegeya was joined in South Africa by Kayumba, the former army chief, who was hugely popular with the troops. Kayumba had been sent to India as ambassador – the kind of posting twitchy presidents use to marginalise potential challengers – but made the mistake of returning to Rwanda to bury his mother. His military colleagues summoned him for a dressing-down, demanding he write Kagame an apology for a list of perceived infractions. Instead, Kayumba drove through the night to the border.

Together with two other Rwandan exiles – Gerard Gahima, the former prosecutor general, and Theogene Rudasingwa, once the RPF’s general secretary – the two men set up the RNC, and joined a coalition of Hutu and Tutsi opposition parties that hoped to mount a challenge to Kagame. The RNC’s combination of intelligence contacts, popularity with the troops and diplomatic and legal knowhow rattled the president. Officials in Kigali routinely describe its members as “terrorists”. The government in Kigali has in the past accused the RNC of merging forces with the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, a DRC-based group made up of former soldiers and members of the Hutu Interahamwe militia – an allegation calculated to shock still-traumatised members of the Tutsi elite, who blame those men for the 1994 slaughter of their families and friends. More recently, Kigali seized on claims in a report drafted by a UN Group of Experts alleging that a militia taking orders from Kayumba is being trained on a plateau in eastern DRC, a claim the RNC adamantly denies.

Few countries divide world opinion more dramatically than Rwanda. Where some see a miracle of rebirth, others see an oppressive surveillance state, a Potemkin village destined for eventual collapse. Articles by foreign journalists visiting Rwanda often seem to follow the same formula: they marvel at the pristine state of the roads, the absence of rubbish – Rwanda was the first African country to ban plastic bags – and the gleaming corrugated iron roofs (rather than messy thatch), and then ooh and aah at Kigali’s soaring skyline, its new conference centre, its investment in ICT, its streamlined bureaucracy and its embryonic welfare scheme. The fact that women account for half of Rwanda’s cabinet and 61% of its parliamentary seats gets an approving mention, along with statistics – on poverty alleviation, primary school attendance, maternal mortality, bovine vaccination and mosquito net distribution – that make hearts beat faster at the British Department for International Development, USAid, Oxfam and Unicef.

These achievements are usually presented by the Rwandan media as Kagame’s personal handiwork, a view embraced by visitors. Andrew Mitchell, Britain’s former international development secretary, lists Kagame alongside Margaret Thatcher as one of the two greatest leaders he has met. “It’s a very self-confident regime which has achieved miracles in the last 25 years,” he told me.

Rwandan newspapers, radio stations and news sites broadcast a steady stream of the president’s speeches and public appearances, in one long paean of praise. In certain quarters, the reed-thin, soberly suited president enjoys the kind of uncritical adulation abroad once lavished on Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi. A Wikipedia page dedicated to Kagame’s honorary degrees and awards from western institutions runs to 26 entries. Tony and Cherie Blair, Bill and Melinda Gates and the Clintons – all of whose foundations are heavily invested in Rwanda – are unabashed admirers. When the US philanthropist Howard Buffett appeared alongside Kagame at a 2016 conference he announced that continued investment in Rwanda was conditional on the president remaining at the helm.

Rwanda also punches above its weight diplomatically. Kagame’s one-year chairmanship of the African Union, which ends this month, galvanised the continent, as he launched plans for a continent-wide free trade area and lectured member nations on ending dependence on western funding. The president’s readiness to contribute troops to international peacekeeping operations goes down particularly well in Washington, which is determined to keep US soldiers on the ground in Africa to a minimum. Rwandan peacekeepers, known for their effectiveness in the field, are currently deployed in South Sudan and Central African Republic. Having invited the World Economic Forum to stage an African Davos in Kigali in 2016, he also persuaded the Commonwealth to hold its Heads of Government meeting there in 2020.

The post-genocide constitution drawn up in 2003 originally limited Kagame to two terms in office, but an amendment approved by 98% of voters in 2015 made it theoretically possible for him to stay in office until 2034. At the same time, Kagame has joined a number of African leaders who are careful to prepare no successors and to avoid establishing institutions that might one day hold them to account. Rwandan elections, in which Kagame routinely wins over 90% of the vote, are barely credible affairs and many of the organisations that routinely monitor polls in Africa quietly give them a miss.

Given Rwanda’s enthusiasm for advertising gender equality in its political leadership, it is ironic that two women who attempted to challenge Kagame in the 2017 presidential elections – which Kagame won with 98.8% of the vote – were both prevented from running. Diane Rwigara, a young Tutsi, was disqualified and later jailed for inciting insurrection and forgery. Victoire Ingabire, Rwanda’s most high-profile Hutu politician, was already in prison for genocide denial. In response to sustained US pressure, both women were released, but too late for them to compete.

Kigali is a city of tended flowerbeds and painted road verges, where it is safe for a young woman to walk home at night – not something to be taken lightly on streets where militiamen once macheted families to death at checkpoints. But is it also, according to human rights groups and Kagame’s critics, a land of sudden disappearances, mysterious car accidents, arbitrary military detention, torture and constant surveillance – where even distant relatives or mere associates of those who have earned the regime’s disapproval are considered guilty by association.

“Rwanda has done a terrific job of hiding many of these abuses behind the curtain of economic and social recovery,” Kate Barth, of the human rights organisation Freedom Now told a US congressional hearing in November. “The Rwandan government knows that its abuses won’t remain hidden for much longer,” she added. “It’s time for Rwanda to allow peaceful dissent.” Human rights groups report that intimidation at home has been matched by a brazen campaign to silence Rwandan dissidents abroad – with lack of respect for international borders redolent of Putin. A 2014 Human Rights Watch (HRW) report detailed 13 cases of former RPF politicians, military figures, intelligence agents and journalists who had fled Rwanda and been assassinated, kidnapped or attacked in Kenya, Uganda, South Africa or the UK.

“As critics or opponents of the government, the victims all share a certain profile,” the report read. “Prior to these attacks many had been threatened by individuals who were part of, or close to, the Rwandan government.” Despite government officials’ tendency to present Rwanda’s story in terms of a beleaguered Tutsi minority fighting for survival in a Hutu-dominated society, most of those targeted have been both former RPF insiders and Tutsis.

The Rwandan government has always indignantly denied responsibility for these things. But it is not just Rwandan exiles in South Africa who have been threatened – police forces in the US, the UK and Belgium have all given warnings to resident Rwandan dissidents that their lives may be in danger. Canada’s border agency has described a “well-documented pattern of repression of Rwanda critics”, while Sweden felt obliged to place an exiled Rwandan journalist under police guard, and expelled a Rwandan diplomatfor spying on Rwandan refugees.

Three months after the murder of Karegeya, another attempt was made on Kayumba’s life: this time his safe house in Johannesburg was attacked by an armed gang. In response, an exasperated South African government expelled three Rwandan diplomats. Later in 2014, a South African judge delivered guilty verdicts to four of the six men tried for the attempted murder of Kayumba during the 2010 World Cup – and labelled the shooting “politically motivated”. While carefully avoiding mentioning Kagame or any Rwandan official by name, the judge commented that ordinary South Africans were “sick and tired of the ongoing and senseless killings of foreign nationals based on political reasons”.

His words hit home. “That case was tremendously important because this was the first time Rwanda was caught red-handed. It showed the world what the Rwandan government is all about,” said DavidHimbara from exile in Canada. “Rwandan violence ended up in a court of law.”

Even foreign critics of Rwanda’s human rights record have been targeted. The Canadian journalist Judi Rever spent years researching atrocities committed by the RPF for her book In Praise of Blood, which was published in 2018. While she was doing her research, she flew to Brussels – where, to her surprise, the Belgian police, acting on intelligence, assigned her a team of armed bodyguards and an armoured car. She was told: “We have reason to believe that the Rwandan embassy in Brussels constitutes a threat to your security.”

The inquest in Randburg, which will include testimony from Karegeya’s nephew, David Batenga, and his widow, Leah Karegeya, may represent a reckoning for Rwanda’s international reputation. It threatens to become a reality check for the western governments, development agencies and philanthropic foundations that have backed Kagame while turning a blind eye to a mounting mass of worrying indications of human rights abuses. It offers a chance to re-examine an aid paradigm that increasingly privileges order and stability over democratic freedoms.

That’s not the way Kagame’s critics see it. When I interviewed General Kayumba last November, the realities of life under a de facto death sentence from Rwanda were apparent. I was driven to the meeting, whose venue I was not told in advance, by a South African bodyguard whose loose cotton shirt barely concealed a gun. I was eventually shown to a dark corner of an anonymous steakhouse off a busy freeway. When he appeared out of the darkness, the general looked in surprisingly good shape for someone who still has a bullet fragment from the 2010 assassination attempt lodged near his spine.

We sat with our backs to a brick wall, under the watchful eyes of his security detail. The continuing risk to the general and his fellow dissidents was recently highlighted by the case of Alex Ruta, a Rwandan intelligence officer seeking asylum in South Africa, who has testified in court that he was sent to Johannesburg in 2014 with orders to eliminate prominent members of the RNC.

“We have a moral obligation not to let this opportunity slip by,” Kayumba said of the inquest. “When Kagame kills in his own country, he gets away with it, there’s silence. If we cannot even have a voice in the place we have run away to, then what is the point of running? We should have just stayed in Kigali and supported the regime.”

For the general, giving evidence at the inquest represents a duty to a friend whose posthumous maligning by former friends and colleagues still cuts to the quick: “We must ensure that justice is delivered to Patrick, who did not deserve to die in this way.”

But the inquest’s outcome could reverberate far beyond South Africa. The principles of international development, insiders say, have changed since the idealistic era that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall, when the industrialised north felt the reconstruction of war-traumatised nations was within its gift, and dreamed of strong civil societies that would spread western values across Africa. In the era of Trump and rising European nativism, the focus has shifted toward backing “reliable” partners in the developing world who promise stability, law and order, and support in the fight against Islamist terrorism.

“There’s been a palpable shift. We’ve gone from the new world order, with its commitment to entrenching human rights and democracy, back to a new version of the cold war,” said Phil Vernon, a veteran British development consultant. “One thing you always hear about Kagame is: ‘He gets stuff done.’ There’s that phrase attributed to Franklin Roosevelt [about Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza García]: ‘He may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.’”

Andrew Mitchell, the former international development secretary, has no time for what he sees as criticisms delivered from “the luxury of 800 years of democracy”, saying: “There a tendency for Rwanda to be judged through the eyes of sophisticated western soi-disant liberals, and that’s the wrong way to view it.” The key question, he said, is: “What is the direction of travel – are they getting better or worse? Alongside extraordinary development progress, there has been, and is, movement in the right direction. This is a very tough, very good regime which makes up its mind on the basis of its own self-confidence.”

Opinion in the international community has splintered in tandem with Kagame’s former inner circle. Many feel that the time when concerns about human rights, or the military’s stifling presence in Rwandan society, would be best raised discreetly behind closed doors has passed. “We need to ask ourselves whether we’re going down the right route, as allies of Rwanda,” Vernon said. “Or whether we should be playing the role of sceptical friend, telling an ally when it’s done something which, in our eyes, is completely wrong – and saying so publicly.”