The fight continues, declares jailed Rwanda opposition leader Ingabire

When the Rwandan Supreme Court handed female opposition figure Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza 15 years’ imprisonment last Friday, it nearly doubled her earlier eight-year sentence while also making her the latest victim of an ongoing clampdown on perceived political dissenters.

The development was not surprising for many inside Rwanda as the severe sentencing was a foregone conclusion in a country that does not brook any challenge to strongman Paul Kagame’s stranglehold on power.

Whereas the charges against those accused of standing up to the Rwandan establishment hardly ever vary, in Ms Ingabire’s case they were generally spelt out as conspiring against the authorities.

Last week the courts upheld a previous conviction for alleged terrorist conspiracy and ‘minimising’ Rwanda’s 1994 genocide, in which at least 800,000 people were killed by troops and extremists of the Hutu majority.

Ingabire, a Hutu, was also found guilty of spreading rumours to incite violence, and also of threatening state security and “belittling” the 1994 genocide.

MULTIPLE CHARGES

Both the defence and prosecution had appealed against last year’s High Court verdict, the culmination of a trial that had begun in September 2010, and which had been characterised by multiple adjournments.

Initially, Ms Ingabire, leader of the FDU-Inkingi opposition party, was facing six charges: creating an armed group, complicity in terrorist acts, complicity in endangering the state through terrorism and armed violence, inciting the public to rise up against the state, and genocide ideology. She was also charged with a vague count of “divisionism”.

After joining the Republican Rally for Democracy in Rwanda in 1997, Ingabire became the president of its Netherlands branch a year later, and in 2000 was nominated president of RDR at the international level.

In her own words, her political activities centred around the idea of “a state of justice where individuals choose their associations based on their shared political aspirations rather than their ethnic or regional background”.

In espousing such seemingly innocuous ideals, Ingabire would soon run afoul of the Rwandan political authorities and was thus a marked person even before her return to Rwanda.

Also vocal in calling for more women’s empowerment in Rwanda, from 2003 to 2006 Ingabire occupied the post of president of the opposition Union des Forces Démocratiques Rwandaises (Union of Rwandan Democratic Forces), the main coalition of political opposition parties and personalities in exile.

The coalition was naturally a thorn in the flesh for the Kagame-led Rwandan government, which has been accused of becoming increasingly repressive during the past few years.

For Ingabire, who had returned from exile in the Netherlands in January 2010, her woes were to come fast and furious as, after 16 years in exile, she was arrested for the first time in April 2010, just a few months after her homecoming.

LONE VOICE

Now aged 45, she has already earned an international reputation as a rare voice speaking out and challenging Kagame’s iron-fisted rule.

For her pains, she has been in jail since the arrest in 2010, when a raft of charges were levelled against her, even though she has all along insisted that her trial was politically motivated.

Pointedly, she was barred from standing in the 2010 elections — won by incumbent President Kagame, a man who has practically been deified by many compatriots, and whose word, according to many observers, is practically law in Rwanda.

Married to Lin Muyizere and a mother of three, Ingabire left her family behind in the Netherlands when she returned to her motherland in 2010.

Earlier, in April 2009, she had resigned from a lucrative job in the Netherlands to dedicate herself to a political career and to prepare her return to her homeland.

Having trained in commercial law and accounting, Ingabire had years earlier graduated in business economics and corporate management, still in the Netherlands.

She had then worked for an international accounting firm based in her country of exile, and was in charge of its accounting departments in 25 branches in Europe, Asia and Africa.

She, however, chose to abandon the position and, as the newly-elected head of her political party, tried her best to contribute to what she considered the crucial task of rebuilding her country.

“My objective is to introduce Rwanda to the rule of law and a constitutional state where international democratic standards are respected, where nationalism will at last be the cornerstone for all public institutions,” she had said upon embarking on her political career.

LIFE SENTENCE

Those aspirations were, however, torpedoed soon after her return to Rwanda, where there were frantic efforts to stop her in her tracks using all possible means.

As it happened, the authorities at first sought a life sentence for her alleged crimes, and last Friday said they were lenient when they sentenced her to 15 years in jail.

That was a pointer to how they viewed Ingabire, who had rapidly become a fire-spitting cult figure among opposition activists inside Rwanda and elsewhere; and who, before her incarceration, had been making speeches that sent ripples and raised eyebrows around Rwanda.

In the meantime, her political activities were making headlines around the world, particularly after she emerged as a daring opponent of President Kagame.

Not surprised

Ironically, her husband Lin only learnt from the Internet that his wife was facing charges that could have placed her behind bars for the rest of her life.

Taken aback but not surprised by that prospect, he went on record as saying he had not expected justice for his wife in the first place.

Soon afterwards, he regularly campaigned for her release at the Dutch Houses of Parliament.

“From the beginning of this trial I have had no faith in a positive outcome,” he was quoted as saying. “As long as Kagame is in power, no judge will come up with a different verdict.”

Although accused of denying the 1994 genocide, Ingabire and her supporters have studiously maintained that, in the now famous speech on which most of her accusations were pegged, she merely insisted that many moderate Hutus were also victims of the genocide, a fact, they say, that is already on record.

INCURSION INTO DRC

Ingabire further claims that there were many Hutu victims of the Rwanda Patriotic Army’s incursions into the eastern DRC during the decade after the 1994 genocide, and that all those deserved a place in the memorial of the event.

Not surprisingly, and apparently to make the case against her airtight, Ms Ingabire was being tried alongside four current or former members of the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR).

An armed group operating in the Democratic Republic of Congo, FDLR was composed partly of individuals who participated in the Rwandan genocide, and all the four members predictably incriminated Ingabire during the trial, amid claims of being compromised by Rwandan intelligence.

Despite her recent tribulations, in many quarters, particularly human rights and justice circles, Ms Ingabire has, for the few years since her trial began, become a cause célèbre.

Bespectacled and with a practically clean-shaved head, she invariably looked calm when she appeared in court in her pink prison frock, and regularly appeared in media around the world as the epitome of confidence and defiance.

Even when handcuffed, her calm, sardonic smile beamed through her almost provocative lips, sometimes breaking into a placid grin as she faced her accusers and followed proceedings at the court in Kigali, some of which she repeatedly threatened to boycott, citing judicial irregularities that allegedly weakened her spirited defence.

According to media reports, during the sentencing session last week, the Kigali court was packed with diplomats and her supporters.

And, at the end when she was handed more years in the slammer, she shouted out to them that “the fight continues” and urged them not to be discouraged by her jail term.

FEELING THE HEAT

But, while her long-drawn trial has been unusually high-profile, Ingabire is certainly not the first Rwandan opposition figure to feel the heat from an establishment that finds it hard not only to brook any criticism of its set-in-stone policies, but also to accommodate any deviation from the thinking of its supreme ruler, President Kagame, recently re-elected the leader of the Rwanda Patriotic Front.

Not surprisingly, the state-controlled Judiciary does not look kindly upon perceived critics of the establishment.

That might explain why, according to media reports, the Supreme Court judge who sentenced Ingabire last Friday calmly opined that the opposition leader should be serving a 27-year sentence for her crimes.

Pleading compassion, the lady justice announced that she had decided to show leniency by giving Ms Ingabire 15 years “because her family was based in the Netherlands and that was her first conviction”.

THE CHARGES

Ms Ingabire, was convicted of recruiting an armed group, complicity in terrorist acts, complicity in endangering the state through terrorism and armed violence, inciting the public to rise up against the state, and genocide ideology. She was also charged with a vague count of “divisionism”.