AfroAmerica Network
Kigali, Rwanda
11.26.00
A report evaluating the functioning of the Rwandan National Transitional Assembly (NTA) has unleashed a bitter power struggle between Rwandan President General Kagame and two Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) ideologues.
The report portrays Tito Rutaremara and Rose Kabuye, members of the RPF and the NTA as greedy, corrupt, and divisive figures.
According to this report, in 1994, Rutaremara took over properties that belong to Hutus and has refused to return them. It contends that he has used Hutu members of the NTA to destroy political parties. To achieve his goal, he supposedly relied on a Hutu henchman named Stanley Safari, a member of a predominantly hutu party, the Movement Democratic Republicain (MDR).
The report says that Kabuye also grabbed houses owned by Hutu refugees when she was prefect of Kigali and rented themout. It reveals that she has used the proceeds to open bank accounts in Belgium and South Africa. In South Africa she has received help from a former boyfriend, Colonel Joseph Karemera, the current ambassador to that country.
The report singles out two Hutu members of the RPF and accuses them of being "interahamwe" or Hutu extremists, a label applied to any Hutu the RPF wants to get rid of.
Rose Mukankomeje, a member of the RPF and the NTA prepared the report. It got leaked to the public before she formally submitted it to General Kagame.
As soon as Rutaremara and Kabuye heard about this report, they urged the NTA members to expel her from this institution. However, they did not know that General Kagame had ordered the report. General Kagame immediately let it be known that he was behind Mukankomeje's report.
A source in Kigali has told AfroAmerica Network that the 45 years old Mukankomeje was born in Kibuye where she grew up. In the mid 1980s, she went to Belgium to attend college. At the end of the 1980s she joined the RPF and became General Kagame's confident.
Meanwhile AfroAmerica Network correspondent in Kigali reports that General Kagame became furious when he learned that Kigeri V Ndahindurwa, the deposed king of Rwanda visited Kinshasa, Libreville, and Luanda in October this year. Neither Colonel Jacques Nziza nor Colonel Patrick Karegeya knew anything about the visit. The former is director of the Directorate of Military Intelligence (DMI) and the latter is director of External Intelligence at the DMI.
National Security Adviser Emmanuel Ndahiro informed General Kagame of the deposed king's African tour. Ndahiro is in Washington, DC where he is completing a certificate in strategic studies. Some Rwandan exiles believe that he is busy building a hit squad network to silence General Kagame's opponents who live in the United States. These opponents include: Kigeri Ndahindurwa; Sebarenzi Kabuye, the former Speaker of the NTA; Pierre Celestin Rwigema, the former Rwandan Prime Minister who resigned earlier this year; Professor Alexander Kimenyi, a former RPF ideologue who denounced and quit the RPF; and Edward Kayihura, the former prosecutor who fled Rwanda after failing to convict Catholic Bishop Augustin Misago using concocted evidence.
A diplomat based in Kigali told AfroAmerica Network that many Tutsi elites and businessmen and some of their Hutu allies have already secured visas at the United States embassy in Kigali. They are concerned that General Kagame's regime may collapse after President Kabila's forces liberate Bukavu and Goma.
Recently the Democratic Liberation Forces of Rwanda, a political and military movement that tries to oust General Kagame's regime announced that it had held a convention in Nasho, Kibungo. Informed sources in Kigali say that the support to this movement cut across ethnic lines and is growing steadily. There is a feeling among Kigali residents that this organization may strike the capital soon.
(c) AfroAmerica Network, November 2000.
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