PRESS RELEASE

On behalf of the oppressed people of Rwanda struggling for justice, democracy and freedom for all, the Rally for the Return of Refugees and Democracy in Rwanda (RDR) asks all democratic governments, the United Nations, the European Union, the Organization of the African Unity, all human rights organizations and freedom-loving people and organizations to denounce, condemn and not fund General Paul Kagame’s dictatorial regime’s coercive and compulsory communist-style villagization program. Under this program, millions of peasants are forcibly displaced from their livelihoods, loose their homes, their land, their properties, their freedoms of movement and residence, and are caged into small territorial enclaves with marginal land while the bulk of the best agricultural land is allocated to members of the military, government officials and supporters.

In 1998 and 1999, more than 700,000 people in north-western Rwandan provinces of Gisenyi and Ruhengeri were forcibly moved from their homes by the military as a counter-insurgency measure and caged into NAZI-style internment camps where harsh detention conditions resulted in the death of thousands of people. General Kagame’s dictatorial regime has frequently employed the technique of clearing large areas during counter-insurgency operations and then killing all civilians found in supposed evacuated areas. This licence to kill in complete impunity resulted in the death of dozen thousands of unarmed men, women, elders and children, who presented no threat at all to General Kagame’s army.

When General Kagame’s dictatorial regime declared that the security has been restored in north-western Rwanda, displaced people were not allowed to return in their livelihoods. Instead, with no consultation at all nor any say in the plan, displaced people were settled in government’s villages along or near the roads in order to administratively control them easily under the disguise of modernization and improvement of access to social services (i.e. installation of water, electricity, and road systems). More administrative enactments and restrictions have rained untold cruelty, suffering, hardships and humiliations on a defenceless people. For the majority of the citizens, Rwanda has become a police state where they are made "prisoners in their homes", "semi-slaves in their own country". Fortunately, the Divine Providence has not endowed the RPF’s power-drunk autocrats with the power to ban the freedom forces out of the people’s hearts. The tragedy is that the RPF-led dictatorial government seems to be blind to the realities of the people’s situation and to the lesson of history that sooner or later the people will be free.

Initiated in north-western Rwanda, the coercive and compulsory villagization program is being extended to other provinces, particularly in Kibungo, Gitarama and Cyangugu, not affected by the fighting between the RPF’s army and the rebels. In those areas, the villagization involves the households abandoning their existing landholdings and being allocated new holdings by the village council, the legal entity in which land rights are vested and which always gives the best land to RPF members and government officials and supporters. Sites for the villages are chosen by provincial and local government administration. What the peasantry themselves think about the plan and their quality of life in government’s villages is completely ignored and doesn’t matter. Rwandan farmers like to be close to their land. If the nearest village is 10 miles away it is unlikely the lone farmer will want to move voluntarily from his home and property to a centralized village site. As the concentration of the population in centralized villages increases the distance between the dwellings and farms, all usual households’ soil fertilization activities undertaken on near-home farms are halted by the program. This has led to the fall in peasants’ food production and revenues. In the end, the villagization program will result in millions of impoverished and landless peasants forced into permanent servitude by becoming farm labourers or labour tenants on large scale farms belonging to RPF members and government’s supporters to whom the best agricultural land is allocated. The RDR calls for the total and complete dismantle of all government’s rural townships and for their internees to have the immediate, full, safe and unhindered access to their livelihoods outside these rural townships.

Done in Montreal on 13 October 2000

For the RDR

Emmanuel Nyemera, Ph.D.

Vice-President`