Q&A with Michela Wrong
"Rwigyema’s death was one of those moments when history could have gone down one path but took another."
Throughout the Orwell Festival we’ve been sharing new writing and insights from this year’s finalists. The Orwell Prizes for Political Writing and Political Fiction 2022 shortlists, released last month, highlight the finest politically engaged books published in 2021. To see the lists, visit our website here.
Michela Wrong is the author of Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an Africa Regime Gone Bad, a finalist for The Orwell Prize for Political Writing 2022. Described by the late John le Carré as a ‘withering assault on the murderous Rwandan regime of Paul Kagame’, Do Not Disturb uses the story of Patrick Karegeya - once Rwanda’s head of external intelligence and a quicksilver operator of supple charm - to paint the portrait of a modern African dictatorship created in the chilling likeness of the president who sanctioned his former friend’s murder. We asked Wrong about the history of Rwandan politics, the UK’s new ‘partnership’ with the country - and the personal attacks she continues to face for her reporting.
Michela Wrong will be appearing at The Orwell Festival at University College London, Bloomsbury, on Tuesday 12th July as part of a special panel discussion on ‘crackdown on dissent’ across the globe. Tickets from just £6 via the link below or www.orwellfestival.co.uk.
Is Rwandan politics sui generis?
There are obvious analogies with the politics in Eritrea: another small, militaristic African state where a control-freak president turned on his former comrades and hijacked a once-promised democracy. And of course there are echoes of Israel in the way the Rwandan government puts the memory of its 1994 genocide to tactical use on the international stage, reminding the world of past indifference to a community’s suffering when human rights concerns bubble up. But you can only take the parallels so far. Each country’s historic circumstances, and therefore its politics, are unique.
Do Not Disturb charts the transformation of the ruling Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) from its birth in Uganda to what you describe as an authoritarian regime today - and your initial admiration of the RPF to your horror at it now. Can you outline the journey the party went on? Was this trajectory inevitable?
It wasn’t inevitable at all. Former members of the RPF will tell you that the death of Fred Rwigyema, the movement’s inspirational young military leader, changed everything, that Rwanda would be a very different place had he lived. Rwigyema was an instinctive conciliator, a member of the Tutsi minority who strongly believed Rwanda’s Hutu majority had to be included in any future dispensation for peace to prevail. He was killed on the second day of the RPF’s 1990 invasion of Rwanda and his boyhood friend Paul Kagame then took over. Kagame was a completely different character: unpopular in the ranks and crippled by an inferiority complex. He has had to use fear and intimidation to impose himself. While in Rwanda today all mention of “Hutu” and “Tutsi” is banned, Kagame’s regime – in which Tutsis hold the levers of power – constantly reminds Tutsis of their possible annihilation and Hutus of their collective guilt. That’s not a recipe for future harmony.
So Rwigyema’s death was one of those moments when history could have gone down one path but took another. Bit by bit after that, you see the RPF becoming an ever more ruthless movement. The massacres of Hutu civilians as the RPF occupied northern Rwanda, largely unreported at the time, were early clues. Exiled members of the RPF elite say Kagame then ordered the plane carrying President Juvenal Habyarimana to be shot out of the sky on April 6, 1994, precipitating one of the worst atrocities of the 20th century. Kagame denies it, but the seniority of those making the claims gives them a certain credibility. After that came the mass killings of Hutu refugees in the forests of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), thoroughly documented by the UN. And of course there’s been a sustained campaign of targeted political assassination, from the shooting of former interior minister Seth Sendashonga in Kenya to the strangling of former spy chief Patrick Karegeya in South Africa and gunning down, just last year, of businessman Revocat Karemangingo in Mozambique. Confronted with that track record of extreme violence, I don’t understand how anyone can regard Kagame as a benevolent despot. The term is an oxymoron in any case, but Kagame certainly isn’t one.
Rwanda has been in the British news a great deal recently. What do you make of the relationship of the British state to Kagame and the RPF? How have schemes like this been received in Rwanda?
The asylum seekers off-shore processing deal is massively cynical on both sides. In the UK, a government past its sell-by date is distracting attention from domestic scandals by pandering to the section of its electorate that feels beleaguered by immigration. In the process, it’s willing to bury concerns British officials voiced only last year about Rwanda’s human rights record and turn a blind eye to Rwandan support for a proxy rebel group creating tens of thousands of refugees in Uganda and DRC as we speak. As for Rwanda, the regime is already struggling to integrate 140,000 existing Congolese and Burundian refugees living in tented camps. As Africa’s most densely-populated nation, the Rwandan government knows it has neither jobs nor land to offer new arrivals. But Rwanda wins brownie points by offering to help – Kenya, Ghana and Uganda all said “no thanks” - and knows that as long as it’s taking in British asylum-seekers London will hold its tongue vis-à-vis extrajudicial killings and disappearances at home and abroad.
As for what Rwandans think of the deal, opposition leader Victoire Ingabire has pointed out that a country where government critics are routinely jailed is no place to send people fleeing political persecution. But who knows what other Rwandans think? It’s really impossible to say. Ordinary folk learned long ago not to express anything other than sycophantic gratitude to Kagame in public.
You have come under significant pressure from those both inside and outside of Rwanda. How has this manifested itself - and how seriously do you take the personal attacks on you?
It’s been very unpleasant, but it was meant to be. Kagame, a former intelligence operator, understands the value of disinformation and he has a small army of trolls hard at work on social media. Instead of openly addressing the issues raised in my book – Rwanda’s international campaign of assassination and intimidation – intelligence agents smear and slur anonymously, all day long, while Kagame’s supporters in the West try to get writers like me no platformed and have my events cancelled. What we saw during the recent Commonwealth summit in Kigali was this gleaming, modern African city. But I laugh when people talk up Rwanda as a sophisticated, far-sighted state where women’s rights are respected. Kagame’s trolls call me a prostitute and a foreign agent, a genocide-denier and a racist. I was one of the many journalists who covered the genocide, for God's sake. Foreign donors, who provide half of the Rwandan government’s operating budget, really should spend more time on Twitter reading the stuff Kagame’s agents pump out: it’s an education. This is the real face of Kagame’s Rwanda: crass, vindictive and sexist.
Michela Wrong is a writer and journalist with nearly thirty years’ experience of covering Africa. She joined Reuters news agency in the early 1980s and was posted as a foreign correspondent to Italy, France and Ivory Coast. She became a freelance journalist in 1994, when she moved to then-Zaire and found herself covering both the genocide in Rwanda and the final days of dictator Mobutu Sese Seko for the BBC and Reuters. She later moved to Kenya, where she spent four years covering east, west and central Africa for the Financial Times. She has written five books on African themes. Her latest, Do Not Disturb, has been shortlisted for The Orwell Prize for Political Writing 2022.