Since 1994 when the Rwandese Patriotic Front (RPF) stopped the Genocide against the Tutsi, while the international community watched and did nothing, Rwanda’s leadership focused on dealing with the country’s problems without foreign interference.

The ‘super powers’ thought it was impossible for an African country to avoid the West’s influence in its internal politics. But the RPF-led government proved them wrong.

And, as things stand, Rwanda has to be punished for being resilient and self-reliant. Its determined leaders must be punished; especially for not becoming Western puppets and beggars.

For almost three decades, the east African country is depicted as a bad boy, or the villain, in the eyes of the Global North.

A number of political tools –Human Rights Watch reports and Amnesty International's, among others – are used to bully Rwanda’s leadership.

Richard Johnson, a retired American diplomat who exposed HRW’s discourse on Rwanda, in 2013, noted that over the years, it was “viscerally hostile to the RPF” which defeated the genocidal Hutu Power regime in 1994, and systematically biased in favor of letting unrepentant Hutu Power political forces back into Rwandan political life.

HRW bolstered its campaign to make Hutu Power parties look good and thus worthy of renewed participation in Rwandan politics by also trying to make Rwandan laws that keep them out look bad.

Instead of mobilizing countries to arrest Rwandan genocide fugitives and bring them to book, HRW shields and uses the genocidaires and other criminals as its ‘credible sources’ in a relentless campaign against the Rwandan government.

In the latest ‘report’ published on October 10, titled “Join Us or Die’ Rwanda’s Extraterritorial Repression,” HRW interviewed Joseph Mazimpaka, alias Joseph Bahati Mbanda, a genocide fugitive arrested in 2009 but later escaped from prison in Southern Rwanda and fled to Tanzania through Uganda and Kenya.

“Thus its desired picture is complete: Rwanda uses aberrant laws to persecute legitimate opposition parties. This has achieved the status of a ‘meme’ in Western discourse about Rwanda. Rwanda’s post-genocide constitution and laws restrict the freedoms of speech and association by banning genocide ideology, genocide denial, discrimination, sectarianism and divisionism;” Johnson noted.

Since 2017, the Rwandan government does not respond to questions from HRW, after seven individuals whom the organisation had claimed to be executed, showed up in Kigali alive and well.

It was six years after the Rwandan government in 2011 pointed out that just as the country was on course to achieve a diverse political discourse, Amnesty International once again chose to misrepresent reality “in an inaccurate and highly partisan report”.

“Amnesty International refuses to acknowledge the significant developments that directly address some of its own recommendations, preferring instead to make unsubstantiated claims about Rwanda.”

That was after Amnesty’s ‘report’ titled “Unsafe to Speak Out: Restrictions on Freedom of Expression in Rwanda” released in June 2011.

While most of their reporters have never set a foot in the country, they write that Rwanda is ‘ruled by monsters and blood-thirsty individuals’. For them, Rwanda is a country where people live in perpetual fear.

Despite their lies, for example, a 2022 survey by Usebounce.com ranked Rwanda as the safest country in Africa and the sixth globally for solo travelers, based on the score of the crime index, and the score of the security index.

Rwanda is also ranked first in Africa and 42nd globally in adherence to rule of law, according to the World Justice Project (WJP)'s Rule of Law Index 2022.

Though, HRW’s professional detractors know the truth, they continously opt to fabricate lies to satisfy the West’s sinister agenda; to tarnish the image of the government of Rwanda.