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Human Right Watch joined bandwagon of RNC terror group
Former Chief of Staff of the Rwandan Army Faustin Kayumba Nyamwasa is one of the founders and top officials of RNC terror group.
Their
latest report, published on October 10, proved, yet again, that Human Rights
Watch has become a mouthpiece for Rwanda National Congress (RNC), an
exile-based terrorist group founded by Rwandan fugitives. In the report titled
“Join Us or Die’ Rwanda’s Extraterritorial Repression,” HRW claims to have
‘‘documented’ killings, kidnappings and attempted kidnappings, enforced
disappearances, and physical attacks targeting Rwandans living abroad, all
testimonies coming from none other than RNC members.
For
the past two decades, HRW’s collaboration with RNC has grown from strength to
strength. What has become clear is that HRW will collaborate with any
anti-Rwanda government groups as long as they advance its insidious agenda
against Kigali.
“RNC
members, or people suspected of links with the RNC, have been arrested,
prosecuted, and convicted in Rwanda” reads the HRW report.
The RNC was established in the United States in December 2010, when fugitives including Kayumba Nyamwasa, Patrick Karegeya, Théogène Rudasingwa, and Gerald Gahima, among others, teamed up to plot against the Rwandan government.
About three years later, Karegeya was found dead in a hotel room in Johannesburg, South Africa, and HRW was quick – even before any investigation was done – to blame the Rwandan government for his alleged murder.
It wasn’t
the first time, nor the last, that Human Rights Watch would report about the
alleged "repression of critical voices inside Rwanda" and that
Rwandan dissidents were victims of "attacks and threats" abroad.
Earlier, in January 2011, Nyamwasa and three other RNC cofounders, all former senior Rwandan government officials, were tried in absentia by a military court in Kigali and found guilty of endangering state security, destabilizing public order, divisionism, defamation, and forming a criminal enterprise.
HRW knows
that RNC agents, among others, masterminded grenade blasts in Kigali from 2010
to 2014 that claimed 17 lives and injured or maimed over 400. But it never
reports about that.
When
their plot to topple the government failed, the group resorted to terrorism as
their only weapon.
In
close collaboration with FDLR, the DRC-based militia group formed by remnants
of the perpetrators of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, RNC
launched grenade attacks in Rwanda.
Besides
the grenade attacks, RNC, on many occasions, declared violent war on Rwanda.
In
2018, RNC was pinned by a UN report as the major partner of the “P5” group in
eastern DRC. The group was responsible for masterminding terror attacks
against civilians during the night of October 5, 2019 in Kinigi Sector, Musanze
District. At least 15 people lost their lives, 14 were injured, with lots of
property destroyed.
Captured
RNC fighters described, in detail, the activities of the terror organization,
and their collaboration with FDLR, and other negative militia groups including
RUD-Urunana, and FLN.
In March 2021, 25 RNC combatants captured in DRC were convicted and sentenced to varying sentences for conspiring against an established government.
They
included Maj (Rtd) Habib Mudathiru, who was handed a 25-year jail sentence for
treason, intentionally forming and joining a rebel group, conspiracy against an
established government or the President of the Republic as well as maintaining
relations with a foreign government with the intent to wage war.
Nonetheless,
HRW deliberately ignores the fact that RNC is a terror group and, instead,
whitewashes their crimes, and calls them ‘members of the Rwandan opposition’.
HRW’s
collaboration with the terrorist group is a new low that only serves as a propaganda
tool meant to demonize Rwandans and their leadership.
