The Second Anniversary of the Rwanda People's Party

Message from John V Karuranga, President of the Rwanda People's Party.

Learn more: www.rwandapepeopleparty.org

(MALMO, Sweden) - As President of RPP, I hereby once more write to you on the second anniversary of the founding of our party and commend all of you in Rwanda and in the Diaspora who have stood shoulder to shoulder with the party for the last two years. We have collectively made great strides and registered significant achievements. On this momentous occasion, the party would also like to remember and salute those party members who lost their lives through RPF’s assassination policy and I would like to reiterate that, in spite of harassments and intimidation, our party will not be deterred from carrying out our historic mission on behalf of the Rwandan people.

18 years ago, the RPF/A of President Kagame captured power in Rwanda. This regime has now been in power since then and was re-elected for another 7 years in 2010, an election that most independent observers consider flawed and illegitimate.

The RPF’s rule has not brought any iota of peace and political stability in Rwanda. Instead it has inflicted one catastrophe after another on Rwanda and its people. While, foreigners are happy with a so-called economic boom, and some of the foreign cult evangelical religious leaders have been guaranteed Rwandan citizenship, 99% of Rwandan people still live in abject poverty, below the UN designated poverty level for human subsistence. Most Rwandans survive on less than $0.15 per day, which ranks it as one of the poorest countries in the world. Children and elderly people die of hunger, starvation and neglect. There is credible evidence that female orphans of genocide placed in foster homes have been systematically emotionally, physically and sexually abused by the people who fostered them and were therefore supposed to protect them. They are made to do menial domestic tasks like cooking and looking after children and their living condition is surely akin to slavery.

We dispute the assertion by some elements of the international community that Rwanda is a democracy and is somehow a role model for Africa. Democracy in Rwanda and freedom of association is virtually non-existent. Rwandan people live a hand to mouth existence and we challenge anyone to say they are free. President Kagame’s regime can only be best described as Animal Farm re-incarnated. In fact President Kagame could have written Animal Farm himself. His MPs have neither backbone, nor authority to challenge him and the fact that he has many female MPs in his government is simply meant to dupe his international backers because they have neither power nor authority. They are mere cheerleaders, more interested in their buttered bread and bacon rather than the interests of the Rwandan people. They see their constituents (more victims) in four wheel air-conditioned driven cars while their victims hardly have any porridge or milk with which to feed their malnourished children, while orphans of genocide have continued to be systemically raped and destroyed on daily a basis.

Our party condemns RPF’s policy of forced sterilisation of Rwandan poor. This is a crime under international law and violates the human rights of the person and of their unborn child if they are forced to carry out an abortion or sterilisation against their will. There exists more egalitarian programmes of population control today and most of these are achieved on the basis of public education and consensus, not force. Sterilisation of 700,000 Rwandan poor is totally unnecessary and is both cruel and barbaric.

Last month, Rwandan people and her friends around the world remembered the 18th Anniversary of the Rwandan genocide which claimed the lives of 1 million Rwandan people who were brutally butchered by the Habyarimana genocide regime. But it is regrettable to us, that we are regressing to the same policy of genocide. A few years ago, the Rwandan government abolished the death penalty yet it is the same President and rubber stamp parliament that have reversed this policy and today allows the killing of unborn babies and threatens its own citizens, many of whom have been forced to flee into exile.

Our party has continuously exposed the cruelty and criminality of the RPF regime, even in spite of its brutality and violent oppression of peaceful protests and democratic expressions of opinion. An example we can give is the assassination of our party member, Mr Charles Ingabire, a journalist and political refugee in Kampala on 30th November 2011. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) reports that, four journalists have been murdered with their cases having gone unsolved let alone investigated. We affirm our party is not going to be deterred by the brutal actions of RPF because we have a long term strategy of liberating Rwanda from tyranny once and for all so that our people can live in peace and harmony and collectively tackle the common and endemic problems of poverty and deprivation that afflict our people today.

Our party supports the establishment of Rwandan National Consultative Council composed of all opposition groups opposed to the Kigali regime. We believe that such a body would build the bridges that can bring all of our peoples together and so that we can together achieve peaceful change in our country.

We have for e.g. proposed a Road Map to Peace as a signal strategy that can get all of us Rwandan, of all hue and colour, and of all creed and belief, together around one table so that we can collectively chart a new future and rescue our country from over 53 years of suffering and misery. I refer in particular to a statement by Ambassador Frank Mugambage asking us to return home to Rwanda and join the RPF. This is not the way forward and the ambassador would be best be advised to study our road map in detail because we see no good in co-opting individuals and coercing them to join the RPF. What we need are comprehensive peace negotiations on the basis that we have outlined in our Road Map to Peace. Making peace is a long, complicated and painful process and cannot be achieved just by bribing or co-opting individuals or organisations who hold views different from those of the RPF. The road to a peaceful Rwanda is a long, winding and treacherous one but is one that can be conquered if we have sufficient resolve and unity of purpose. There has never been an easy walk to freedom.

Our policy is to bring perpetrators of genocide to justice, especially the leaders because we believe Rwanda cannot achieve true reconciliation without confronting the organisers of the genocide and bringing them to account. This is a task that the Arusha court has so far failed to achieve despite having been operational for more than 17 years now. At the same, the RPP will release all Rwandan prisoners convicted of genocide who have served at least 15 years of their sentences, as well as those non documented prisoners known as lodgers. These prisoners were misled and misguided by a small group of educated elite and many of them are capable of rehabilitation and of playing a useful and productive life in the new Rwanda we propose.

As far as criminal justice is concerned, we see no purpose in pregnant women, children, the old and the sick being confined in prison unnecessarily and we will therefore design other egalitarian methods of rehabilitating them. We also affirm our position to protect Rwandan national interests at whatever cost. We will never surrender a Rwandan citizen to be tried in a third country. This is why we have continued to advocate for the return of all Rwandan accused of genocide and those who are serving their sentences beyond Rwandan border to be repatriated back to Rwanda.

As a party, we affirm our position, that we are not fighting president Kagame as a person; instead we are fighting the entire RPF rotten system of which President Kagame is a part. The problem of Rwanda has been going on since 1959 till today. The failure of the Rwandan state to protect its citizens is systemic and can never be attributed to one single individual. It is unrealistic and fundamentally flawed to hold president Kagame responsible for the 1990 invasion of Rwanda or the killings that then took place culminating in the genocide of 1994.

We re-affirm our belief that Rwanda should aspire to be a united nation with its citizens enjoying equal rights in a peaceful environment where they can achieve their full human potential. We therefore totally reject past historical attempts to divide our people along ethnic or sectarian lines.

Our challenge as the opposition is to critically examine and expose Kagame’s failed policies while putting before the Rwandan people alternative viable programmes and policies that can rescue Rwanda and its economy from its current malaise.

As a party, we don’t believe that peace and democracy will return to Rwanda if president Kagame resigns or dies today. This is because, if he resigns or dies today, the RPF system and inner-cell will replace him with another brutal dictator even worse than him. We therefore believe that merely changing Paul Kagame with another dictator from within the RPF will never bring about the desired change we need. This is why the RPP is advocating for the comprehensive dismantling of the infra-structure of oppression and injustice that the RPF has imposed on our country and people.

We believe that the problem of Rwanda is a shared responsibility of all Rwandan. We all have a stake in what has been happening in Rwanda for the past 53 years. And all of us must be accountable for our actions. We bear responsibility for the numerous massacres and genocides that has taken place in our country since independence and even before. Therefore, no politician can escape responsibility for the suffering our people have gone through throughout the last century and still continuing. The RPP therefore sees itself as the voice of the voiceless. We bellow out a clarion call, indeed a cry for a new Rwanda, free of hatred, intolerance, nepotism and greed. As a party, we also reject the notion of Truth and Reconciliation Commission similar to that of South Africa. The South African model cannot work in Rwanda because the circumstances are different. In South Africa there was political violence and racial discrimination, but no genocide of the kind we witnessed in Rwanda.

As a party, we will uphold 7th April as official day of the anniversary of the genocide against our people for ever and even beyond the RPF government. We will also maintain and upgrade all genocide memorial sites, digitalise them and share them electronically with global partners. We will also seek to build Rwandan Genocide Memorial Plagues in the UK, Belgium, France and US, as a reminder and lesson learned from the failures of the international community in stopping the 1994 Rwandan genocide. It will also act as reminder and clear warning to the international community to react swiftly and aggressively to prevent genocide anywhere else in the world it is likely to, or threatens to occur.

RPP is now an established party in Rwanda and is fast growing as a national and progressive party. RPP has a clear programme, political, economic and social for our country and is now accepted as a key partner in the project of African renaissance.

Recently the party published its vision for Rwanda entitled: “Opposition Rwanda People’s Party (RPP) President John V Karuranga has spoken out on his political organisation’s plans for his countrymen” that was published on the party’s website, newspapers and social networks.

Since March 2012, the party secured electronic communication resources that will be used to broadcast its party programme to local and international audiences in due course.

RPP has also issued a number of documents which can be accessed through our website and on face book. We herein attach a summary of our first anniversary statement which is as follows:

Fellow Rwandan, the RPP, dreams of a new Rwanda to be an open opportunity society in which every person is free, secure and equal, where everyone has the opportunity to improve the quality of their life and pursue their dreams, and in which every Rwandan has equal respect and protection.

Our party, the RPP underpins the vision of the proper relationship between individuals, the state and society in the Rwanda of tomorrow.

We consider human freedom and dignity as the foundational concept that forms the values and vision of our party. Let’s join hands together to build a new Rwanda we want for our people. A modern Rwanda which lives in peace with itself, with its neighbours and with the rest of humanity.

We thank you very much and look forward to communicating with you on the RPP website www.rwandapepeopleparty.org and at Facebook: Rwanda Peoples Party