A year ago, singer Kizito Mihigo died after being arrested for his mourning song for the tutsis and Hutus murders. Now Western donors a full investigation into his death.
Last at sea February 17, 2021 at 4:19 p. m. GMT
Masses will be held this week on at least 4 continents to mark the anniversary of the death of Rwanda’s top gospel singer, but there will be a key difference between ceremonies held in the country where Kizito Mihigo was born and those held abroad. , no one will dare publicly ask how, or why, the baby-faced singer has come to an end. In the rest of the world, enthusiasts will demand justice.
The death of the 38-year-old star in police custody last February tops a list of cases cited through human rights and civil society teams calling for a basic re-evaluation of western government with President Paul Kagame and his Central African country. The foreign network to prevent the 1994 genocide, they say, has encouraged donors for too long to forget the grim realities of their Rwandan Patriotic Front (FPR) regime.
In the United States, activists’ attention is focused on Paul Rusesabagina’s upcoming Kigali trial, the hotel’s former manager, whose efforts to prevent his Tutsi visitors from being massacred by Hutus extremists have earned him Hollywood fame. FPR’s vocal critic, returned to Rwanda last August and faces charges for financing terrorism.
But Kizito’s case would possibly reveal more about the twisted nature of Kagame’s presidency, for in theory, he represented precisely the kind of citizen that the Tutsis-dominated FPR took the strength to protect. Tutsi fled his home in 1994 after Juvénal President Habyarimana his father was killed and his Hutu army and extremist militias began to exact revenge on a Tutsi minority network accused of the murder. His father murdered, turning Kizito into a survivor, a survivor, an organization that theoretically gave special prestige in Rwandan post-genocide society.
Deeply devoted and exceptionally talented, Kizito went to study music at the Paris Conservatory, where he embarked on a heartbreaking, non-secular journey. At one point, he had tried to enroll in the RPF to avenge his father’s death. himself to mingle with the Hutus and face the visceral hatred he felt towards this community. The traumatized youth decided to be informed pardon.
He returned to Kigali in the hope of implementing his commitment to ethnic reconciliation. One of the new government’s first acts to eliminate the rankings dividing citizens of the former Belgian colony into Tutsi, Hutu and Twa, and gave Kagame his Created a Foundation for Peace, which spread the message of reconciliation in Rwanda’s schools and prisons and obtained charitable state funding.
For a few years, Kizito might not do anything wrong. His songs appeared constantly on Rwandan radio and he was the performer of the selection every time the national anthem of the commemorations of the genocide was sung. I was on good terms with the first girl Jeannette Kagame, and rumors circulated that she was dating Kagame’s daughter. A weekly tv show made it a last name.
But he began to suspect that the regime, which controversially described the 1994 massacres as “genocide of the Tutsis”, thus abandoning the Hutus also murdered in 1994 for supporting democratic reform, into oblivion, was exploiting the prestige of the Tutsis. Victim of his network to keep the majority Hutu in Rwanda scared and submissive. Array felt repelled by the perception of collective Hutu guilt, shocked when the government suggested Hutus too young to take part in genocide to publicly apologize for their alleged crimes. In March 2014, he released a song that broke all official taboos. While the UN and human rights investigators agree that the RPF massacred tens of thousands of Hutus in Rwanda and the neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo before and after the genocide, Kagame has consistently insisted those killings were ongoing. . limited number and driven by the warmth of emotion. Kizito’s song, The Meaning of Death, challenged this narrative, calling on Rwandans to feel empathy for those who suffered genocide and the “revenge killings” as those deaths are called. With his eyes closed and a rosary in hand, the outstanding survivor sings that death is equally terrible for everyone.
The song reshaped Kizito’s position in the Hutu community, which had seen him as a puppet of the regime, but triggered a dizzying drop of grace. Arrested without access to a lawyer, he said the president had not appreciated his latest composition and that if he did not apologize, he is dead. Anguished, obey. The next glimpse that the golden boy’s audience had was handcuffed by the dolls and presented by police to an organization of journalists, accused of treason.
Kizito admitted that he had been in telephone contact with the opposition in Rwanda’s exile and was sentenced to 10 years in prison for conspiring against the government. Kizito traded the designer costumes of Rwandan high society for prisoners in pink uniforms awarded to Rwanda. But the criminal only radicalizes, he.
Rubbing the shoulders of the kind of men who had killed his father, he began to perceive the grievances of the Hutus, the grateful prisoners nicknamed him “the dove” in homage to his message of peace and the pigeons that mysteriously posed on the windowsill of his cell. Eager to debate, he used a smuggled phone into criminals to enroll in Rwandan activists and Western human rights teams abroad. He was obsessed with the feeling that he was running out of time and wrote an autobiography, sending chapters to which “I think they can kill me,” he told a friend in the United States. “I’m not sure I can do it. ” But locked up, he reached a kind of transcendence. “I had never enjoyed happiness and joy like the ones I discovered inside the criminal,” he writes in the book, published superhumously.
Released in 2018 under presidential pardon, Kizito learned that his freedom came here at a price; his passport had been confiscated and he was forced to inform the authorities; when survivors’ teams invited him to act, the government would make sure the state media blacklisted his songs. He was forced to move several times after intruders attempted to break into his space at night. “He learned he was still in prison,” Lewis Mudge of Human Rights Watch (HRW) said. , who was in normal contact. ” He went from being someone who was actually a component of the elite to monetary difficulties. It became clear to him that other people would not touch him with a barge. He began collecting data on illegal disappearances and detentions in Rwanda, using his contacts in prisons to become a de facto human rights researcher.
He was under pressure from Rwandan police inspector general Dan Munyuza, who was looking for Kizito to spy on the human rights and opposition activists who trusted him. Munyuza, who in the past led Rwanda’s fearsome Military Information Directorate, has been continually known through political dissidents as a key figure in the government’s plans to locate members of the Rwandan National Congress, an opposition organization created through former high-level FPR members.
“The threats were very direct,” Mudge recalls, “You have to start running with us,” Munyuza told him, “the leader showed you this generosity, now you’ll have to show gratitude. “The tension was intense. ” I kept saying, “I have to get out. “But it was about making plans, being proactive. There was never a sense of despair.
One last drop turns out to have been a verbal exchange in which Munyuza told the singer that he had deposited cash into his bank account in exchange for facilities that had not yet been lent. On February 14, 2020, Kizito and two staff members headed south with the aim of fleeing the country. Kizito’s face turns out to be his loss. He was identified in the villages he was passing through and police squeezed all 3 near the border with Burundi. A few days later, Rwandan police announced that Kizito had been discovered dead in his cell, allegedly using sheets to hang himself. In hours, a dreadful photo, very unlikely to authenticate, began circulating on social media. It shows someone who looks a lot like Kizito, mendacity in a pool of blood, bruises. to his head and neck. The man’s arms are firmly tied behind his back.
The Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative and HRW, as well as representatives of the British and US governments, called for an independent investigation, but the Rwandan Department of Justice ignored their demands and no investigation has ever been conducted. However, those who spoke to Kizito after his re-attack insist that he completed his long-term plans and gave no trace of a suicidal feeling. .
Why kill Kizito, a devoted artist popular with the Hutus and Tutsis?His friends and his circle of relatives, too petrified to be named, is dead because his songs have highlighted the hypocrisy of the post-origin narrative that the FPR promotes abroad. “Sought to unite Hutu and Tutsi, while the government relies on the department to govern,” says a friend founded in the United States. “He preached that we deserve to forgive, to make one nation, and they don’t need that. “Instead of protecting him, his fame would possibly have been a contributing cause. By targeting someone of such a high level, the RPF reported that no one was banned.
By connecting through social media, other young people from a diaspora scattered throughout Africa, Europe, North America and Australasia have already begun to mark the anniversary with 10 days of vigils and masses. His photograph embellielliating the Twitter accounts of many of those supporters, some of them. “Kizito has an emblem, a reference point, a symbol,” says Noel Twagiramungu of the Washington-based African Center for Strategic Progress. A former Prime Minister of Rwanda is calling on fierce opposition to unite on behalf of Kizito.
The anniversary comes at a politically sensitive time. For decades, Rwanda, Ethiopia and Uganda have enjoyed the prestige of “donor favorites” in the West, with their budgets driven through aid injections from the United States and the United Kingdom in particular. Accusations of manipulation in Uganda’s recent elections, the war in northern Ethiopian Tiger, and an avalanche of revelations about Rwanda’s brutal remedy to its critics abroad – the subject of my e-book Do Not Disturb – are causing fear about Western support. Now that the UK Department for International Development has been incorporated Affairs and Covid are pushing government budgets, the official appetite is waning for Britain to be noticed as an unconditional supporter of authoritarian rule in Africa.
Earlier this month, Freedom House, an American for democracy group, published a chilling account of how Rwanda is restitution, kidnapping and murder to silence dissent abroad, physically attacking Rwandans in at least seven countries since 2014, adding Germany, Kenya, Uganda and South Africa, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the United Arab Emirates. “Rwanda’s government is among the most prolific players in transnational repression in the world,” the expert group said, calling it throughout China, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Russia and Turkey for the “extension and violence” of its campaign.
During rwanda’s regular review of Rwanda’s human rights record in Geneva last month, British and American delegates surprised many by expressing their deep fear of Kigali’s record. enforced disappearances and bring perpetrators to justice. Rwanda’s government downplayed the statements as “un baseless in reality,” but surprised by the harshness of the criticism.
It will be attractive to see if these considerations resurface in June in Kigali, where the Commonwealth Heads of Government will be held. The election of the venue provoked angry protests when it was announced, and the status of delegates for Rwanda’s national anthem at the Kigali conference. Middle will be well aware that the singer who once crowned his patriotic words is buried on the periphery of the capital, a disturbing representation of everything that is wrong in Rwandan fashion.
Molestar. La story of a political homicide and an African regime that went wrong, through Michela Wrong, will be published through Harper Collins and Hachette in March.