Kagame on Karake

They want to mask it by saying “No it is not us. These are the savages of Africa who kill each other. The genocide was between the Hutus and Tutsis; this is the normal thing in Africa, it is the normal thing in Rwanda. These blacks turn on each other and kill one another. It’s the normal thing. For us we have nothing to do with those things that happened.”

So that they retain the moral ground on which to always operate from, dictating to the very Africans. But it is not us. We are people of high standing and above these fellows.

Of course inadvertently they make one big mistake. How do you maintain any credible ground by associating with criminals who feed you, who advise you, who you want to flaunt as the people who respect democracy and human rights, “they have run to us, the government in Rwanda was about to kill them”.

Kill them? Since when did we become killers? These same people have killed more people than they can claim Africans ever killed. Among those killed, they have killed Africans, millions of Africans.

How then do we become killers? How do we give our lives to save our country and our people, and at the end of the day, we are killers? Just because you hobnob with these foolish fellows, actual criminals, in your country, who you use as witnesses, the ones with “credible evidence” that so and so did this. You are using criminals.

How can you take pride in hobnobbing with criminals? These Rwandans they use, even those who gave advice to those who arrested Karenzi are criminals from here.

One of them happens to now have dual citizenship, he is British and Rwandan. People see him on twitter every day, a fellow called René Mugenzi. How he wants to be of political influence in UK and then in Rwanda at same time, is going to be difficult. And there is another thug from our army who ran away, a criminal called Marara.

They move around and tell police that the head of security in Rwanda is in town, we feel threatened, because he will kill us. “Oh, OK, we’ll go for him.” That is one of the things that happened. Because this man, Karenzi, was arrested three or four days after.

In fact, we didn’t know, that is how much these fellows hold us in contempt. But these fellows knew. They were already writing, those of you who follow online news, these fellows Rene, Marara and some of their foreign friends living in Canada, and one in the US.

They were already writing talking about the arrest of this man on 17th of June. We are told that it is when the indictment, the request for extradition came from Spain. As for us, we only knew when he was being arrested. These people have already formed their own imaginary state of Rwanda, that leaves out who they work with, to determine what happens to us. This is not serious. Absolutely not serious. How can this be?

As I said last time I was here, somebody says we are really good friends, we even support your development, which we appreciate by the way. But do you support my development and take away my dignity at the same time? Are you really helping me because you despise me? Is that the meaning? You support my development but at the same time despise me. You hold me in contempt. This level of disdain is just unacceptable. To tell me, you are not good enough., you are not relevant enough, to deserve any respect from me.

This is what the story is about. So now how can the argument be extradition? You want to extradite this Rwandan general to Spain? No, you should not have arrested him in the first place. There are no grounds under which anyone should have arrested our chief of intelligence under any circumstance.

We are talking about justice. Justice has a course that it follows, which respects certain norms. So I don’t understand the grounds on which we talk about extradition.

Extradition to where? What right does Spain or any country have in this matter, to try Rwanda, to try this head of intelligence?

What right did this country have to arrest him in this manner, let alone now talk about extradition?

None of these things have any basis. They don’t have anything other than absolute arrogance and holding people in contempt. It is the only basis.

People talk about rule of law and they respect their laws, you can’t treat people like this. If this is how Africans must be treated, imagine if we arrested, even for a good reason, one of their chiefs of anything? Is that even thinkable? You know what would happen.

But it is easy to do it to the Africans. I think they must have mistaken him, you know, for this problem they have with illegal immigrants, these fellows who are sinking in boats in the Mediterranean, these brothers, sisters and children of ours.

The way they treat them is the way they treat this minister from Africa, head of intelligence. They really must have mistaken him for an illegal immigrant. What was he looking for? They know that he works with them, he has been working together with them on many sensitive things. That’s how they turn around.

But of course, again, in other places, Africans or black people have become shooting practice targets. You know when people are learning to shoot they have dummies made from paper or something. We Africans and other blacks we have become targets for shooting practice of trigger happy people. Whenever they want to learn to fire bullets, they practice on us. That is how far it has gone.

They want to hold in esteem the Africans who the Africans don’t respect at all. They are the ones they respect. Like these fellows I was talking about, criminals, petty criminals and thugs literally. These Himbaras and their sponsors. There is a man who used to be a businessman here called Rujugiro. We found out he’s the one who financed the hearing which Himbara had in another friendly country. Himbara appearing anywhere to talk about Rwanda, can you imagine? Why don’t they invite one of you to go and talk about Rwanda? Why do they invite Himbara? Because he has a bad story to tell about us.

Well, if there are bad stories about us, we will take care of that ourselves. You don’t have to take care of me; you don’t have to take care of my bad story.  I don’t take care of your bad story. If there are any wrongs here, if there are things that need to be put right, and there will always be things to put right, absolutely, we should be the people who can put them right.

But for somebody else to want to put right the wrong they may be preserving here is not the way to do business.  I think they’ve run this kind of business for so long that they’ve gotten too used to it. Pulling back from it is almost impossible for them. Every day it is sweeter to keep practicing the same thing, even as it gets worse with us and makes us angrier every day.

So we come here, swear in ministers, judges, MPs, and we just go. We go and do what? If we don’t internalise this and understand it. Any decent human being, any decent Rwandan, any decent anybody cannot accept that people will do to us whatever they want, because they can. No. We will do things with people because it is the right thing to do. And they should be doing with us, or to us, the right things. Not just because they can.

So we will keep our heads cool. You need to keep your heads cool, because these things can drive you to a level of anger where you can even make a mistake.

So just keep your heads cool, I’m trying to keep mine cool, I’m really trying. I’m struggling, I’m not finding it easy, but I know I have to keep the calm, that is necessary to do things right. It is important. Otherwise the anger that people might have about what others do to us can drive people crazy. They can influence people to make mistakes. And we shouldn’t make mistakes. But that doesn’t mean we can accept any mistake being done against us.

I think, in the end, we must and will prevail. It doesn’t matter how long. We learned in our earlier days to be patient. But be patient and not just hope for time. Time is important and so is patience. But it is also what you do in that time. Don’t just sit back and say you are patiently waiting it out. You must be patient while you are doing something.

These struggles we have been in, they take a long time. They require a lot of patience. But even more, they require a lot of hard thinking and a lot of doing. And simply have the right spirit that won’t be easily broken.

So those who take us on, we advise them that we are aware that we are in it for the long haul. We can absorb a lot of these things and still remain with our heads high.

There are too many things to say, I think I should allow you time to go have your own thinking, and more doing of things that can make our country better, in spite of all these things that happen to us.

Thank you very much.

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President Paul Kagame made this statement on June 25 when he presided over the swearing-in ceremony of government officials.