Why Is Rwanda’s Leader Sowing Chaos in Congo?

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

After the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, Paul Kagame was seen as a hero who had come to the rescue of his people. Since then, the Rwandan president has cultivated this image, and the West has been eager to believe it. But for Michela Wrong, a journalist who has covered Africa for decades, cracks in this story became too big to ignore.

My colleague Ty McCormick talked to Wrong about what her reporting has uncovered, including in a recent essay for Foreign Affairs. Today, Kagame’s meddling in Congo has brought central Africa to the brink of a wider war—and outside powers are doing little to stop it.

TY MCCORMICK

Michela, thanks for joining us. Welcome to The Foreign Affairs Interview.

MICHELA WRONG

It’s a pleasure.

TY MCCORMICK

So I want to talk about your new article in Foreign Affairs, “Kagame’s Revenge,” about Rwanda’s support for a rebel group that’s destabilizing much of the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. But first, I’d love if you could take us back and help us set the stage for how we got here. As a journalist, you covered the Rwandan genocide and its brutal aftermath for the BBC and Reuters. What do you remember thinking about Kagame back then, and how was he seen by the rest of the world?

MICHELA WRONG

At that stage, the feeling was that the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) had put an end to a genocide, taken control of the country. They were talking the talk of ethnic reconciliation. We were, all of us, very, very aware of the extreme violence, the horror that had preceded their arrival. We’d all seen the bodies. We’d seen the churches and schools where the massacres had taken place. So there was a willingness to give them the benefit of the doubt.

And as they installed a new government, and it was a government that had Hutu ministers in it, as well as Tutsis in it—it was a positive impression. And it has to be said that the diplomats who were in place in Kigali were also very positive about them, and also I think most of the NGOs that were operating in the area were pretty positive.

TY MCCORMICK

And what about Kagame himself? I mean, I realize that he was kind of the power behind the throne at that point—he was vice president—but how was he seen by foreign journalists, by Western powers?

MICHELA WRONG

He seemed to be very quiet—if anything, a rather retiring, maybe a shy figure, not somebody who exuded charisma. Often, he wasn’t someone that you really noticed when he came into the room. He didn’t have an aura around him.

I think now that we’ve seen a personality cult gradually establish itself around him, you’re seeing a very sophisticated figure, somebody who wears designer clothing, African designer clothing, and also what are clearly quite expensive suits and sunglasses. And there was really none of that, because of course the RPF, in those days, they were wearing camouflage. And I remember one of the small details that impressed itself on me was that he was trying to teach himself how to play tennis, so he used to go and practice his tennis. And I thought that was a sort of charming detail, that he was a sort of leader who was learning some social skills; because, of course, tennis is quite a social game.

TY MCCORMICK

So how do we go from that Paul Kagame—uncharismatic but still charming—to the one in your fantastic book, Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad; the Paul Kagame who is sowing chaos across the Great Lakes region, and who is sending hit squads to assassinate his political opponents at home and abroad?

MICHELA WRONG

Well, I think if you track his career, what you have seen is someone who’s come out of the shadows and really emerged as a key player. But he sort of caught people unawares, I think. I’m often impressed by the phrase “accidental president.” Sometimes, Rwandans will refer to him as an accidental president because, of course, he wasn’t even meant to be the original leader of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, that rebel movement that set itself up in Uganda in secret. That was supposed to be Fred Rwigyema. And Fred really was a charismatic figure who people met and they never forgot him, and his troops adored him, and journalists sort of fell in love with him.

Paul Kagame was not that person. He was the quiet friend who kind of hung around in the background. But I think what you’ve seen is that he has, bit by bit, eliminated all the other key players in the RPF, and has emerged as the sort of dominant player. What my book describes is the fact that these other potential leaders have either been jailed or they’ve fled into exile—or they’ve been murdered, as was the case with Patrick Karegeya, former head of intelligence. So I think he caught people by surprise. And it’s a story of a leader whose capabilities and whose ambitions were grossly underestimated by both those around him, but those also who met him.

TY MCCORMICK

You write in the book that there came a day when, “with a near audible mental ping, I realized I no longer believed most of the key truths upon which Kagame and his army, the RPF, had built their account.” What made you realize that maybe you’d misjudged him, and what was that moment like?

MICHELA WRONG

I think what happened with me, and I think it’s happened to quite a few journalists and analysts and diplomats and NGO people who have followed the Great Lakes, is that there’s been an accumulation of facts and incidents; and then, you know, you’re busy writing about other things, analyzing other situations, so you don’t dwell on them. But then there comes a point where you have to sort of sit back and add them all together, and there’s something about your cognitive process that you suddenly realize, “Oh, okay, I misjudged this.”

With me, I think there were two key elements, if I can identify them; sort of my wake-up call moments. One was the murder in Nairobi of Seth Sendashonga, the former interior minister, Hutu, a very impressive man who had been part of Kagame’s first post-genocide government. And he was shot in his car in Nairobi on the second attempt. And the fact that it was the second attempt meant that it was very, very hard to pretend it had been anything other than an RPF hit ordered from Kigali.

And then the other incidents, the massacres in the forests of eastern Congo in the late 1990s, when you saw a mass exodus of Hutu civilians from the refugee camps that had established themselves in eastern Congo, fleeing the AFDL [Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo] rebel movement and the Rwandan army—Kagame’s army—and many of them ended up in a place called Tingi Tingi, near Kisangani. And we know that there were many massacres there, and that it was the AFDL, but also and mostly Rwandan soldiers killing men, women, and children. The evidence of that is absolutely overwhelming. There’s been a UN mapping report, it was published in 2010, and it talks about 617 separate incidents. So I think it’s really impossible to look at that evidence and think, “Oh, this is an inspirational, progressive, former rebel movement that seized power.”

TY MCCORMICK

There are still people who do look at him that way—I mean, fewer and fewer of them these days. But I think, you know, why do you think that this image, that old image, has taken so long to fade away? I mean, one thing I find really puzzling reading your book is that Kagame often boasts about his crimes. He comes right up to the point of admitting them for a domestic audience while denying them for an international one. How is it that he still has so many supporters in the West?

MICHELA WRONG

He’s very good at playing that game of, as you say, nearly admitting responsibility. And also, his message in Kenya and Rwanda is very different from his message in English. So I think he’s always really telling his domestic audience that he is going to be ruthless with anyone who dares to challenge him, while at the same time, you know, officially and formally denying the responsibility for any crimes in front of his international audience.

I think he gets away with it because there’s this massive sense of guilt—a guilt complex—abroad, because, you know, the international community didn’t do anything to stop the genocide. In fact, if anything, the UN started withdrawing its troops when the genocide started in 1994.

But I do think also there is this inertia—and I’m aware of that inertia having been an element, you know, in my own character—that none of us like to admit that we got something wrong, especially if you are paid to analyze as either a journalist and analyst or a diplomat. That’s your job, is to assess what’s going on. And nobody likes to admit that they were naive, that they fell for it. So there’s just this tendency to think, “No, well, maybe that happened, maybe there were reasons for that, you know, maybe there’s a good excuse.” And then eventually, as I said, there’s this mental ping where you think, “No, okay, there are no excuses for what happened.”

TY MCCORMICK

You write that “one thing I never doubted, not for a second, was that a genocide had occurred in Rwanda in April of 1994.” But there are many other things that you’ve come to doubt about the story that most of us think we know about the Rwandan genocide. And part of what you do in the book is begin to set the record straight. What are the biggest holes in that narrative? What gets missed?

MICHELA WRONG

What gets missed? One of the biggest debates, of course, is who brought down the plane in 1994—the plane that was carrying President Juvénal Habyarimana. I was just in France recently, and that seems to be a topic of near obsession amongst the French media. And certainly I was amongst many people who—I read the histories that had been written at the time by people who knew Rwanda better than me, and they were all saying it was probably the Hutu extremists within Habyarimana’s own administration who brought down the plane because they weren’t happy with the peace agreement he had reached with the RPF. And as time went by, more and more people came out of the RPF system and said, “No, actually we did it.” And while I was investigating and doing my research for my book, I just had to confront the fact that so many of the key players who are now exiled members—former high-up exiled members of the RPF—were saying, “Of course we did it. I mean, how many times do we have to say it?”

There’s another big question mark about the death of Fred Rwigema, the charismatic military leader of the RPF—how he died. I give two alternative versions because I personally don’t know, and I was told both of those versions, and they both make sense, but I ended up saying I just don’t know.

So those are the two key issues. But I think one of the reasons why my book has a lot of reference notes—far more reference notes than any other book I’ve written or published—is because every single chapter in Rwandan history is debated and disputed. And this is something I try to address in my introduction, is that there’s an alternative narrative for almost every stage of Rwandan history. And I myself was trying, as I wrote the book, to try and work out what was the most likely course of events.

TY MCCORMICK

That flows nicely into my next question, which is, in the intro to your book, you write that “there are many points in the story in which I honestly don’t know what happened.” It’s refreshing and unusual for a journalist to admit that, and yet everyone who has ever been a reporter knows that there are some stories in which it’s just impossible to pin down what happened. Why did you decide to include that line so early in the book, and was there something about the Rwandan context that made it especially important to do so?

MICHELA WRONG

One of the issues I address in my introduction, and it’s a controversial point, is that when you meet Rwandans, you know, interviewing Rwandans, they will often tell you, “Be careful, because, you know, Rwandans are very good at lying, and especially they will often take people like you, i.e. white outsiders, Westerners, foreigners, who don’t know the culture, they’ll often take you for a ride.” So I was always aware of that when I was doing my research.

I was also aware of the fact that there was this track record of fabricated narratives, of forgeries, of documents that can’t be trusted, of testimonies that have been changed, and changed more than once. You know, so someone has given testimony, changed that testimony and said, “No, I was lying when I said that,” and then they’ve come back and said, “No, my original testimony was correct.” And that makes interpretation really, really hard.

But the reason that I am so open about that is because I wouldn’t have written this book if I wasn’t aware that I had got it wrong originally. You know, the book was triggered by the murder of Patrick Karegeya, the former head of external intelligence, and the realization—which followed on from his murder in a South African hotel—that I had misunderstood his movement, the RPF, the history of the RPF, and the history of his former close colleague, Paul Kagame. So I wouldn’t have written the book if I wasn’t concerned and fascinated and challenged by the whole issue of how you try and establish the truth of the Rwandan story.

TY MCCORMICK

So let’s talk a little bit about Patrick Karegeya, this former Rwandan spy chief-turned-dissident-turned-opposition politician in South Africa. Why did you pick such a complicated figure as your protagonist? I mean, it seems pretty clear by the end of the book that he may well have ordered similar assassinations to the one that ended up taking his own life. What kind of problems did that present as a journalist as you were trying to get to the bottom of this story?

MICHELA WRONG

Well, if you’re gonna write nonfiction books and not novels, you are dealing with reality. And reality is diverse and multifaceted, and I think you are always dealing with anti-heroes. And Patrick Karegeya was definitely an anti-hero. So, as you say, he was the former head of external intelligence who ended up becoming a dissident, going into opposition, fleeing the country, denouncing Paul Kagame as a dictator and a tyrant, and ended up being strangled in a hotel room for doing that. I think he sort of represents that complexity of Rwandan history.

TY MCCORMICK

How has the book been received in Rwanda itself? Has the regime made any effort to engage substantively with it? Or has it responded, as it so often does, with angry denials?

MICHELA WRONG

Well, what happened after the book came out was that there was this sort of onslaught of social media abuse, because the Rwandan regime uses Twitter very, very actively. I don’t know a single African government that uses social media as knowingly and as carefully as the Rwandans do. So there was an onslaught there, and I was vilified and sort of denounced as a neocolonialist, as Patrick Karegeya’s concubine—also as a spy, and claims made that I was paid to write the book by Ugandan intelligence because, of course, there’s a longstanding spat between Rwanda and neighboring Uganda.

But the really astonishing thing was that last year, Kagame was giving a very long press conference on Rwandan TV live, and he was asked about my book. And all of those slurs that I just mentioned, he repeated them—without mentioning my name or Patrick Karegeya’s name, but he sort of made it clear that he was talking about us. And I sort of thought, for me it was great validation, because it meant I knew exactly where those slurs and smears were coming from. I had never really doubted that he had ordered those attacks on me, but I sort of thought, “Okay, I’m hearing it now from the source. This is where it’s coming from.”

TY MCCORMICK

You write that you’ve written previous books that annoyed ruling regimes, but have never felt quite so personally at risk as you felt writing this one. Can you say a little bit more about why you felt threatened while you were reporting the book, and whether you still feel that way?

MICHELA WRONG

I do feel threatened. I was just recently in Brussels, where I staged several speaking events. I’d been invited by a pan-African think tank to give a talk at an African restaurant which has a room where they stage events. And a very deliberate campaign was started up on Twitter, and it was also taken up on email, and people were calling, anonymous phone calls from Kigali, and these were all directed at the restaurant where we were supposed to be staging the event, to claim that I was a genocide denier, something—as I said in my introduction of my book, I have never denied that there was a genocide in Rwanda. Why would I? I reported on it. But that’s one of the slurs that is hurled at me, and really anyone who criticizes Paul Kagame.

And so eventually, you know, the restaurant owner got cold feet, not surprisingly, and canceled the event. And we moved. I mean, we sort of outsmarted the trolls because we just moved it to another event in Brussels. And the pan-African think tank, they were very smart; they had three young men sort of checking arrivals, and they reckoned there were three people who had been sent to disrupt the event, to either heckle or who knows what they would’ve done. But they made sure they didn’t get access to the venue.

So, this is routine. This has happened to other writers, other people talking about Rwanda. This even happens at universities where people go to speak about Rwanda. There is a very consistent and very well-organized campaign of harassment and intimidation. And what’s shocking is, you know, this isn’t happening in Rwanda, or even a neighboring country. This is happening in Belgium. This is happening in France. You know, people are trying to do this in the United Kingdom, here, where I live, and in the United States. It’s international.

And I think the incident in Brussels really illustrated the theme of my book, which is, this is a government which has no compunction and no fear about doing this beyond its own borders. I mean, it reaches out well beyond its own territory to intimidate, to harass, to sabotage, and to silence its critics.

TY MCCORMICK

Speaking of reaching out beyond its borders, let’s shift gears a little bit and talk about what’s going on in eastern Congo, which is the focus of your recent Foreign Affairs piece. Can you just tell us a little bit about what’s going on there?

MICHELA WRONG

Well, what’s happened recently and what I wrote about in Foreign Affairs is the M23 movement, which is a movement made up of members of the Tutsi minority, Congolese members, has been rampaging, operating in eastern Congo and seizing more and more territory from the Congolese army.

And this is a very curious state of affairs; it started last year, because, you know, this is a movement that had withdrawn. It was active 10 years ago in the area—at the time, it was well known that Rwanda was supporting this movement, because there’s a strong allegiance between the Rwandan army and the M23. And it’s bubbled up again and become a really big factor in eastern Congo.

And when I say a big factor, the numbers are extraordinary. I mean, we’re talking about 800,000 refugees, Congolese villagers who have had to flee their homes. There have been massacres staged in eastern Congo by the M23. There’s lots of arming of local militia groups. There’s now an eastern African force, international force of soldiers who are intervening because they have been called in by the Congolese government, by Felix Tshisekedi, the president. Recently, Felix Tshisekedi has also asked southern African governments to come to his aid militarily.

So what you are seeing is this vortex—that the Great Lakes region is becoming this sort of vortex of instability. And the great irony is that so much of this is actually being initiated by Rwanda. We know from a UN mapping report that came out last year that the M23 are being armed, equipped, and are deploying alongside the Rwandan army. And one of the points that the UN made was that it’s almost impossible to tell the difference between the Rwandan Army and the M23.

So this is a movement that is supported by Kigali—and yet, despite the fact that America and all sorts of Western countries have repeatedly made this link and called on Rwanda to stop this support, it continues. And we’re seeing this sort of situation in which eastern Congo has become more and more anarchic. Goma, the main city, is virtually surrounded, and there are all these refugees living in camp.

TY MCCORMICK

So what’s Kagame’s objective in eastern DRC? Why risk international condemnation or worse to back the M23?

MICHELA WRONG

Well, the point I made in my piece for Foreign Affairs is that there was a moment when the president of DRC reached out to Uganda and had signed a deal to basically reconstruct, rebuild the roads between Uganda and eastern Congo. Eastern Congo, as we know, has got a lot of mineral resources that are of interest and that are exported to the rest of the world. And by signing that deal with Uganda, it basically meant that these goods no longer had to go out via Rwanda. And Rwanda, over the years, has benefited a great deal from all of these mineral riches that are often exported as though they were Rwandan minerals, but everyone knows that they’re Congolese.

So I think what happened is that President Paul Kagame effectively felt he was being sidelined, he was being marginalized. He doesn’t like that. He wants to be the president in the Great Lakes that everyone, you know, pays due deference to. And the M23 has been his way of reminding people that he is a player, that he sees himself as a key player, and that if he isn’t taken into account and included in the various deals, he can make life very, very difficult for the residents of the Great Lakes.

TY MCCORMICK

As you write in the piece, this is not the first time that the M23 has threatened eastern Congo, but the last time this happened, in 2012, Western countries came down pretty hard on Kagame. They cut aid, they threatened sanctions, and basically forced him to withdraw his support from the M23. Why isn’t that happening this time around?

MICHELA WRONG

This is a very good question. We know that 10 years ago when the M23 was also very active, the foreign donors got together and announced sanctions, and that hit Rwanda and its budget very hard. That hasn’t happened this time, and it’s very interesting to examine why it hasn’t happened.

My own government here in the United Kingdom, I think, has played a role in that failure to form a common stance. Last year, we signed an asylum deal—unwanted asylum seekers are supposed to be sent to Rwanda to settle. Not a single asylum seeker has yet gone to Rwanda, and there are question marks about whether that will ever happen. But in the meantime, what we are seeing is Downing Street and the foreign office here are completely silent on the issue of Kagame’s support for the M23.

Another big player, of course, is France, and we saw Emmanuel Macron going to Kigali last year. He has sort of mended this very unhappy relationship between France and Rwanda that was a result of François Mitterrand’s support for Juvénal Habyarimana. So he has repaired that relationship, and most analysts think what we’re seeing is France turning to Rwanda and counting on it for its military support, because increasingly French troops are no longer welcome around Africa. They’re not welcome in the Sahel, in western Africa. We see that French interests have been threatened in Mozambique by a jihadist movement. And the Rwandans are ready to deploy and have done so in the past. You know, the Rwandan troops have deployed very effectively in the Central African Republic, and Darfur, and Mozambique. So I think France is looking to Kagame for that kind of help, and that’s the implicit promise.

As a result of that, you have a situation in which two key foreign allies, two key foreign donors, are simply not going to criticize Paul Kagame, and not going to vociferously call on him to halt his support for the M23, and that really presents a problem. So, although people might have been discussing, at a diplomatic level, imposing sanctions, nothing has actually been done. And in that silence, you see this growing, unraveling situation in eastern Congo, where more and more foreign armies are getting sucked in, and there’s more and more uncertainty over the future.

TY MCCORMICK

Yeah, you write that, “Not since 2012 has Africa’s Great Lakes region been on such a troubling trajectory. But this time, no one is pumping the brakes.” What’s the danger? What’s the worst-case scenario if this is allowed to escalate?

MICHELA WRONG

Well, no one can feel at ease with a situation in which more and more African armies are mustering and deploying into a rather small area. And also, you’ve got to think that eastern Congo, for decades now, has been an area where there are all sorts of local armed groups. Some of them are just local defense groups, and these were militias set up to protect local villages, but then in the end, they became predatory on the local population.

So you’ve got a lot of armies operating in the area, you’ve got a lot of rebel groups, and you’ve got a lot of local militias. It’s just a force for destabilization—and not only of eastern Congo, because this is going to have spillover effects on all the neighboring countries. So I think any government that cares about the stability of the African continent and central Africa should be very worried about what’s going on in the Great Lakes.

TY MCCORMICK

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has been one of the lone senior Western officials to really sternly rebuke Kagame about this situation. Is there more the United States should be doing to prevent this from spiraling out of control?

MICHELA WRONG

I think of all the foreign donors, the Americans have been most forthright in their criticisms of Kagame, and in terms of ramping up the rhetoric and sort of saying, you know, “We know what you’re doing and you need to stop.”

One of the concerns, though, for outside observers, is that the Americans were bothered about two issues in particular. One of them was the kidnapping and jailing and sentencing of Paul Rusesabagina, the former hotel manager, who is a U.S. resident and whose family managed to wage a really impressive campaign to get him freed. And the other was the M23 and Kagame’s support for the M23. And the Americans have been vocal on both those issues.

And what you saw fairly recently was that Rusesabagina was freed and flown back to the United States and has been reunited with his family. So one of the question marks is whether by removing Rusesabagina’s detention from the game, whether that means that the Americans will now scale back their rhetoric, be less critical of Kagame and his support for the M23—whether that move by Kigali will go some way to repairing the relationship.

What I hear from my American contacts is that there is a sense of profound disillusionment in Washington with Paul Kagame’s regime, with his administration—with the role it’s playing, in particular, in destabilizing the Great Lakes. So the freeing of Paul Rusesabagina is not going to do enough to repair that relationship. Anyway, that’s what I’ve been hearing. But I think time is going to tell, because there had been talk of imposing sanctions on Rwanda for its support of the M23, and what we’ve seen is there are no sanctions. So that does raise a major question mark.

TY MCCORMICK

How will the presidency of Paul Kagame end? He’s been in power for 30 years, but he’s only 65, on a continent where many leaders are over 80. Is there a world in which he steps down, or will he be president for life? Or is there a third option? Could someone like Karegeya from the exiled opposition ever mount a credible challenge to his regime?

MICHELA WRONG

Well, there’s definitely an active opposition. It’s active abroad, because at home it’s impossible for the opposition to mobilize. The most important head of the opposition, a woman called Victoire Ingabire, is under house arrest at home, having spent eight years in prison. So she can’t really meet her supporters, and I doubt that she’ll be able to run in future elections because she spent time in prison.

So I don’t think we are likely to see Paul Kagame bowing out anytime soon. I mean, one of the problems with someone of his kind is that there has been so much bloodshed and so many atrocities attributed to his regime—I mentioned the UN mapping report of 2010—that if he were ever to stand down, the question then becomes, as with Putin, will he face prosecution before an international tribunal? So that’s a real disincentive to standing down.

TY MCCORMICK

I think that’s probably a good place to end, so thanks Michela, thanks for that, and thanks for joining us today.

MICHELA WRONG

It’s a pleasure.