Rishi Sunak’s Rwanda bill has passed its first hurdle - it says, as a matter of law, the East African state is “safe”. But is it? Is it a place we could confidently send those who have arrived on our shores seeking asylum, and be sure they would not be at risk? Or is it, in fact, a dictatorship with a history of persecuting and killing those who disagree with the president? Michela Wrong, a journalist who has spend decades reporting on Rwanda, and wrote the book Do Not Disturb - an account of the murder of a Rwandan opposition leader - give Phil and Roger a clear picture of just how safe Rwanda is.
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[00:00:00] The Y-curve with Phil Dobby and Roger Hearing
[00:00:04] Is Rwanda safe?
[00:00:05] If Rishi Sunak's bill passes, it will be.
[00:00:08] Whether it is or it isn't.
[00:00:10] Confused?
[00:00:11] Yes.
[00:00:11] Well, so is much of the legal world.
[00:00:13] How can the security of a foreign country be defined in English law?
[00:00:17] But, okay. How safe is Rwanda, really?
[00:00:22] Is it the forward-thinking, modernizing a charismatic man then? Is this why?
[00:01:40] So they pulled the wool over. He's pulled the wool over there.
[00:01:43] I think so. I mean, I was interested in But I mean, so there's still tensions in that. And obviously, you know, they're coming up for elections in the Congo as well. The Congolese leader is saying, you know, that he is like Hitler. Well, but not about a Kagame. Yeah, because of his support of the rebels. And this has been going on for decades and decades, you know, kind of proxy war going on in DRC, which the UN certainly thinks is encouraged and possibly even run by Rwanda.
[00:03:05] I mean, this is the thing.
[00:03:06] It's not like nobody knows that the whole thing's been abandoned. But yeah, the intention was, but I don't think they ever did. But those refugees from Congo are being resettled out. There's the difference, isn't it? So they're going into, so the UNHCR is actually helping to resettle those people to other
[00:04:22] countries.
[00:04:23] So the USA, Norway, New Zealand, Australia, Netherlands, France.
[00:04:25] Not in Rwanda.
[00:04:26] But then Rwanda probably doesn't want them.
[00:04:27] Probably doesn't want them.
[00:04:28] Yeah. Do you think this is part of his plan for the country, that he's going to get a lot of money from overseas and perhaps use it to populate the country but also bring in extra revenue? Is that the big plan here? I think Kagame is very clever at playing the West. What he does is he identifies areas of vulnerability, Western obsling, you know, playing its role in the in the toppling of civilian governments and takeovers by military, by the militaries in those countries. And he has been able to say to the West, listen, you know, Rwandan soldiers are the best in the they were the elite, the elite minority, the Tutsis, and they were expelled from the country and the Hutu majority took over.
[00:08:23] And at that stage, it was still Rwanda was still a Belgian colony.
[00:08:27] And people like Paul Kag four year civil war in which there were one in patriotic front in which, you know, Polkegarmy had taken the lead of it was encroaching and sort of heading south. And while that was happening, there was a civil war being fought between the Hutu controlled army and the militias and the RPF, Kigami's Rwandan Patriotic Front. And eventually the Rwandan Patriotic Front took over,
[00:11:01] won that battle and all the Hutu armies and militias
[00:11:05] taking the population within the Hutu population you know, most people were dead. So the international community has always felt it. It let ordinary Rwandans down and it did. And he and he does sort of throw that constantly in their face whenever his human rights record is brought up as a topic. The problem, though, is that, you know, it's not as though he has clean hands himself because there was
[00:12:22] there's more and more evidence that has emerged of ethnic cleansing
[00:12:25] when the RPF was sweeping down south through Rwanda.
[00:13:27] that his people, his Tutsi minority were the main victims of that bloodletting and therefore, his authoritarianism, his hardline is totally justifiable because they came back from the
[00:13:33] brink of extinction.
[00:13:34] So whoever's to blame, I mean, it's very difficult to imagine that you'd have a massive genocide
[00:13:40] like that and then you just have peace Eastern Congo since October. So we are proposing to send, you know,
[00:15:03] God knows how many and not very our asylum seekers. Well, even worse than that, I mean, the government supporting media in this country are saying, well, look, we can send refugees there because the UNHCR is facilitating lots of refugees already in Rwanda. And it's talking about the Congolese that have been resettled in Rwanda, perhaps as a result of that conflict
[00:16:21] that we're talking about.
[00:16:22] And actually, most of them are then sent by the UNHCR
[00:16:25] to third countries.
[00:16:26] They don't stay in Rwanda.
[00:16:27] They go after the States or Norway or New Zealand, And that's completely different setup. It's a different circumstances. And you know, the people in those detention centers were not complaining. Whereas we know damn well that the people that we're gonna be trying to center Rwanda are gonna be fighting it tooth and nail. Well, indeed. And on that point, I mean, we talked about the external, the history, we talked about the external relations, but what about within Rwanda? What kind of regime, what kind of setup is there
[00:17:42] in Paul Kagame's Rwanda?
[00:17:44] What kind of a country is it in terms of law
[00:17:47] and rights and things like that? This is not the experience of people who live inside Rwanda. What Rwandan citizens experience is firstly, it's an incredibly poor country. It's regularly listed amongst the sort of 20th poorest countries in Africa, sorry, in the world by the IMF.
[00:19:00] It's massively overpopulated. and she was she was given for supposed insurrection. The judiciary is completely politicized. I mean, and this is one of the points that the Supreme Court made in its ruling. It was very interesting on the fact that there was interference, political interference in the running of of the courts in Rwanda.
[00:20:20] And that was why, you know, it wasn't a safe place where it wasn't a place
[00:20:23] where asylum appeals against asylum processes could be heard.
[00:21:22] you need to take your own precautions. And that's happened in the UK.
[00:21:24] Similar things have happened in Belgium, in France,
[00:21:27] in South Africa, several of those critics
[00:21:31] and dissidents were targeted.
[00:21:33] Well, you knew what your book was about, I think.
[00:21:35] Yeah, my book.
[00:21:36] A general who was full of general.
[00:21:37] I find all of this very surprising
[00:21:39] because I'm looking at opinion polls here.
[00:21:41] So President Kagame seems to be immensely popular.
[00:21:45] He got 99% of the vote in the last election.
[00:21:48] I mean, you don't get they were debating what number they should give a pool. Kigami as his supposed electoral win. So, I mean, the elections have no validity.
[00:23:01] But let me let me throw in one element which I can imagine people here might say, well, OK, you know, it's when they'll see the steel hand, you know, within the velvet glove, because she's experienced that, you know, she can't leave the country. She can't run for elections. She can't be members of her political party. She spent eight years in prison for trying to run to's come up in the Supreme Court and elsewhere they've been concerned about some of these people are fleeing because as you they have special reasons. So perhaps they are transgender, LGBTQ, for example, or have particular religions that are unacceptable wherever they are, or perhaps where women are oppressed. Now, women at least are very well represented in the Rwandan parliament. It's a
[00:25:44] very equal society, we're told. Yes, and that Rwanda? Normally, Rwanda is very friendly towards LGBTQ. And in that way, it's been very I mean, a lot of the obviously a lot of the Tory party that are in government plus their, you know, plus their membership seem to think it's a fantastic idea. And I wonder whether you will have dissuaded any of them because choose. Because effectively what Rwanda has done is it's brought the silence of the British government on the fact that it practices energetic, this energetic campaign of transnational repression,
[00:30:48] I was asked by some of the legal chambers what I thought of that policy and to send in some, you know, witness testimony of my own.
[00:30:56] And when I was reading it, the Supreme Court ruling is pretty definitive and it's very, very convincing.
[00:31:00] And it was unanimous. So I would just say to people, read that ruling.
[00:32:21] So what sort of things that you hadn't thought of? And what we do know is the judiciary is highly politicized in Rwanda. We've seen that in very high profile cases like the high profile terrorism case that was brought against Paul Rizas Abagina. It was very obvious from the way that was conducted. He was the man at the the Hotel Rwanda film was based on and the man who looked after or tried to save some people during the genocide. Yeah.
[00:32:22] And he was, you know, sentenced to kind of micromanagement that the President, Paul Kagame, exerts over every area of the
[00:33:40] country, you know, from the army to the less aid in future because we, you know, it's been very interesting. Yeah, well, I mean, some of the some of what you're saying about it is even beyond what I knew in terms of the the actual nature of the regime and really quite shocking. But I suppose, you know, again, the central question is Rwanda safe? The fact that it's being defined in English law in theory or could be
[00:36:21] as being safe. I mean, the answer to the question absolutely someone who means what he says, who doesn't waste time, who's proactive, who gets things done. And I think that's what Kagame trades on, this image of he's the man who gets things
[00:37:40] done and I can sort out your problems in this instance.
[00:37:45] He knows what to say to people. And you kind of think, how dare you? You know, one way. Yeah, but that's, it's not another case of, look, I've taken your money. I really don't want the people over here. So I'm looking for an out. I mean, that's how I read that. But actually, this is a government that has repeatedly been denounced by the UN for arming, barbering, feeding, rebel movements,
[00:39:01] including the M23 that are rampaging across Eastern Congo.
[00:39:05] That is a violation of international law. It would be, you know, with the important stuff that everyone needs to be aware of. But let's talk about something else important. A little bit lighter. Lighter, but something important. But you know, next week is the week before Christmas and we're all out buying Christmas presents. Or sitting on our computers doing it. Yeah, perhaps as well. So yeah, just how is our behavior changing in terms of what we are buying for Christmas?
[00:40:20] And you know, there's also a question about, you know, just about present giving generally.
[00:40:25] Yes.
[00:40:26] Phil's not giving any presents this year, by the way.