KENYA/RWANDA-POLITICS: Undiplomatic Relations

By Moyiga Nduru Reprint | | Print |

Jean Baptiste Kayigamba and Moyiga Nduru

NAIROBI, Apr 24 1996 (IPS) - The disappearance of a Rwandan diplomat in Kenya while in police custody has cast a new chill over the two countries’ uneasy relations.

The office of Rwandan President Pascal Bizimungu expressed concern over the safety of Francis Mugabo, an attache who vanished at the weekend, in a statement released Tuesday night.

According to Pierre Hakizimana, Rwandan charge d’affaires in Nairobi: “On Monday (Francis) Mugabo was taken away by police from Langata police station to an unknown location. Efforts by (Rwandan diplomats) to trace Mugabo have been fruitless. Police at Langata wouldn’t tell them his whereabouts.”

The diplomats also contacted Kenya’s foreign office which promised to help, but to no avail.

Mugabo was arrested Feb. 26 for his alleged role in the attempted assassination of Seth Sendashonga, a former Rwandan interior minister who resigned last year over claims of atrocities committed against civilians from the Hutu majority by the Tutsi- dominated ruling Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF).

Wounded along with his nephew who accompanied him, Sendashonga claimed that his assailants were Tutsi RPF youths.

Four days latter, Kenya’s attorney general Amos Wako issued a statement saying that although two of the assailants had disappeared, “Mugabo was arrested at the scene, and was found to be in possession of one pistol make Jericho together with its silencer and 13 rounds of 9 mm ammunition.”

According to Hakizimana, Kenya threatened to shut down the Rwandan embassy unless Mugabo’s diplomatic immunity was waived to facilitate a criminal investigation into the case and if necessary, Mugabo’s prosecution and trial.

“We categorically denied our involvement in the attempt on the life of Sendashonga and protested against the Kenyan authorities violation of the Geneva convention,” President Bizimungu’s senior aide in charge of external affairs, Seth Kamanzi, told IPS in Kigali.

“We have nothing to do with the failed assassination. Nairobi is a dangerous city. Even before Sendashonga, diplomats had been attacked and escaped from murderers.”

Rwanda had requested that Mugabo be repatriated and was still awaiting Kenya’s response when the diplomat disappeared.

The affair is the latest example of the deterioration in relations between the two countries since the RPF came to power in 1994, overthrowing a Hutu extremists government responsible for the genocide that claimed one million Tutsi and moderate Hutu lives.

Moi has barely bothered to disguise his hostility towards the new Rwandan authorities. Members of the former government were welcomed here by Kenyan leader Daniel Arap Moi, a longtime ally of the late Hutu President Juvenal Habyarimana.

His widow, Agatha Uwiringiyimana, a regular visitor to Kenya, is high on the list of people the RPF wants to have stand trial in connection with the pogroms of 1994 that devastated Rwanda and horrified the world.

Sendashonga has also been linked to efforts by exiled Hutu leaders to form a political front linked to the hardliners in the refugee camps of Zaire plotting a military return.

Sources in Kigali allege that Mugabo was beaten up and tortured at a Kenyan police station on the night of Apr. 19 before being removed to an unknown location.

Hakizimana claims that after Mugabo’s arrest, the Kenyan police escorted him to his residence and looted it. Expressing disgust at the incident, Kamanzi said it was Kenya’s third transgression of the Vienna Convention with regard to Rwandan officials.

“The embassy of Rwanda condemns, in the strongest terms, any act of violence against Rwandese nationals and cannot condone any other form of action which might threaten security in Kenya,” Hakizimana said.

Last year, Kenya expelled two Rwandan ambassadors from Nairobi and Moi threatened to arrest investigators hunting down those suspected of involvement in the 1994 massacres for trial at a proposed international tribunal in Arusha, Tanzania.

Rwanda reacted angrily to Moi’s threat, which he dropped after concerted international political pressure was brought to bear.

Although some analysts consider it unlikely, hostile relations with Kenya could result in Nairobi denying land-locked Rwanda access to its Indian Ocean port of Mombasa. Such a move would seriously hurt an economy battling to recover from the upheavals of 1994.