Elections tend to bring out the worst in Rwanda and the 2010 presidential vote, which takes place on 9 August, has proven no different. In recent months, opposition leaders, journalists and dissident military officers have been jailed, injured or murdered. On 25 June, Jean-Léonard Rugambage, the acting editor of the Umuvugizi newspaper, was shot dead in front of his house in Kigali.
Rugambage had written several articles criticising the pre-election crackdown by President Paul Kagame and the ruling Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). A month before Rugambage's murder, the government suspended Umuvugizi and another critical newspaper, Umuseso, on grounds of inciting public disorder. Kagame's main opponent, Victoire Ingabire, leader of the FDU-Inkingi party, and her American lawyer, Peter Erlinder, were arrested and locked up.
Human rights groups have accused Kagame and the RPF of authoritarianism and of rigging the election. However, simply labelling the Rwandan government as authoritarian shrouds the complexity of political and social divisions in Rwanda and provides little insight into the future directions of the country.
Elections in Rwanda both illuminate and exacerbate ethnic and political relations. Moves toward multi-party democracy in the early 1990s allowed the rise of extremist Hutu political leaders who sought the extermination of political moderates and Tutsi civilians, culminating in the 1994 genocide. Like the current presidential election, the lead-up to the 2003 presidential and parliamentary vote was also marred by violence and the quashing of political dissent. In Rwanda, elections typically mean volatile contestation over power and fears that extremist ethnic voices will again be amplified.
The 2010 election period, however, has been different. This time around, Kagame and the RPF face little serious political opposition and are assured of victory. Ingabire, who has lived in the Netherlands since 1993, was barely known in Rwanda when she began campaigning six months ago. While the Tutsi-dominated RPF is hardly loved in the countryside, many Hutu (who constitute around 85% of the population) view a vote for Kagame as a vote for continuing peace and stability – no mean achievement after years of violence. Kagame could win this presidential election without campaigning. So why the crackdown on the opposition and the press which has generated global condemnation?
The answers lie inside the RPF. Contrary to depictions of a cohesive, repressive state, the RPF is a deeply divided, fragile, paranoid party. It has a tendency to pursue innovative social policies during the good times but to lash out during periods of perceived uncertainty.
The RPF is a motley coalition of hardliners and reformists. As I argue in a forthcoming book on post-genocide politics and justice in Rwanda, the highly factional nature of the RPF has been a central – and often overlooked – feature of recent policy-making in Rwanda. Human rights critics have preferred to lambast the hardliners and paint Rwanda as an international pariah, rather than forging relations with powerful reformists. Failure to engage with moderate leaders within the RPF has further isolated them and empowered the old guard.
Kagame's repressive tactics in the lead-up to Monday's election are less about external threats to his power than about internal RPF pressures. Kagame is sending a message to the RPF ranks that he is in charge. Increasingly, the divides within the RPF have widened and more moderate voices – such as the health minister, Richard Sezibera, and former minister for finance and economic planning and current president of the African Development Bank, Donald Kaberuka, as well as senior RPF military figures such as Generals Charles Muhire, Emmanuel Karenzi Karake and Faustin Kayumba Nyamwasa – have challenged Kagame over a host of issues, including the openness of political and media space and the question of presidential succession. Some RPF leaders interpret the recent enrolment of Kagame's son at West Point as a sign that he intends to keep political and military control within the family.
To maintain cohesion in a divided party, Kagame has struck out against relatively unthreatening targets as a show of strength.
After Kagame wins the election, international actors must work more closely with the many reformist members of the RPF who share their concerns over the current state of Rwandan politics. RPF moderates have substantial clout within the government and have scored major political successes in the past. Despite opposition from Kagame and others, these leaders enabled the abolition of the death penalty in 2007. In 2009, the minister of justice, Tharcisse Karugarama, opposed unequivocally a bill tabled by a minority of MPs to criminalise homosexuality in Rwanda – a bill summarily dismissed by parliament, in contrast to the treatment of similar legislation in neighbouring Uganda.
In several weeks' time, the radical system of gacaca community courts will end after eight years of prosecuting more than 400,000 confessed perpetrators of the 1994 genocide. Gacaca involves public hearings in 10,000 village courtyards across Rwanda. Judges in these genocide trials are elected by their communities. Under gacaca's plea-bargaining scheme, the vast majority of genocide perpetrators have admitted their crimes in front of their neighbours, performed community service and been reintegrated into their towns and villages, where they now live side-by-side with genocide survivors.
Kagame and his inner circle opposed gacaca when it was first proposed in the late 90s because it would deliver lenient sentences to those responsible for the genocide. However, other figures within the RPF argued successfully that gacaca could pay vital dividends in the form of truth about the events of the genocide and reconciliation.
As a testament to the impact of gacaca, a documentation centre has been opened in Kigali, containing the handwritten records of more than one million gacaca trials. This represents a vital historical archive and the largest repository in the world of material detailing a mass crime. Kagame's vision of strict justice for genocide perpetrators would never have allowed the gathering of this information. A crucial lesson from the gacaca experience in the context of the current election is that the RPF does not speak with one voice and Kagame does not always get his way.
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