{UAH} A TRIBUTE TO ONE OF THE GREAT LAKES KILLERS

Tribute to Patrick Karegaya 1960-2013

8 January 2014 , By Catherine Bond, Source: The Star

A man of two nationalities, held three times effectively a political prisoner, Patrick Karegaya's exciting but unsettled life embodied many of the experiences of his generation of East Africa's Tutsi.

His national identities - Rwandan and Ugandan - straddling a colonial border, like so many of his peers, Karegaya was comfortable in both. Karegaya was born on February 12, 1960, when Uganda was still a British colony.

As a child, he would return from school to find his home had moved on from where it had been that morning, his parents well-to-do, Kinyarwanda-speaking pastoralists who grazed their cattle along Uganda's frontier with Rwanda. Rich in offspring as well as cows, he was their fourth of 12 children.

Although not born a refugee, later in life, ironically Karegaya would become one. From his itinerant upbringing, he went on to secondary school in Kampala, the Ugandan capital, before studying law at Makerere University, his career taking a similar path to that of the tens of thousands of Rwandan Tutsi children who had been raised in exile, and brought up like him in President Idi Amin's Uganda.

Following the 1979 fall of Amin, Karegaya was suspected of sympathising with Uganda's current president, Yoweri Museveni, who had started a rebel army inside Uganda in 1981. As a result, he spent three years in a maximum security prison under Uganda's then president, Milton Obote.

In 1986, after Museveni came to power, Karegaya worked at Uganda's military intelligence headquarters with Paul Kagame, Rwanda's president, then his colleague and friend. Known for his outgoing nature and humorous turn of phrase, Karegaya was the perfect foil to the more stern Kagame, whose leadership in Rwanda would determine his fate.

In 1990, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) movement Kagame and others had joined to make a bid to return to their land of their forefathers invaded Rwanda from Uganda.

Kagame rushed back from a military training course in the United States to lead it. Karegaya remained placed in Ugandan intelligence for the duration of the civil war, providing Kagame with close advice and support.

As such, he was a confidante, a keeper of Kagame's secrets, part of the institutional memory of the RPF, now steadily being erased as member of his generation are shifted aside in Rwanda's power structure.

When the RPF took power in mid-1994, bringing to an end the genocide of around 800,000 minority Tutsi and Hutu moderates, Karegaya left Uganda to be appointed head of Rwanda's civil intelligence.

He was in charge of external affairs, a post he held for 10 years, most notably during the chasing of Hutu refugees - some undeniably involved in the genocide, others not - across the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1996, a military campaign that led to tens of thousands of deaths.

A Rwandan blogger has said he believed Karegaya had 'essentially been forgiven by many victims before his death'. Though not accused of war crimes, Karegaya is named in the 2008 indictment of 40 former Rwandan military officers by a Spanish judge, as the man heading the Rwandan government office at the receiving end of US$800,000 worth of stockpiled minerals exported to Rwanda from the Congo for six months between 1998 and 1999.

According to Karegaya's friends, internal tensions caused by the involvement of the Rwandan army in the Congo, contributed to his final fallout with Kagame in 2003, as well as his blunt criticisms of Kagame's leadership - in 2000, Kagame had risen to become not just Rwanda's military leader, but the country's president.

In 2005, Kagame had the gregarious Karegaya held in solitary confinement in an unofficial lock-up in a disused factory west of Kigali, the Rwandan capital, for six months. On his release, he is said to have been asked to apologise to Kagame, to 'prostrate himself' before him.

Karegaya refused. Accused of committing a petty offence, he was charged with 'insubordination', receiving an 18-month prison sentence. A week after his release in November 2007, believing his life under threat, he escaped house arrest in Rwanda, fleeing first to Tanzania and then South Africa.

Openly unable to guarantee their safety, South Africa granted Karegaya, and later, Nyamwasa Kayumba, Rwanda's former Army Chief of Staff, asylum. Together with two Rwandans already in exile in the United States - Gerald Gahima, Rwanda's former Prosecutor General, and his brother, Theogene Rudasingwa, a former Ambassador to Washington - they launched an opposition movement.

Their 2010 briefing paper accuses Kagame of responsibility for war crimes and crimes against humanity, as well as of running a repressive, minority regime.

In response, a Rwandan military court sentenced them in absentia to between 20 and 25 years imprisonment each. Kagame later rebuffed the accusations of autocracy, calling Karegaya and Kayumba 'selfish' and 'dishonest'.

Despite the adventures of his long career in intelligence, Karegaya was at heart a man dependent on the company of his family and outsiders, including foreign journalists whose friendship he sought.

He was found dead, apparently strangled, on New Year's Day in a luxurious Johannesburg hotel after going to meet a Rwandan businessman and family friend he believed supportive of the small, exiled opposition movement he helped found. To that movement, he was irreplaceable.

His death violently silenced a man whose spirit had until then remained stubbornly unbroken and unbowed. Karegaya is outlived by his three children, to whom he was close and who were the first to notice his abrupt silence from afar, as well as his wife, Leah, and his elderly mother.

Patrick Karegaya: born February 12, 1960, died December 31, 2013

 

 

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