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
http://m.allafrica.com/stories/201401080730.html/
--
SIBOMANA Jean Bosco
Google+: https://plus.google.com/110493390983174363421/posts
YouTube Channel: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9B4024D0AE764F3D
http://www.youtube.com/user/sibomanaxyz999
***Transmission Time Interval (TTI) on Wednesday January 8th, 2014:
TTI=17H00-20H30, heure de Montréal.***Fuseau horaire domestique: heure
normale de la côte Est des Etats-Unis et Canada (GMT-05:00)***
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
http://m.allafrica.com/stories/201401080730.html/
--
SIBOMANA Jean Bosco
Google+: https://plus.google.com/110493390983174363421/posts
YouTube Channel: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9B4024D0AE764F3D
http://www.youtube.com/user/sibomanaxyz999
***Transmission Time Interval (TTI) on Wednesday January 8th, 2014:
TTI=17H00-20H30, heure de Montréal.***Fuseau horaire domestique: heure
normale de la côte Est des Etats-Unis et Canada (GMT-05:00)***
__._,_.___
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