Is the Wrong book reviving Uganda-Rwanda rivalry?
Saturday April 24 2021
Summary
The Rwandan media can be brutal. One outlet published a story accusing me of having committed amarorerwa (genocide?) in Rwanda and that I had been deported from Rwanda because of ruswa (corruption).
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Ms Michela Wrong (what a name?) wrote a book titled ‘Do Not Disturb’. It is on the death of Col Patrick Karegeya in a South African hotel room. Col Karegeya was former director general of Rwanda’s external intelligence agency. Ms Wrong is a British national.
Col Karegeya’s death or assassination or murder or killing was widely covered in Uganda’s media. Karegeya was born and studied in Uganda; needless to say, his Ugandan ideological, military and political heritage is a given.
11 New Books We Recommend This Week
April 22, 2021
This week’s recommended books include a local’s impressionistic rendering of Mexico City, a Chilean novel about life during the Pinochet regime, and journalistic accounts of Rwanda and the family that brought you OxyContin. There are also two essay collections (or essayistic collections), by Jenny Diski and Jo Ann Beard, along with a senator’s memoir and sparkling letters by the American poet James Merrill. Finally, a biography of the scholar Edward Said, a history of the cultural hotbed of 1970s Los Angeles and Kaitlyn Greenidge’s new novel, about a free spirit finding her way in post-Civil War New York.
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On New Year’s Day 2014, Patrick Karegeya, once a top Rwandan intelligence official, was found dead in Room 905 of the up-market Michelangelo Towers hotel, in Johannesburg, South Africa. According to the police report, Karegeya’s neck was swollen, and a rope and a bloody towel were found in the hotel room’s safe, indicating that he had been strangled. As news of his murder spread, fingers pointed immediately to his childhood friend and former boss Rwandan President Paul Kagame. Karegeya had fallen out with Kagame and fled to South Africa, where he had helped start an opposition party in exile. Kagame denied any involvement in Karegeya’s killing, but several days later, at a national prayer breakfast in Kigali, Rwanda’s capital, he hinted that he wasn’t bothered by the assassination. “Whoever is against our country will not escape our wrath,” he said. “The person will face consequences. Even those who are still alive they will face
Do Not Disturb” said the sign outside Room 905 of Johannesburg’s Michelangelo Towers hotel on 1 January 2014. When the police finally broke in they found the garrotted body of Patrick Kare-geya, Rwanda’s former head of external security, on the bed. Karegeya had fallen out with the regime he had helped create, and was murdered by a Rwandan hit squad as he helped build an opposition movement in exile.
“Do Not Disturb” is also the sign that has been metaphorically hung on the narrative that Paul Kagame’s Rwandan regime has so assiduously cultivated over the past quarter century – namely that a heroic band of warriors led by Kagame swept in from Uganda to halt the Hutus’ genocide against their fellow Tutsis in 1994, then built a prosperous and harmonious new country on the ruins of the old one.
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