Kagame also has strong views about the views most espoused in the West on the conflict in the neighboring DR Congo. 

“Now Rwanda is being accused of assisting Laurent Nkunda (leader of the CNDP rebel group); now they are saying Nkunda is a Tutsi and so Kagame must be helping him, as if that is the entire logic of it!”

Of all the subjects that exercise Kagame’s capability to keep his emotions in check, the subject of the Congo without a doubt tops the list. The president will talk vehemently about it and his voice will tend to rise as he discusses the reasons, the vicissitudes, the historical factors and the human drama that always cause wars in the country.

“Does it make Nkunda any less a Congolese because he is a Tutsi?” Kagame asks tightly clasping his hands together and staring at a point in front of him. “And in what way does it become our responsibility if the Congolese government cannot protect its people and you have a situation where groups who committed genocide here are busy committing atrocities over there, which makes Nkunda and others like him take up arms to defend themselves? In what way does that make Nkunda our responsibility?” Kagame repeats.

The fact that Tutsis in Rwanda suffered genocide makes it look logical that Kigali indeed backs Nkunda and his fellow Congolese Tutsis. Nkunda and his forces assert daily that their people have increasingly become victims of massacres and other human rights abuses at the hands of the FDLR—the umbrella group of Interahamwe Hutu extremist militias and the former Rwanda armed forces (FAR) who fled to the DRC after massacring up to a million people in 1994.

Congolese Tutsi refugees who have fled their country and now live in refugee camps in Rwanda say they have been targeted by Hutu extremist for no offence other than that they are Tutsis.

But Kigali repeatedly denies being in any way involved in the current spate of conflicts in the Congo, maintaining that Nkunda is an internal Congolese problem that Congo should be “making a better effort to resolve.”

“By the way it always amazes me when all these international groups accuse us of causing trouble in the Congo but never come up with a single analysis of what happens when you have a government that isn’t up to the responsibilities of ensuring law and order, and personal safety for its people,” says President Kagame.

He gestures around the room and continues: “you have all these people (local and international diplomats and statesmen and women) coming here and telling me to rein in Nkunda, as if I can do any such thing! Now, if I may ask, in that case who will rein in (Congolese President Joseph) Kabila, since the problem really is one to do with his government? I am waiting for someone to see issues that way but in vain.”

Tribert Rujugiro

Our interview touches a number of other issues, notably that of Tribert Rujugiro, the Rwandan tycoon who is under arrest in London on charges of evasion of taxes in South Africa. Rujugiro has also been cited by a highly tendentious UN report on the conflict in the DRC that he is one of the financiers of Laurent Nkunda.

“Really this is a difficult world,” says the President shaking his head. “Now if Rujugiro happens to be a Rwandan who has relatives in the Congo, that becomes an offence that reflects on the Rwandan leadership!

“They say, ‘there you go, Rujugiro who is one of Kagame’s advisers is giving Nkunda money and so Kigali must be backing the CNDP’; how simplistic can you get! Rujugiro is one of my many advisers; his single role in this government is to advise in ways how to develop the private sector of the country. Period. Rujugiro doesn’t advise me how to run government or how to conduct politics and what he does with his time only he knows.

“On the one hand you have this outside world preaching to us that we should grant citizens more freedoms—so are they now suggesting we turn into a police state monitoring each and every citizen’s private financial transactions?”

The interesting thing about Rujugiro’s activities is that the tycoon has businesses and financial transactions even in Kinshasa. But, says Kagame, “No one is accusing Kabila of wrong doings because of that.”