Umuseso editor goes to exile – Our source; financial problems probably main cause of his departure
The editor of Umuseso Charles Kabonero has left Rwanda to go into self imposed exile, according to sources from within the newspaper.
Kabonero is in Kampala, and he has reported to the regional office of an organization called East and Horn of Africa Human Rights Defenders where he is claiming that he has fled Rwanda because the state is persecuting him. Kabonero has been spotted more than once at the offices of this organization situated on Lulume road in Nsambya, a Kampala neighborhood.
From here Kabonero hopes to get the bona fides, i.e. confirmation by East and Horn of Africa Human Rights Defenders that things are exactly as he says in Rwanda and so he needs resettling in a third country.
A “researcher” with the New York-based Human Rights Watch, one Leslie Haskell, is trying to help Kabonero secure a visa to a third country on the allegation that the young man “fears for his life in Rwanda” due to “his work as a journalist.”
Before Kabonero left – last month on the 24th – he went around saying farewell in private, telling his friends that he was leaving for further studies in Sweden. He said he would be in Stockholm for three years doing a degree course.
But, according to a source we have in Umuseso, “The only reason he has left is because things have become very difficult financially.” (Being one of the founders of Umuseso, I have maintained contacts within the newspaper).
“Umuseso has for the last three years been operating under crushing debt,” our source, whom we cannot name because he swore us to confidentiality, says. He adds that in fact the situation was that Charles (Kabonero) was changing his phone number every two or three days because so many debtors are after him.
“One of the debtors – whom we only know by the name Richard – is the man who used to repair computers for Umuseso. Every time the newspaper needed to go to print but lacked money he would loan Kabonero the required amount, and now he owes him to the tune of Frw 8 million,” our source informed us.
According to our source – who also provided us a photograph of Kabonero sitting with a British diplomat – the banks too have been writing warning letters, and numerous other creditors have been threatening lawsuits. “The world was closing in on Kabonero, so he decided to leave,” said our source.
British diplomats duped
Initially the Umuseso editor was supposed to find political asylum in the UK. He had convinced the British Embassy at Kacyiru that his life was in such danger he was living in hiding.
Kabonero somehow convinced officials of the embassy that the suspension of the BBC by the government of Rwanda from the FM airwaves too would affect him – the logic being that this was a sign Rwanda was “cracking down” on the media and therefore he, Kabonero, as the fearless champion of free speech in the country was in particular danger.
(Rwanda suspended BBC Kinyarwanda language programs because of incessant broadcasts of the words and opinions of Genocide deniers and the extensive granting of airtime to people like Ignace Murwanashyaka of the FDLR and others like that. Actually, if you have been buying Umuseso, it is when the BBC Kinyarwanda programs were suspended that the ferocity of Kabonero’s attacks on President Kagame intensified).
The interesting thing is that at the time last month that Kabonero was alleging to officials of the British Embassy that his life was in danger, they were interviewing him during daylight hours.
The editor whose life supposedly was in such danger that he was in hiding actually would enter the embassy building in broad daylight, tell his stories, and walk out a few hours later to go to the taxi stop some metres up the road. He would take public transportation to town and back to his office at Muhima.
Kabonero does not move anonymously. In fact he goes almost everywhere by public taxi or on foot. Many people know him and they see him on the streets every day. The other interesting thing is that despite the fact Kabonero has been alleging that his life is in danger for the past six years, the British Embassy was credulous enough to take his stories at face value – that because a Kinyarwanda language program was suspended therefore he too was in danger.
A Nairobi-based British diplomat flew into Kigali to conduct more interviews with him. This diplomat interviewed Kabonero from Umuseso offices.
But, according to our Umuseso source, something must have changed because the British appeared to have become reluctant to offer him a visa and transportation to the UK. The possible reason for this is that the British officials may finally have decided Kabonero’s stories were not very credible.
The first time consular officials at the mission of a Western country declined to offer the young man a visa was late last year. He was supposed to travel to Canada for a three months journalism course at Carleton University.
But this newspaper exposed a series of email exchanges between him and a Canadian journalism professor, Allan Thompson in which the latter appeared to be coaching Kabonero in ways to beat questioning by Canadian consular officials as to why he had claimed in a visa application questionnaire that he had never been convicted of a criminal act. But he had, and it is on record.
Denis Polisi, a member of Parliament, took Kabonero to court to charge him with criminal defamation for an article in which the latter questioned who, “between Kagame and Polisi”, runs the country. The court found Kabonero guilty on some of the charges and handed him a one year suspended sentence.
After Canadian consular officials confirmed this they denied him the visa.
Embezzlement, scams and so on
Now, as things stand, the last hope for the Umuseso man is for Leslie Haskell of Human Rights Watch to convince Sweden to take him in.
Kabonero is a person who thrives on all kinds of flim flams and scams. We have gathered ample proof of that in our reporting on Umuseso.
Readers of this newspaper will remember the emails we published in 2006 in which Abdul Ruzibiza, an exiled former lieutenant in the RPF, appeared to conspire with Kabonero for the latter supposedly to coordinate a series of grenade attacks in and around the capital “to create the impression the government was weak and incapable of protecting the people and to sow discontent in the public.” This was on the agreement Ruzibiza would keep sending him money, in American dollars.
Kabonero’s usual defenders, namely international media rights groups like Reporters Without Borders rushed to rubbish our story on their websites, without ever looking at the emails. We got the emails from within Umuseso itself and anyone who saw them knew they were authentic.
A number of other emails we got our hands on involved Kabonero demanding money (in most cases half a million francs) from Rwandans seeking exile in Europe so he could “authenticate” their status as threatened individuals back home.
What happens is that if a European country is to give you asylum, someone, an immigration official for instance, calls organizations or people back in your country whom they think are credible to talk on issues of human rights; the rights of homosexuals and lesbians; or whether (if you are a woman) you are likely to be forcibly circumcised, et cetera.
So this European immigration official thinks: who can we call in Rwanda if, say, one Mutangana is in London saying Kagame’s regime is hunting him down? Of course the only person to verify this is none other than the brave journalist Charles Kabonero who is in the trenches against that very regime.
The next thing the official does is get hold of his email, probably from Reporters Without Borders, and asks him what he knows of Mutangana. Kabonero immediately sees an opportunity to make a quick half million and immediately emails (this Mutangana) telling him to find the money so he in touch vouches for “the fact that operatives of the Kagame regime have been looking for him to throw him in the dungeons.”
What we are writing here is no fiction. We have examples of such emails and we have published them (in 2006).
Kabonero perpetrates unpalatable things as easily as most people gulp down a bottle of fanta.
One case we know of well is that between him, a woman friend of his called Mutesi Gasana and an NGO called Amani Africa headed by an American called Elizabeth Davis.
Mutesi was an employee of the National Institute of Statistics of Rwanda when she got friendly with Kabonero. At the time she was married to another man, a Burundi national by the names of Charles Nkazamyampi. Later she left NISR and was offered a job by Davis as the Representative of Amani in Rwanda.
The NGO’s work in Rwanda was to give assistance to vulnerable homeless children and within a short while Mutesi was flown to the United States to join Davis in raising funds to build something called Amani village for homeless, parentless children.
But last year Mutesi Gasana was in jail on suspicion of embezzling US$ 60,000 (Frw 32,400,000) – the funds they raised in the US to set up the village. This case file is at the Criminal Investigation Department. Elizabeth Davis is the one who took the case to the Police when she came to Rwanda only to realize that not a single foundation had been dug to raise a single house at the site of the Amani Village in Bugesera.
What Davis did not know was that Mutesi and Kabonero had been using that money in the following ways: to publish issues of Umuseso and pay off some of the paper’s debts, and to cavort around in hotels, mostly in Uganda.
Mutesi in mysterious circumstances however escaped from police custody and a week later surfaced at the Nairobi UNHCR claiming the “Kigali regime” wanted to imprison and torture her. Kabonero – who by then had a child with Mutesi, a boy they’ve christened Gisa – wrote letters to human rights bodies confirming that indeed what Mutesi said about the “dangers facing her” was right.
One of the groups Kabonero wrote is none other than East and Horn of Africa Human Rights Defenders (the same organization where he is now, with their help working out ways to go to a European country).
Kabonero leaves with no hindrance
When Kabonero left, he crossed into Uganda at the Kagitumba border post. Immigration officials at the border did not attempt to stop him from proceeding to Uganda. Some people are of the view that if the journalist, who has been very frequent in his attacks on senior government officials including the President, ever tried to leave the country he would only do so through the informal bush paths known as panya. But Kabonero crosses the borders, and is at airports frequently and freely.
At Kagitumba, after a few minutes verifying whether there were no issues such as court cases, pending against Kabonero, the officials stamped in his passport and he was on his way.
According to people familiar with the Rwandan media, Kabonero’s departure is bound to be another club with which international media and human rights pressure groups will bludgeon Rwanda, accusing the state of running a campaign of repression against independent media.
“Definitely we are going to witness all these organizations criticizing Rwanda that it is a place where journalists have a very hard time,” said Gaspard Safari, president of the Rwanda Journalists Association. “For their reasons of course they choose not to mention the fact that people like Kabonero have been absolutely free to write anything about the government for the past several years and their safety never was in question,” Safari added.
The organizations Safari talks about are ones like Reporters Without Borders, Human Rights Watch, Committee to Protect Journalists and others who have for long turned Kabonero into their cause célèbre.
Related articles:
• How the Bizumuremyis of this country thrive
• The ‘independent’ papers of Rwanda cannot be taken lightly
• Is Umuseso in the employ of FDLR/Interahamwe?
• Rujugiro defamation ruling postponed
• Financial mess real reason Umuseso had to close down
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Posted by The Rwanda Focus
on Jun 16 2009. Filed under National.
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