In spite of the official denial of involvement, the arrest and disappearance of Cassien Ntamuhanga is proof that the assassination of President Juvenal Habyarimana and the Rwanda genocide that followed is, tragically, still claiming new casualties.
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At the recent Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Kigali, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Rwandan President Paul Kagame could not escape insistent questions about the controversial plan to deport asylum seekers from Britain to Rwanda.
National dialogue has been shown to open the door to resolving longstanding conflict and should be adopted by the countries of the Great Lakes region to address the root causes of conflict in eastern DRC.
Rwanda’s proposed refugee deal with Britain is another strike against President Paul Kagame’s claim that he is an authentic and fearless pan-Africanist who advocates for the less fortunate.
Rwandans are welcoming, but the government’s priority must be to solve the internal political problems which produce refugees.
“Go back to Africa” has taken on a new meaning, with Britain’s controversial plan to deport migrants to Rwanda, and outsource its “immigration problem”.
After years of complaint about being “overwhelmed” by trickles of new arrivals, Europe has absorbed millions of refugees fleeing the conflict in Ukraine virtually overnight. However, the solidarity that underpins this dramatic turnaround would appear to exclude non-Europeans.
Unless the leaders make good on their statements about using the greater scale of the economic bloc to demand better terms of trade globally, the expanded Community is likely to be a continuation of the already damaging experience suffered by the ordinary people.
Alternatively, there could emerge a leadership that seeks to respect each ambition, and find a happy medium between them, by first addressing the question: what are these cities for, and how will they feed and maintain themselves
Much like in 1977, all the conditions have come together that could turn conflicting interests into ruinous warfare across the region.
Graham Harrison argues that all development is capitalist development. Based on his recent book, Developmentalism, he argues that development is not only risky and likely to fail but also very unpleasant. Contemporary notions of development see it is as a stable, incremental, and positive process but this is a fantasy in which capitalist development is reimagined as a planned, inclusive, and socially just modernisation.