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
Thé Mulindwas Communication Group
"With Yoweri Museveni and Dr. Kiiza Besigye Uganda is in anarchy"
Kuungana Mulindwa Mawasiliano Kikundi
"Pamoja na Yoweri Museveni na Dk. Kiiza Besigye Uganda ni katika machafuko"
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