His songs violated official taboos on genocide
The Rwandan government gets rid of a singer who called on the people to move beyond the bitterness of the past
President Paul Kagame is exploiting the ethnic cleansing for political ends.
A.F.B.
Kizito Mihigo ... doves land on his cell window.
From the source
Kagame blames all the crimes of ethnic cleansing for Hutu.
Reuters
picture
All accusing fingers point to the Rwandan government in the death of the young Rwandan singer Kizito Mihigo, whose music united a nation torn apart by genocide, as this 38-year-old spent in his cell last February after he was arrested for a song in which the dead Tutsi and Hutus lamented.
Nobody in Rwanda dares to openly ask: How or why did the child-faced singer meet his end?
But Western donors now want a full investigation into his death.
His death comes at the top of the list of issues raised by human rights organizations and civil society in order to reassess the relationship of Western governments with President Paul Kagame and his Central African country.
They say the feeling of guilt for the failure of the international community to stop the 1994 genocide;
It has long encouraged donors to ignore the sinister realities of the ruling Kagame-led RPF regime.
Focus on the upcoming trial
In the United States, activists' attention is focused on the upcoming trial in the Rwandan capital, Kigali, of former hotel manager Paul Rosapagina, who gained fame in Hollywood for his efforts to save his Tutsi guests from the massacre at the hands of Hutu extremists.
Rosapagina, who later became a vocal critic of the RPF, was extradited to Rwanda last August and faces charges of financing terrorism.
But the Kizito case may reveal more about the twisted nature of Kagame's presidency.
In theory Kizito was the kind of citizen who gained security after the RPF took power, and since he was a Tutsi, Kizito fled his home in 1994 after the killing of President Juvenal Habyarimana, and after the Hutu army and its extremist militia began to take revenge on them. The Tutsi minority, believed to have assassinated the president, and his father were killed in those events, making him one of the survivors' group that theoretically attained special status in post-genocide society in Rwanda.
Kizito, who is extremely religious and exceptionally talented, went to study music at the Conservatory in Paris, and set out there on a torn spiritual journey, and at some point he had the desire to join the RPF to avenge his father's murder, but he forced himself to coexist with the Hutu and confront the deep hatred that he had. He feels it for this nationalism, and this young man, traumatized after the massacre, was determined to settle himself in tolerance.
He returned to Kigali with the hope that he would bring about ethnic reconciliation on the ground.
One of the government's first actions was to get rid of the classifications that divided the citizens of the former Belgian colony into Tutsis, Hutus and Toa, and Kagame gave his enthusiastic support to this young man who founded a peace foundation to spread the message of reconciliation across Rwanda's schools and prisons, and received generous government funding.
For a few years, things went as he desired, his songs were broadcast constantly on the Rwandan radio, and he was the favorite singer to perform the national anthem at the celebrations of the genocide.
He had a friendly relationship with First Lady Janet Kagame.
suspicion
But he began to question the system that controversially called the massacres in 1994 "the genocide of the Tutsis", which diminished the rights of the Hutus who were also killed in 1994, and Kagame took advantage of his ethnicity as a victim in order to keep the Hutu majority in Rwanda subjugated to him. Kizito was shocked by The idea of holding Hutus collectively guilty was even more shocked when the government urged younger Hutus, who had not participated in the genocide, to publicly apologize for their supposed crimes.
While UN and human rights investigators agree that the RPF slaughtered tens of thousands of Hutus in Rwanda and the neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo, before and after the genocide, Kagame always insists that these killings were of limited number and carried out amid the sentiments that accompanied the genocide.
In March 2014, Kizito released a song that broke all official taboos. The song "Meaning of Death" talks about that story, and called on Rwandans to show sympathy for all the victims of genocide and "revenge killing," as these deaths are called.
With eyes closed, holding a rosary, this singer chants the lyrics of the song: "Death is an equally terrible thing for everyone."
The song changed Kizito's position in the Hutu community, which was seen as a puppet of the regime, but caused him to fall in an amazing way in Kagame's eye, and he was detained without being allowed to contact a lawyer, and he was told that the president did not like his last song and that if he did not apologize, he would be in Dead counter.
He gave in in panic to this threat. After a while, citizens saw al-Fati al-Dahabi, as they called him, on television, handcuffed, by the police presenting him to a group of journalists on charges of treason.
He admitted that he had been in contact with the Rwandan opposition in exile, and was sentenced to 10 years' imprisonment for plotting against the government.
And Kizito replaced the suits of the famous Rwandan fashion designer, the pink suit for convicts, and prison made him more extreme.
Kizito sympathized with the Hutus who killed his father. The Hutu prisoners called him "the dove" in honor of his message for peace, and in reference to the doves that, in mysterious circumstances, came to sit on the threshold of his cell window.
He used a phone smuggled into prison to communicate with Rwandan activists and Western human rights groups abroad, and he felt time was running out.
"I think they will kill me," he told a friend in the United States, "I don't think I will survive."
But he did achieve a kind of highness in custody.
In the book, which was published after his death, he stated: "I only felt happiness and joy in prison."
The authorities released him in 2018 under a presidential pardon, and he discovered that his freedom did not come without a price, as his passport was confiscated and he was forced to inform the authorities regularly of his whereabouts.
When some groups of survivors invited him to perform some of his songs, the government canceled shows, government media blacklisted his songs, and he was forced to move repeatedly from house to house after intruders tried to break into his home at night.
"He realized he was still in prison," said Human Rights Watch activist Lewis Mudge, who had been in regular contact with him.
He added, "He shifted from being part of the elite to being financially destitute. It became clear to him that people were afraid to approach him."
He considered preparing himself to be an effective human rights researcher, and he began gathering information on disappearances and illegal detention in Rwanda, using his knowledge in prison.
He was under pressure from Rwanda's Inspector General of Police, Dan Munyoza, who wanted him to spy on human rights and opposition activists who trusted him.
Political opponents, who previously ran Rwanda's Terrifying Military Information Directorate, are considered a key figure in various government plots to track down members of the Rwandan National Congress, an opposition group created by former high-profile figures in the RPF.
"The threats were very immediate," Mudge recalls.
"Muñosa used to tell him: You have to work with us, the president has shown you his generosity, and now you have to show his gratitude."
The straw
It seems the last straw that wiped it off was a conversation in which Muñosa told this singer that he had deposited money into his bank account for services that had not yet been rendered.
On February 14, 2020, Kizito and two of his companions headed south to flee the country, and it seems that Kizito's famous face was the reason for his arrest again, as citizens in the villages he passed by, and the police arrested the three near the border with Burundi.
A few days later, the Rwandan police announced that Kizito was found dead in his cell, after he allegedly used the sheets to hang himself.
Within hours, the horrific image, which was impossible to verify, began to circulate on social media, showing a person much like Kizito lying in a pool of blood, bruises on his head and neck, arms bound behind his back.
The Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative and Human Rights Watch, along with British and American government officials, called for an independent investigation, but the Rwandan Ministry of Justice ignored their requests, and no investigation ever took place, yet those who spoke to Kizito after his re-arrest insist on He is optimistic about his future plans, and does not seem to indicate that he will commit suicide.
Every Rwandan diaspora firmly rejects the idea that he died by suicide.
Some ask: Why would Kizito, the famous religious artist among Hutus and Tutsis, kill himself?
Friends and family who fear anonymity believe he died because his songs highlighted the hypocrisy of the genocidal narrative propagated by the RPF abroad.
"He was trying to unify the Hutus and the Tutsis, while the government was trying to impose a divide and rule law. He was calling for forgiveness and the unification of the nation, and they don't want that," said a friend residing in the United States.
• Guilt at the failure of the international community to stop the 1994 genocide; It has long encouraged donors to ignore the sinister realities of the ruling Kagame-led RPF regime.
• Kizito was forced to inform the authorities regularly of his whereabouts, and when some groups of survivors invited him to perform some of his songs, the government canceled shows, and government media had blacklisted his songs, and he was forced to move repeatedly from house to house after intruders tried to storm his house at night.
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