""The phone recordings are part of a months-long investigation by The Globe into murder plots organized by the Rwandan government. Rwandan exiles in both South Africa and Belgium - speaking in clandestine meetings in secure locations because of their fears of attack - gave detailed accounts of being recruited to assassinate critics of [Rwandan] President [Paul] Kagame.
Their evidence is the strongest yet to support what human rights groups and Rwandan exiles have suspected for years about the Rwandan government's involvement in attacks or planned attacks on dissidents, not only in South Africa but in Britain, Sweden, Belgium, Uganda, Kenya and Mozambique.
It also raises new questions about the world's moral stand on Rwanda. This year, the country marks the 20th anniversary of a shocking genocide. Because he helped stop the genocide, Mr. Kagame is hailed as a hero and his reborn country is touted as a model for African development - stable, business-oriented, fast-growing, environmentally clean and virtually free of pettty corruption. But as revelations of murder plots and assassinations mount, easy narratives of good overcoming evil become more and more difficult to sustain. The reality in Rwanda is far more complex. The mass killings of the 1990s and the recent assassination plots left almost no one untainted.
Meanwhile, Mr. Kagame's enemies live in fear - or in hiding - after a wave of attacks against them.
And they are the lucky ones: On New Year's Eve, one of the Mr. Kagame's most-wanted, Rwandan dissident Patrick Karegeya, was brutally strangled to death in a Johannesburg hotel room. His killer or killers remain at large."" (thanks Regan)
Their evidence is the strongest yet to support what human rights groups and Rwandan exiles have suspected for years about the Rwandan government's involvement in attacks or planned attacks on dissidents, not only in South Africa but in Britain, Sweden, Belgium, Uganda, Kenya and Mozambique.
It also raises new questions about the world's moral stand on Rwanda. This year, the country marks the 20th anniversary of a shocking genocide. Because he helped stop the genocide, Mr. Kagame is hailed as a hero and his reborn country is touted as a model for African development - stable, business-oriented, fast-growing, environmentally clean and virtually free of pettty corruption. But as revelations of murder plots and assassinations mount, easy narratives of good overcoming evil become more and more difficult to sustain. The reality in Rwanda is far more complex. The mass killings of the 1990s and the recent assassination plots left almost no one untainted.
Meanwhile, Mr. Kagame's enemies live in fear - or in hiding - after a wave of attacks against them.
And they are the lucky ones: On New Year's Eve, one of the Mr. Kagame's most-wanted, Rwandan dissident Patrick Karegeya, was brutally strangled to death in a Johannesburg hotel room. His killer or killers remain at large."" (thanks Regan)
