Jean Baptiste Kayigamba in Kigali
United States nationals need to watch their backs – — not just in Saudi Arabia, where a truck bomb killed 19 Americans and wounded about 80 more at a US air base last week.
They are also under threat in East and Central Africa, according to a communique issued in Nairobi one day after the bombing in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia.
The warning was issued by a Hutu extremist organisation calling itself Palir (People in Arms to Liberate Rwanda). In its June 26 communique, Palir promised rewards for anyone who killed Americans residing in Rwanda.
It asked Hutus to stand up and “fight the vampires who have taken hold of our country” and, in an evident attempt to scare away Americans helping Rwanda in its efforts to recover from the genocide there in 1994, it added: “To start off our combat on the right foot, we must attack also every person or entity which helps in the consolidation of the power of the RPF.”
The Rwandese Patriotic Front (RPF) is the former rebel group that seized power in Rwanda in July 1994 from an extremist Hutu regime, during whose three- month reign more than 500 000 people, mainly Tutsis, were massacred.
The RPF victory caused the ousted regime along with the former Rwandan Army (FAR) and the interahamwe – — militias which perpetrated much of the killing in April-June 1994 — to flee to neighbouring Zaire, Tanzania and Kenya.
There, they regrouped in various organisations, of which Palir is the newest.
The group has offered a reward of $1 500 for the assassination of the US ambassador in Kigali and $1 000 for the killing of any other US citizen. “Strike them down, don’t be afraid,” it urged.
“We have taken these threats seriously,” Peter Whaley, political officer in the American Embassy here, said in a telephone interview.
“We have been in contact with security organs of the [Rwandan] government and we have informed all American citizens in Rwanda and in the region to be careful.”
In a notice issued last week, the embassy said: “We know that terrorism does happen. Witness the attack in Dhahran … This threat from Palir is designed to intimidate. While we acknowledge its existence and increase our precautions, we continue with daily activities.”
The threat by the extremist group is evidently a reaction to the support the United States has given to the RPF-led government in Kigali over the past two years.
It came just about two weeks after a Geneva roundtable of donor countries, at which Richard McCall, chief of staff of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), played a key role in mobilising support of the rehabilitation process in Rwanda.
McCall also condemned the murder of people who had survived the 1994 genocide by armed groups linked to Hutu formations in exile, mainly the Rally for the Return of Refugees and Democracy in Rwanda (RDR), which is active in refugee camps in Zaire.
While the RDR and the Resistance Forces for Democracy (FDR) were formed soon after the 1994 exodus, Palir is a new group. A senior official in the office of the president here said that the organisation “encompasses all Hutu extremist groups and individuals who desperately seek to impede the reconciliation process we are engaged in.”
Army spokesman Major Emanuel Ndahiro feels that “Palir is but a pseudonym of genocide criminals based in Zaire and Nairobi, presenting themselves under a new political name with the aim of gaining international recognition under that cover.”
Ndahiro, who is a senior aide to Rwandan Vice- President Major General Paul Kagame, said the Rwandan government had reassured the US embassy that any attack on US citizens and their property would not be allowed.
“The threats against Americans are just empty,” he said, explaining that they stemmed from the disappointment of extremist groups at the result of the Geneva meeting, at which donors pledged S617- million in support of Rwanda’s recovery programme.
Ndahiro said that while the Geneva conference was being held, groups based in Zaire and Kenya had declared that they had bases in south-west Rwanda so as to divert the focus of the meeting from development to security.
“This did not work, and now they are desperately trying to threaten the friends of Rwanda,” he added. — IPS