The Rwandan president, Paul Kagame, has launched a withering attack on Britain and other Western powers after the arrest of his intelligence chief in London.
Kagame reminded Western governments of their bloody colonial exploitation of Africa and put the arrest down to “absolute arrogance and contempt,” observing: “They must have mistaken him for an illegal immigrant.”
The country’s relations with Britain have been shaken since the head of intelligence, Karenzi Karake, was arrested at Heathrow Airport last weekend on a European arrest warrant. He is among 40 people sought on the orders of a Spanish judge over the alleged murder of three Spanish aid workers and revenge massacres of Hutus in the wake of the 1994 genocide.
On Thursday, the Rwandan presidency’s Twitter account ran extracts from a speech to parliament in which Kagame was unusually scathing about the conduct of the West. “People think they can take us down but they can never take us out,” he said. “We are decent people who do not accept injustice. It is history repeating itself in a different form. It is a continuation of slavery, of colonialism, of violence and bigotry.
“It is wagging a finger at the African and telling him ‘this is where you belong’. We are no longer the African that belongs there. There are Africans who still belong there, even among us. This is the African they prefer.”
The international community failed to intervene to prevent the genocide 21 years ago. Former U.S. President Bill Clinton described it as one of the biggest regrets of his presidency. Kagame has even accused France of having a direct role in the political buildup to the mass atrocity and claimed its troops took an “active” part in the killings.
On Thursday, the president said the “real untold story is they want to change the narrative of what has happened in Rwanda that they were so deeply involved in. They want to mask their responsibility by saying it’s not us, it is savages of Africa who killed each other.”
Read the full story at theguardian.com
