EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE

RDR Rally for the Return of Refugees and Democracy in Rwanda Rassemblement pour le Retour des Réfugiés et la Démocratie au Rwanda Ihuliro Liharanira Itahuka ry’Impunzi na Demokarasi mu Rwanda P.O. Box 5352, Postal Station B Postbus 3124 Montreal, Canada, H3B 4P1 2280 GC, Rijswijk, Netherlands Phone : (514) 340 0618 Phone/Fax : (31)-(0)-180633822 E-mail : info@rdrwanda.org Website: http://www.rdrwanda.org

PRESS RELEASE N0. 01/2000

THE RDR CONDEMNS UNFREE AND UNFAIR LOCAL ELECTIONS IN RWANDA

As member of the coalition Union of Rwandese Democratic Forces (UFDR), the Rally for the Return of Refugees and Democracy in Rwanda (RDR) strongly denounces and condemns the unfree and unfair communal elections planned for October or November of this year by the dictatorial government of Rwanda led by the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). These communal elections are a continuation of unfree and unfair elections initiated in March of the last year at cell and sector levels under the so-called «no-party system» imported in Rwanda from Uganda by the RPF.

Transplanting the Ugandan «no-party» dictatorship in Rwanda, the RPF has imposed a ban on the activities of other political parties and limited their effectiveness inside the country since July 1994. The Ugandan ruler, General Yoweri Museveni, wrongly equates multiparty democracy with division. He argues that in developing countries political parties divide the society only along ethnic, tribal and religious lines. He permits the existence of political parties however but severely limits their activities. Political parties are not allowed to campaign, to issue membership cards, to hold public meetings, gatherings and rallies or to back candidates in elections. Stringent restrictions on the activities of the political opposition are justified by a kind of paternalism which considers Africans as politically immature peoples who have to endure decades of dictatorship under a self-declared enlightened elite who will deliver, at unspecified time, political freedom and social liberation from on high to a meek and grateful mass. This idea is wrong, dangerous and does not hold any water. It justifies the establishment of a one-party dictatorship instead of finding ways to curb the negative aspects of political pluralism, like tribalism. On the African continent, Botswana, Senegal, South Africa and Mauritius are some examples of multiparty democracies. The RDR asks all democratic governments and freedom-loving peoples and organizations to condemn and not fund the RPF-led government-organized elections which violate the Rwandan citizens’ rights to freedom of association, peaceful assembly, expression, movement and the right to take part in the government directly or through freely chosen representatives as recognized by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the African Charter for Human and Peoples' Rights.

After banning the activities of other political parties when it took power in July 1994, the RPF embarked on division and destructive tactics. It picked some Hutus belonging to factions sympathetic to it in the muzzled political parties and appointed them in its dictatorial government, legislature and civil service. It did so hoping that those chosen Hutus will lead the way, like Pied Pipers of Hamelin, blindly followed by the people and help them win over. However, the population has looked and continue to look to them quite rightly as government servants who opted themselves to be on the side of the oppressors and not as their leaders. If they do not express their masters’ voice, they are liable to be deposed forthwith, imprisoned or killed. This is what has exactly happened to many of them. Incapable of winning the hearts of the people and successive resignations and denunciations having exposed the fallacy behind the dictatorial «government of national unity», the RPF is now organizing unfree and unfair elections and falsely presenting them as a «democratization and decentralisation process» at the grass roots level in order to hide its hastening decay and doom.

In elections held last year at cell and sector levels, only persons supportive of the government were allowed to be candidates, but according to the government, they stood as individuals, not as party members. Voters had no alternative programmes to choose from and vote for. The vote was compulsory. Under the strict surveillance of the government’s army, police and RPF’s local defence militia units armed to the hilt, the citizens were forced to go to vote and compelled to line up behind one candidate of their choice among those selected by the government and allowed to stand in elections. Candidates who got the majority of persons behind them were declared by the government "elected on merit, rather than according to their political or ethnic group". In communal elections, only 10000 persons elected last year in cell and sector levels will have the right to vote and elect among themselves 154 mayors at secret ballot; the suffrage will be indirect. For the RDR, the entire electoral process is flawed. The ban on the activities of the political parties should be lifted, political freedom should be fully restored, the citizens should have the right to elect their leaders at all levels through universal, direct, free, equal and secret elections. All the power should be to the people.

The RDR asks all democratic governments and freedom-loving peoples and organizations to denounce and condemn the unfree and unfair elections organized by the RPF-led dictatorial government in Rwanda, and not to associate themselves with oppression of our people, with tyranny in our land. All tyrants, whatever their colour, ethnicity, shape and garments, come today and are gone tomorrow. The people, the victims of tyranny, live on. All tyrannical systems, whatever the label they give themselves, come today and tomorrow are no more than a bad memory.

Done in Montreal on 31 August 2000

For the RDR

Emmanuel Nyemera, Ph.D.

Vice-President