April 17,1996

The RPF government has embarked on a program of issuing new identity cards.

While the Kigali government gives a seemingly innocent explanation for the new move, namely to have the new cards with no mention of ethnicity, there is also a hidden agenda behind it.

First of all, one has to point out that the Kigali government has not carried out any thorough census of the population , despite the fact that mercenaries and non rwandans who include somalis, ugandan and burundians, etc... entered the country with the coming to power of RPF. This should however not be misconstrued to mean that genuine rwandese refugees had no right to return.

This is explained by the discrepancies between the figures of the rwandese population given by the Kigali government and the real figures. Indeed, even without carrying out a new censure, the figure given by RPF officials do not tally at all with any realistic evaluation.

The Kigali government put the population inside the country at 6 million. However, a realistic breakdown of the population is quite revealing. Indeed, according to the population censure of 1991,the population of Rwanda was around 7.5 million.

At present, the refugee population is more than 2 million. At the same time RPF put the number of victims of the 1994 massacres at 1 million, some time even more.

The most optimistic estimate of the people killed by RPF since it took over power is between 350,000 and 400,000.

This puts the total number of rwandans who died or are in exile at between 3,350,000 and 3,400,000,leaving only at most 4,000,000 people inside the country.

During the war, RPF was putting the figure of rwandese refugees around the world at 1,000,000, but UNHCR was giving a round figure of 500,000.

It is now well known that even that figure included some economic migrants and those that RPF is now calling zairians of rwandan origin.

Even if one admits that all of them returned after the RPF victory which is far from being the case, there is still more than half a million people that RPF would have imported from abroad.

It is also worth noting that the exercise has started in the western and northern districts, where RPF has embarked on an operation of intimidation and persecution, that has forced citizens to flee. Thus, new refugees are arriving every day in the refugee camps of IDJWI, NYANGEZI and UVIRA. UNHC is trying its best to conceal this fact in order not to jeopardise its repatriation plans, but anybody can cross-check this information on the ground.

RDR would like to warn the RPF government and alert the international community over the consequences of such a sinister plan of legitimizing the squaterisation of property of refugees by RPF, with the sole view of enhancing its political constituency, and rewarding those aliens for their contribution towards RPF war.

For RDR

Chris Nzabandora

Director of Information