Borrowing a leaf from the annual National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, DC, an event that brings together American presidents, federal judges, Cabinet members, congressmen, intelligence and military chiefs, and corporate executives, Rwanda’s dictatorial president Paul Kagame held his own Rwanda Leaders’ Fellowship Prayer Breakfast on January 12 in Kigali, the Rwandan capital. Kagame has been a frequent guest at the Washington prayer breakfast.
The U.S. National Prayer Breakfast is sponsored by the secretive “Fellowship” based in Arlington, Virginia, which is also known as “The Family.” The Fellowship Foundation, which collects millions of tax free dollars for the operations of the group, has been linked to sponsoring pro-U.S. leaders, including dictators like Kagame, around the world. The Arlington mansion that houses the headquarters for the Fellowship was once a CIA safe house owned by billionaire industrialist Howard Hughes.
Kagame used his own prayer breakfast to admit that his regime has reserved the right to kill its political opponents. The last victim of Kagame’s hit squads was Patrick Karigeya, Kagame’s one-time ally and chief of the Rwandan intelligence service. Karigeya broke with Kagame to form the exile opposition coalition Rwandan National Congress.
In his prayer breakfast speech delivered in the Kinyarwanda language, Kagame said, “Whoever is undermining Rwanda usually face serious consequences wherever they are.” Kagame added, “Some have forgotten so soon, these people who were made by this country, have turned against it. We have faith and we need to live by it. The only way to confirm your faith is through your actions. God gave us power to build our nation; God also gave us power to protect it.”
Earlier this month, Karigeya was found strangled in his room at the Michelangelo Towers hotel in downtown Johannesburg. In 2010, would-be assassins in Johannesburg tried to gun down Lt. Gen. Faustin Kayumba Nyamwasa, Kagame’s exiled former army chief of staff.
Kagame’s regime tolerates no political opposition. Kagame has also used the George Soros-influenced International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda to criminally charge with genocide his opponents from the majority Hutu ethnic group. The charges stem from Kagame’s minority Tutsi-led civil war against the predominantly Hutu government during the 1990s.
When Kagame’s officials are not successful in bringing genocide charges against his opponents abroad, his hit men resort to political assassinations to silence the opposition.
Rwanda’s defense minister, James Kaberebe, accused of carrying out genocide in the neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo against exiled Rwandan Hutus, as well as native Congolese, threatened Rwanda’s political opposition on January 7, 2013. Kabarebe said, “When you choose to live like a dog, you die like a dog . . . Do not waste your time on reports that so-and-so was strangled with a rope on the seventh floor of a hotel in whatever country. When you choose to be a dog, you die like a dog, and the cleaners will wipe away the trash so that it does not stink for them . . . Those who choose such a path must be ready to face such consequences. There is nothing we can do about it, and we should not be interrogated over it. We cannot apologize for it.”
Kagame and his government are strongly supported by the Barack Obama administration, chiefly by National Security Adviser Susan Rice, who is a close personal friend of Kagame; by the British government, which was excited to see francophone Rwanda join the British-led Commonwealth of Nations; and by Israel, which has embraced Kagame as a close ally. In fact, Kagame was one of the few world leaders who attended Israeli President Shimon Peres’s 90th birthday party celebration in Jerusalem.
Previously published in the Wayne Madsen Report.
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Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and nationally-distributed columnist. He is the editor and publisher of the Wayne Madsen Report (subscription required).
