Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad

"This is lesser-known history. When it comes to the usual suspects in assassination, you have Russia, Israel, perhaps the United States. This is a different case, the case of Rwanda. The argument Wrong makes, particularly well, is the ability of the Kagame regime to exploit memory and history in order to strengthen itself, and to establish connections with powerful western allies so that even when the regime goes well beyond what is needed for security, and engages in extra-territorial repression, kidnappings, assassinations, there is a very small price to pay—or even no price to pay at all. Because all they confront is complaints from NGOs and investigative journalists. Western leaders who have, in their view, much bigger interests in maintaining good relationships with Rwanda, tend to turn a blind eye to the violation of human rights, all the way up to assassination. We’ve seen similar cases—for example, the case of Saudi Arabia, which paid a very, very small price for the incredibly reckless assassination of Jamal Khashoggi . Saudia Arabia is already back in the good books of most western countries. The same is true in the case of Rwanda, tracked effectively by Michaela Wrong. The book is built around the assassination of the former intelligence chief of the Rwandan regime, Patrick Karegeya. Wrong, at one point, actually interviewed Karegeya about the regime’s practices, including assassination, and in a very candid interview Karegeya made the argument that the situation of Rwanda is not so different to that of Israel: it’s a very small and densely populated country that cannot allow itself to have another invasion or internal civil war. So, the policy is one of outsourcing the use of violence through pre-emptive and preventive assassinations outside the borders of Rwanda itself. Karegeya linked this approach explicitly to Israel and Mossad, going back to the argument that we made earlier, about setting a precedent. Karegeya was very explicit in suggesting that, ‘if Israel does it, we do it as well.’ One of the points made by Wrong, and by a 2023 Human Rights Watch report, relates to the use of Rwandan diasporas to increase pressure on certain individuals or potential dissidents. Family members might be arrested to induce these people to come back—something Saudi Arabia is also very good at doing. And, an element that connects to our previous discussion, Rwanda has established very effective links to intelligence services of other countries throughout Africa, to the extent that some of these countries have helped Rwandan authorities by arresting individuals and in the rendition of them to Rwanda, through intelligence, collaborations, and so on. There was a case in Mozambique, for example, in 2021, where a Rwandan journalist and founder of an opposition movement was arrested by local police and handed over to Rwanda. Which is not dissimilar to what was happening with the Condor countries, helping each other out by arresting dissidents and sending them back to their countries of origin."