Always ready to face whatever comes, Victoire Ingabire greets supporters outside the courtroom.
Rwandan opposition leader Victoire Ingabire’s arrest belies Rwanda’s pretense to liberal democracy and its pretense to self-defense in DRC.
Rwandan opposition leader Victoire Ingabire has been denied bail and remanded to prison in Rwanda’s capital, Kigali, after being arrested for allegedly encouraging nonviolent protest. She has already served an eight-year prison sentence, from 2010 to 2018, and there is great danger that she will be returning for another extended term. Given the totalitarian nature of the Rwandan regime, she can’t expect a fair trial.
Ingabire has been a threat to the Rwandan government ever since she returned from exile in the Netherlands to attempt to stand for the presidency against incumbent Paul Kagame. Kagame has been the country’s de facto ruler since seizing power at the end of the 1990-1994 Rwandan war. He has been its president since 2000.
She has spoken out eloquently against the regime’s injustices, against its war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and against the fundamental falsehoods used to justify both its rule and its war.
Rwanda has one of the world’s highest per capita prison populations and gross prison overcrowding
After being denied bail, Ingabire was moved from the Rwanda Investigation Bureau’s jail in Kicukiro, Kigal to Mageragere Prison, the largest prison in Rwanda. Mageragere was created with the 2016 consolidation of Nyarugenge and Gasabo Prisons, but some reports still refer to it as Nyarugenge. In a CNN Op-ed, Inside the prison where sunlight ceases to exist, Ingabire wrote that conditions are “harsh and harrowing – especially for those incarcerated for daring or perceived by the authorities to challenge the government’s narrative.” She described torture including solitary confinement in a sunless room, for some time in handcuffs and without even a mattress.
CNN published her opinion because of attention then turned to the UK’s plan to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda, duplicating a process that had already proven disastrous, as reported by Haaretz, after Israel deported asylum seekers there.
Rwanda’s per capita prison population is consistently ranked among the top three in the world, with 620 prisoners per 100,000 inhabitants according to Statista’s February 2025 report. Human Rights Watch has repeatedly documented prison overcrowding and inhumane treatment, including torture.
The US is a longstanding ally of the regime even though the US State Department lists a long list of human rights abuses in its last country report and says, “Conditions at prisons and unofficial detention centers ranged widely among facilities but could be harsh and life-threatening due to gross overcrowding, food and water shortages, and inadequate sanitary conditions.”
Pretense to liberal democracy
Ingabire’s struggle lifted the veil off Rwanda’s pretense to practicing liberal democracy. During her attempt to run against Paul Kagame in the 2010 presidential election, it became clear that the electoral process was no more than a charade staged to mollify Western powers. None of the three viable parties including Ingabire’s were even allowed to register and enter the race. By the end of the year, Ingabire and fellow candidate Bernard Ntaganda were both in prison and Frank Habineza, leader of the Democratic Green Party of Rwanda, had fled to Sweden after his vice presidential running mate was found with his head cut off.
Multiple journalists were murdered and others fled. ICTR defense attorney and law professor Jwame Mwaikusa, was assassinated in Arusha, Tanzania after he succeeded in preventing his client from being repatriated to Rwanda, arguing that he could not possibly receive a fair trial there. Rwandan operatives attempted to assassinate Kagame’s former defense chief Kayumba Nyamwasa, who was then in exile in Johannesburg.
In August, American lawyer Peter Erlinder traveled to Rwanda to defend Victoire Ingabire, but he was immediately arrested and charged with genocide ideology, which means differing with the official, legally enforced history of the Rwandan Genocide. It took an international campaign, waged by Bar associations around the world, to secure his release.
By the end of the year Rwanda’s liberal facade was in tatters. Victoire Ingabire was behind bars but largely credited with its destruction.
In 2017, the African Court of Human and People’s Rights ruled that Rwanda had violated her freedom of expression and right to a fair trial. The ruling was reported on the websites of Jeune Afrique, La Libre Afrique, Radio France International, the Dutch publication AD, the Voice of America’s French Africa edition, and Pacifica Radio’s KPFA News in the U.S., but not in Rwanda where the press is under tight state control.
Though released from prison in 2018, Ingabire remains forbidden to leave Rwanda. Gospel singer Kizito Mihigo, who was released from prison at the same time as she was found dead in a prison cell after attempting to escape across the Rwandan/Burundian border.
Truth about Rwanda and DRC
Ingabire has also exposed the truth about the Rwandan Genocide and Rwanda’s war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Shortly after I met her via video conferencing, in 2010, she told me that the world thinks Hutu people are killers, but that many Hutu people were also killed, often in what were crimes against humanity, during the Rwandan war and genocide and afterwards in Rwanda’s war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. This has been proven in multiple UN Group of Experts Reports and in books including Judi Rever’s “In Praise of Blood, Crimes of the Rwandan Patriotic Front” and Charles Onana’s Holocaust in Congo: The International Community's Omerta.”
Ingabire did not use the words “Hutu genocide” or “double genocide,” which would have been violations of Rwandan law, but upon her arrival in Rwanda, she went to Kigali’s genocide memorial and asked, “Where is the memorial to the Hutus?” For this she was charged with genocide ideology, the same crime that Peter Erlinder was charge with there.
Both Ingabire and Erlinder spoke to complex truth of the Rwandan Genocide and Rwanda’s ensuing war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. That truth belies the excuse that Kagame has used to justify his war in Congo for 30 years. Throughout that time he has relied on the simple Manichean tale of demonic Hutus massacring innocent Tutsis and insisted that Rwandan forces must be in DRC to keep these demonic Hutus from massacring Congolese Tutsis or returning to commit another genocide in Rwanda, even as UN reports documented Rwanda’s wholesale plunder of DRC’s natural resources.
Unfortunately, the so-called “peace agreement” repeats this 30-year lie by referring to Rwanda’s war and plunder in DRC as “defensive measures,” but gradually more and more people realize that Rwanda’s tragedy is not the simple tale they’ve been told. More and more also realize that the simple tale has been used to justify human catastrophe.
On Sunday, July 21, activists, journalists, and Ingabire’s family gathered online to consider the grave danger she faces and plan an international campaign for her freedom. Securing her release from Rwanda is unlikely, but it may be possible to keep her alive and out of prison.
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