Thread by @TheGreatLakesE1

1) Michela Wrong’s #Rwanda hatchet job. Every informative analysis by @AndrewMwenda on the biased book by @michelawrong
thegreatlakeseye.com/post?s=Michela…

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2) After reading @michelawrong's memoir "Do Not Disturb" of Patrick Karegyeya, a former Rwandan intelligence chief killed about eight years ago in South Africa, @AndrewMwenda has written an article showing how it is a one-sided and racist account that lacks context.

3) Wrong is a compelling writer. Do Not Disturb (that is the title of the book) is a captivating read, riveting with scintillating details. One can easily think it is well researched – that is if they are ignorant of the realities of post genocide Rwanda.

4) It is a one-sided account that lacks context. Rarely in the history of our profession has a journalist thrown away all pretense to fairness and balance.

5) Wrong opens the book with a classic prejudice claiming that all Rwandans are liars. In fact, she argues quoting contemporary Rwanda politicians she interviewed, lying for Rwandans is “an art form,” a “part of their culture.”

6) Then she quotes a 19th Century Europea saying: “Of all the liars in African, I believe the people of Ruanda are the most thorough.” And she agrees. Just imagine in a continent of 1000s of cultures, how could this European have studied all of them to arrive at such a conclusion

7) But this is where the contradiction in Wrong’s convictions comes out. If she accepts that lying is an art form in Rwanda, she does so only when someone speaks in defense of President Paul Kagame and/or his government.

8) But when it comes to claims, allegations, accusations and assertions by Kagame’s enemies against the president, the Rwandans she interviewed cease to be liars – their every allegation is treated as gospel truths.

9) There is one great lesson I got from Wrong’s book, and that is my own culpability in her distorted Rwanda narrative: we African journalists do not write books about our countries.We leave it to Western academics seeking to purvey their prejudices about us, our leaders&our govs

10) Interestingly I got to know @michelawrong through Karegyeya. Once having coffee in Kigali in 2002, Karegyeya told me: Andrew, you should read a book titled In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz by a journalist called Micheal Wrong.” Back in Kampala, I bought a copy and devoured it.

11) But when she came to write about #Kagame and #Karegyeya, @michelawrong lost herself – that cool, detached assessment of issues. She transformed into a partisan hack, doing a hatchet on Kagame and his government.

12) She got convinced that Karegyeya was killed on Kagame’s orders and proceeded 2conduct an “investigation” 2prove her hypothesis. Even when her findings cast suspicion on the SA,she is blind to it. Her mind was closed and hence she made no effort to explore any other hypothesis

13) For instance, why did the South African government drag its feet and ultimately fail to prosecute the case six years later? Wrong claims it was intimidated by the Rwandan government. Really? President Jacob Zuma was not a friend of Kagame.

14) He and former South African Intelligence Chief, Bill Masetera, were very close to Karegyeya. Couldn’t they have pushed for prosecution? This lead may have led to dead end but it was important to raise these questions and suspicions about the South African government.

15) When Karegyeya was murdered, I said onTV that @RwandaGov was the number one suspect, but not the only1. They had every reason 2seek his head because I had seen Rwandan intelligence where it was alleged he was involved in training rebels in DRC in alliance with Hutu extremists

16) However, there were many others who would want his head as well. He had stepped on many people’s toes and they could have sought revenge. A Burundian musician had been killed in a SA and his family blamed Karegyeya for it claiming he had been sleeping with his girlfriend.

17) I also knew Karegyeya had been involved in arms dealings for RNC.Arms trade is a dirty business.Did he double cross anyone in this risky business, including Kayumba,who could have bumped Karegyeya off using the same Rwandan double agents knowing they could blame it on Kagame?

18) Could these Rwandan opposition activists have lied to Wrong that it was Kagame who killed Karegyeya? Aren’t Rwandans liars as Wrong says in the introduction to her book?

13) I once got a tip that Rwandan intelligence had misled South African intelligence to believe that Karegyeya was, through Apollo Gafaranga, reconciling with Kagame and was poised to return to Kigali.

14) The South African and Tanzanian armies were in DRC to “fight subversive forces.” But instead they had only beaten M23, leaving Hutu extremist forces intact. Apparently, the South Africans & Tanzanians were using Karegyeya’s contacts among Hutu extremists to trade in minerals

19) Could the South Africans have feared that if Karegyeya returned to Rwanda he would expose their mineral secrets and their work with Hutu extremists? This hypothesis may be misleading but it is worth exploring. I shared it with @michelawrong in London

20) I also shared it with Samantha Power, Obama’s UN ambassador, and British intelligence. Wrong was not interested. She just wanted to present Kagame as a violent psychopath, yet he is a leader loved by the vast majority of his citizens and admired across Africa and the world.

20) But let us accept that the Rwandan state actually killed Karegyeya. Would this be because Kagame is a violent psychopath? Karegyeya himself gave the answer. “You have to understand,” Wrong quotes Karegyeya speaking to someone in Kenya’s capital, Nairobi in 2002,

21) “we are a small and densely populated country. “we are a small and densely populated country. We have a higher population density than any other country in Africa. So we have no space for another war. We just don’t have the strategic geographical depth.

22) There is nothing novel in what Karegyeya was saying. Many countries have always acted preemptively and extra-territorially depending on their judgement of the nature of the threats they faced.

23) During the cold war, the Americans, French, British, and Russians intervened in other countries using coups, civil wars, and targeted assassinations. For example, the Americans attempted to assassinate Fidel Castro 76 times, attempted to assassinate Muammar Gadaffi (1986)

24) After 9/11, the America government adopted a policy of preemptive war to any threat. The US has carried out coups, assassinations or sponsored civil wars and terrorist activities in Iraq, Syria...Libya etc. Would Wrong accuse any US president of being a violent psychopath?

25) This is the problem I have with many Western scholars, journalists and diplomats. When something is done by their countries, they focus on the national policy that informs the decision, not the personality of the leader who made it.

25) They can criticize the policy but rarely do they attribute it to some mental or psychological pathology of the leader. When the same thing is done by an African leader, they ignore the circumstances that informed such a decision and accuse the individual leader of psychopathy

25) I hate to use the word racism. But if this is not racism, what is it? Wrong quotes Keregyeya’s well-articulated explanation for Rwanda’s preemptive and extraterritorial operations.Yet she ignores that explanation & presents such policy as the product of a Kagame’s psychopathy

26) @michelawrong goes a notch higher. In her world, there is hardly anything good Kagame has done. She claims Rwanda’s economic growth figures are distorted and that IMF does not respect them. All she needed to do is visit the IMF website or contact its Africa department.

27) When highly respected world leaders like Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, George Bush Pastor Rick Warren Bill Gates and Howard Buffet, Michael Potter and Paul Farmer hail Kagame, @michelawrong claims it is because of guilt about the genocide or ignorance of basic facts about Rwanda

27) @michelawrong even claims that it is Karegyeya who advised Kagame to “sponsor” my newspaper, The Independent, when the facts were in front of her. Karegyeya fell out with Kagame in 2004 when I was employed by Daily Monitor with no plans of establishing my own newspaper.

28) I left Monitor in 2006 to go to Stanford University and returned in 2007. I resigned from Monitor in August of that year and The Independent was born in December 2007, after Karegyeya had escaped from Rwanda and gone to exile.

29) Space does not allow a detailed demonstration of the lies and distortions she indulges in. I reserve that for another article. In all, Wrong’s BOOK is not a work of journalism but a propaganda hatched job no Western publisher would have entertained about a Western country.

30) She did it because she knew she was writing about Africa where Western publishers do not care about the factual veracity of the work. This is not to say that Wrong is wrong in every claim she makes against Kagame or that the Rwandan president is without weaknesses.

31) Rather, anyone who knows Kagame and Rwanda would agree that his many weaknesses pale into insignificance when set side by side with his contribution to Rwanda’s reconstruction after the genocide.

32) No number of books by anyone can be used to hide the achievements of post genocide Rwanda under Kagame’s leadership. 2nd that those who try to spit at the sky end up spitting in their own faces. In trying to tarnish the name of Kagame, Wrong has soiled her own reputation. END