Kigali’s centre for undesirables: HRW gets it wrong once again

There was a time when Rwanda was famous for the wrong reasons.

Tucked away deep in the Great Lakes region of East and Central Africa, surrounded by far larger neighbours and once led by remarkably insular governments, few in the wider world had heard of it until the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi exploded onto their television screens and became the staple of news headlines in print and electronic media. It then became the country where “ancient ethnic hatreds” had led to the killing of a million or so of its citizens.

There were also the wars in the former Zaire, where the Rwandan army at times featured as it sought to ensure that the post-genocide government outlived the brief period predicted by many established Rwanda experts and others who believed the country would never overcome the deep socio-political divisions of the previous nearly 35 years.

And then there were the many years when, thanks to unremitting campaigning by a wide assortment of groups, some now known to have been collaborating with the perpetrators of the genocide and its deniers, one would have been forgiven for believing that violating human rights was the one thing the post-genocide government did best.

In recent years, however, a unique blend of its collective leadership’s industriousness and sheer determination to succeed has enabled Rwanda and its image to turn a corner.

Some campaigners may want to carry on with the same old narratives, but the noise they generate these days is increasingly eclipsed by the attention the country attracts because of the long list of achievements, some truly spectacular, it has made in several domains.

For starters, there is the once wide gulf, psychological and otherwise, between the Hutu and the Tutsi. As already said, hardly anyone out there believed it could be narrowed, and that one day more and more of them would choose what united them as Rwandans, not what divided them.

At the level of the state, reputable international opinion polling and research organisations, among them Gallup, have shown that the government enjoys significantly, and to detractors and sceptics, unexpectedly high levels of trust among its citizens, as do state organs like the police, the judiciary, and the military.

To understand why the army and the police are regarded with such trust and appreciation, one has to look at the roles they play in executing their “secondary mission”: Supporting the government in combating disease, poverty, and ignorance.

Alongside their work in agriculture, where they donate cows to the poor, drain swamps for cultivation, build roads, dams and dykes to improve infrastructure and terraces to prevent soil erosion from hilly ground, the two are notable builders and renovators of classrooms and health facilities.

In all this, they work alongside ordinary citizens in a country where communal self-help is something of an institution. You wonder why school enrolment rates in Rwanda are high and dropout rates low; why Rwandans now live longer; and why they experience less hunger than 20 years ago? Here is part of the answer.

And then there is the story of Kigali the capital, widely acknowledged as one of Africa’s cleanest cities. Visitors wonder how this was achieved. It is a long story.

However, recently, Anneke van Woudenberg, a senior staffer at Human Rights Watch, volunteered a short and very simple explanation. In an article titled “The Dirty Secret behind Kigali’s Clean Streets” in Newsweek, she claims that it is all down to the arrest and illegal detention by the police on behalf of Kigali City Council, of the city’s “undesirables”: The homeless, street vendors, sex workers, and beggars.

Her “explanation” revolves around Gikondo Transit Centre, which the government uses as a holding facility for individuals, including petty criminals and drug abusers, whom it seeks to rehabilitate and equip with practical skills through vocational training and start-up capital for small-scale businesses, prior to reinsertion into their communities.

Gikondo is no holiday resort. What Ms Woudenberg does not mention, however, is that it has long been the subject of much debate within government circles, and of inquiries and hearings by parliament.

These internal processes have led to the recognition that poverty begets the key problem Gikondo was meant to tackle — rising numbers of poor and vulnerable citizens roaming the streets, without sustainable livelihoods, and the attendant risk of this breeding criminality.

As a result, in the past few years the government has established nearly 30 transit and rehabilitation centres across the country to deal with a problem that manifests itself not only in Kigali, but other urban centres too.

Graduates from these centres have gone on to live productive lives after acquiring skills and financial assistance. Of this, van Woudenberg says nothing. Proof, possibly, that HRW “has lost its ethical and analytical bearings on Rwanda,” as one critic says.

Frederick Golooba-Mutebi is a Kampala- and Kigali-based researcher and writer on politics and public affairs. E-mail: [email protected]