Rwandan politician who criticised Sunak’s bill fears for her safety

A Rwandan opposition politician who publicly criticised the UK’s deportation deal this week fears for her safety after a presidential adviser condemned her for “waging war on her compatriots”.

Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza, who wrote a column in the Guardian on Tuesday questioning her country’s treatment of refugees, said she has become concerned about the fallout from the criticism after the aide, an ally of Paul Kagame, wrote she was “maligning Rwanda” in international media.

Umuhoza, who spent eight years in jail after what human rights groups called a flawed trial, also says she has received warnings of a threat against her life. Her views have been condemned by government supporters on social media.

She said: “I am alarmed that there appears to be a campaign to harm me for no other reason than the fact that I was given platform to share my views on the UK-Rwanda asylum deal by international media.

“Two weeks ago a friend warned me of an impending threat on my life. I took it as rumours. Yesterday [I received] information that a plan to harm me has been going around.

“Whether these claims are true or false, the fact is that people here in Rwanda including my supporters have been mysteriously killed and disappeared before.”

Umuhoza, who lives in Kigali, has given interviews to several media organisations after Rishi Sunak announced last week that the UK government would double down on plans to fly refugees to Rwanda.

After a damning supreme court ruling found that Rwanda could not ensure the safety of refugees, the prime minister announced a new bill that says that Rwanda is a safe country in an attempt to stop legal claims from preventing flights taking off.

Umuhoza became especially concerned on Tuesday when a column in a Kagame-supporting media outlet by Joseph Rwagatare, an adviser to Kagame, said she was “gravely sick” with “ingratitude”.

“She has actually waged war on her country and compatriots,” he wrote. “Individuals with such terrible disorders and illnesses think they are very clever. Ingabire now presents herself as a champion of unity and reconciliation, and lambasts the government of Rwanda for failures in that area. Only in foreign media, of course.”

Referring to Umuhoza’s appearance on the BBC’s Hardtalk programme on 7 December, Rwagatare wrote: “She dismissed her country as dirty, poor and not safe for its own citizens, let alone foreigners, including asylum seekers. That is, of course, what some in the United Kingdom wanted to hear – confirmation of their bias coming from a Rwandan ‘politician’.

“Her loud cries of suppression of such rights as the freedom of expression, for instance, ring hollow when she makes the most rabid anti-Rwanda statements on Rwandan territory and has not suffered for it.”

Rwagatare’s LinkedIn account describes him as an adviser to the president of Rwanda. In an article he wrote for the Daily Mail in June 2022 he was described as Kagame’s education adviser.

Umuhoza has received threats on social media. One written on X accused her of “sedition” in her Guardian article, adding: “There is possibly no worse reputation than to be known as the Rwandan who conspires with colonialists.”

Another said: “You should thank Kagame … I would shoot you.”

It has since emerged that £290m has been pledged in total to Rwanda between 2022 and 2024, while two other as yet unknown tranches will be paid in 2025 and 2026.

In 2010, Umuhoza, a Hutu, was arrested in Rwanda on return from exile as leader of the United Democratic Forces party. After questioning why there were few mentions of the moderate Hutu victims of the 1994 genocide at a memorial, Umuhoza was arrested on charges that included collaborating with a terrorist organisation and “minimising the genocide” and was sentenced to 15 years’ imprisonment.

She was released in 2018 after receiving a pardon from Kagame. She spent five of her eight years in jail in solitary confinement. Human rights organisations including Amnesty International condemned her trial as flawed.

Kagame has been accused of seeking to assassinate and kidnap political opponents.

One of Kagame’s most prominent alleged victims was his former intelligence chief Patrick Karegeya, who was strangled in a hotel room in 2013 while living in exile in South Africa.

Rwanda’s former army chief of staff Kayumba Nyamwasa – who also went into exile in South Africa – has survived two assassination attempts blamed on Kagame.

The government of Rwanda has been approached for comment.