Rwanda Bans Bob Brown

Former Greens Leader and Senator Bob Brown, who retired from the Senate in June, has been banned from entering Rwanda.

Dr Brown was due to fly to the central African country tomorrow to support the local Greens party.

Dr Brown was issued a visa on 30 October 2012 but this morning received an email cancelling his visa citing “contradictory messages” in his application.

“This is very unfortunate, not just for the Greens in Rwanda, but for democracy in a country where political opposition is not wanted by the government of president Kagame”, Dr Brown said.

A recent article in the Guardian Weekly (10 Oct 2012) reported on the situation in Rwanda.

Kagame’s Rwanda, say critics, is an authoritarian state where democracy and human rights are trampled upon and dissenters are hunted down. When Kagame won the 2010 election with 93% of the vote, for example, three major opposition parties were excluded from the ballot. Two of their leaders were jailed and still languish there today.

The third, Frank Habineza of the Democratic Green party, was also arrested briefly then went into exile after his deputy, André Kagwa Rwisereka, was found dead, nearly decapitated. “It broke our hearts,” recalled Habineza, who returned home last month after two years in Sweden. “He was a man who came to our house to share a meal and was close to my family. It was a terrible death. I went to the mortuary to dress him for the burial. It was an intimate moment. It shattered us but we have to pull ourselves together.”

Habineza, who received death threats after breaking away from Kagame’s ruling Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), feels frustrated at international donors’ failure to push for genuine democracy.

“I will continue to support the Rwandan Greens and to work for people pursuing democracy under far more difficult circumstances than we experience in Australia”, Dr Brown said in Melbourne today.

Full article in the Guardian Weekly can be found at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/oct/10/paul-kagame-rwanda-success-authoritarian?intcmp=239

• Rwanda – Brown Appeals to Gillard

Bob Brown has asked Prime Minister Gillard to seek to have Rwandan President Kagame restore Brown’s visa so that he can visit the country’s Democratic Green Party.

Former Senator Brown says that the claim on the website Rwanda Responds that he had visited Rwanda before is demonstrably wrong.

In October Prime Minister Gillard met President Kagame at the United Nations.

Yesterday, Greens Leader Christine Milne called on Foreign Minister Bob Carr to intervene on Brown’s behalf.