originally published in Africa Review, Kenya
Fresh coordinated grenade attacks killed have injured 16 people in the capital of Rwanda late Thursday night after exploding in busy suburbs through the pouring rain. The nearly simultaneous attacks are the second of the its kind in two weeks to strike Kigali, a usually safe and serene capital, targeting the heavily commercial neighborhoods of Remera and Kimironko neighborhoods at around 7 in the evening. While the police said that things were under control, they said they did know who was behind the attacks.
According to some local journalists, two university students are said to have had died overnight, and sixteen were in the hospital, but this could not be independently confirmed, and police officials said that there had been no deaths and that they were investigating the attacks.
“It is something that can get people scared, and the routine security measures are being taken,” said police spokesperson Eric Kayingare.
The explosion have struck a sense of fear into Kigali’s citizens and come on the heals of another attack on February 20th, when three simultaneous grenades exploded at bus stops throughout the city, eventually killing two and injuring over thirty, and have since been likened to an attempted coup.
Though the police first suggested Hutu militants responsible for the 1994 genocide were behind the first attacks, the government this week said it believed renegade soldiers originally part of the ruling party would behind the attacks. At a press conference Wednesday President Paul Kagame said that, despite the attacks, Rwanda was the safe and virtually immune to a coup attempt.
“We have all it takes to prevent and act on any dangers to our country,” President Kagame said. “Nobody, not a single person can make a coup.”
The attacks Thursday night have been interpreted by some to be a response to those statements.
While attracting significant media attention and injuring dozens, the grenade attacks inspire more hype and fear than tangible danger. In general, they are few and far between, and constitute a large portion of the rare violent crimes within the capital. While in the past they have been used to kill genocide survivors and instill fear, they have caused relatively little damage to the country’s reputation and investment attraction, becoming a beacon of development. Still, the attacks in February, in their symmetry and civilian targets, had shook Kigali.
On Monday, the government said there was evidence linking two former high-ranking Rwandan officers, who had fought alongside Kagame in 1994, to the February attacks, and alleging it was coup attempt. General Faustin Nyamwasa, former army chief and – until last week – Rwanda’s special envoy to India, was accused of plotting the attacks and trying to destabilize the country. President Kagame called the attacks acts of terrorism and said that Rwanda was well suited to ensure security in the county. Earlier this week Nyamwasa escaped into Uganda, and then met another renegade officer, Patrick Karegeya, who spent time in prison for insubordination, in South Africa.
Rwanda’s public prosecutor Matin Ngoga said that Rwanda was working with South African authorities to bring the two renegade generals back to the East African country to face justice.
In Friday morning’s edition of Uganda’s Daily Monitor, an interview was published with Nyamwasa, in which the former general denied playing a role in the attacks, and claimed his family had been taken under house arrest in the embassy in the Indian capital New Delhi. He said he was one of many who had felt harassed by the ruling party and had defected, and condemned the accusations.
“That was just threatening the population, threatening anybody who would want to raise his voice. Essentially that was a threat,” Nyamwasa said in the article. He also said that, though he was not seeking political power, he believed the Rwandan regime had grown too tight and that, if he had wanted to seek power, that would have been “okay.”
But Rwanda says that there was solid information implicating Nyamwasa and Kayegere of terrorism, and Rwanda’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a statement that with immediate effect Nyamwasa was relieved of government duties. On Thursday Rwanda’s foreign minister Louise Mushikiwabo said that close relations had allowed the general to slip across the border but that the Ugandan government had not been involved. Good relations between the two countries have grown more complicated in the last decade and in this press conference Kagame criticized how the country was being portrayed in regional media, specifically out of Kampala, and questioned how Ugandan media was covering Rwanda’s political landscape.
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