HRF condemns Aston Villa’s £20 million per year sponsorship deal with #VisitRwanda, a front for dictator Paul Kagame’s regime to project international soft power and enrich itself with tourism revenues. Aston Villa joins a list of European football clubs complicit in promoting a brutal regime fuelling a bloody war in the DRC and committing gross human rights abuses at home.
On July 14, Aston Villa’s President of Business Operations Francesco Calvo and Janet Karemera, CEO of the Rwanda Convention Bureau, announced a multi-year agreement worth up to £20 million per year. Under the deal, the Visit Rwanda branding will appear on the front of the club’s men’s, women’s, and academy shirts, as well as in other prominent spaces.
Aston Villa is the fifth football club — following Arsenal, Bayern Munich, PSG, Atlético de Madrid — to sign a commercial partnership with Kagame’s brutal regime. The deals are part of efforts to normalize Rwanda’s dictatorship in mainstream global culture, project a false image of normalcy and progress in Rwanda, and obfuscate the poverty and repression under which Rwandans live. They also divert attention from Rwanda’s war of territorial conquest and its plunder of natural resources in neighboring eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.
Aston Villa announced the partnership the same day the United Nations Security Council issued sanctions against senior leaders of Rwanda’s proxy politico-military groups Alliance Fleuve Congo, M23, and Twirwaneho.
