It has been more than 16 years since Rwandan dissident and genocide survivor Déogratias Mushayidi was imprisoned in Rwanda, where he is serving an unjust life sentence for peacefully opposing Paul Kagame’s regime. HRF joins calls to #FreeDeoMushayidi.
In early March 2010, Mushayidi, a former ruling party member turned opposition politician in exile, was arrested in Tanzania, where he was traveling on a fake Burundian identity. Tanzanian police handed him over to Burundi, where he was subsequently transferred to the custody of the Rwandan regime. Six months later, Rwanda’s High Court convicted Mushayidi on trumped-up charges that included causing state insecurity and inciting the population to hate the government. In February 2012, the Rwandan Supreme Court rejected his appeal. He has been held at Mpanga International Maximum Security Prison in Nyanza in southern Rwanda since.
Mushayidi joined Rwanda’s ruling Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) when it was a rebel movement in the early 1990s, serving as its representative to Switzerland. He lost his entire family in the 1994 genocide and returned to Rwanda after the RPF seized power. His opposition to the human rights abuses of the new regime led him to quit the RPF and start an independent newspaper called Imboni, which was eventually banned. Repression led him to flee the country, and he obtained political asylum in Belgium in 2000.
At the time of his arrest, Mushayidi was the president of Pact for People’s Defense, a political party formed in Belgium and unregistered in Rwanda, which advocated for justice, democracy, and inclusive dialogue. Mushayidi accused Kagame’s regime of a number of crimes including deceptively casting itself as the savior of Rwanda in order to conceal its participation in the genocide, perpetuating divisive politics of revenge that have haunted the country since independence, and permanently invoking threats to justify dictatorship and aggressive regional militarism.
