April 30, 2000
Kigali, Rwanda - Rwanda has denied charges by two human rights organizations that it uses the pretext of security to cover up rights abuses, saying the groups aim at undermining the government, news reports said Sunday.
Rwanda News Agency quoted Foreign Minister Andre Bumaya as saying Saturday that reports by the Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International "are based on lies and questionable research methods whose purpose is to tarnish the image of the newly sworn-in government."
The news agency also quoted Rwanda's permanent representative at the United Nations, Joseph Mutaboba, as saying his country's image had been tarnished by former members of diplomatic corps. "Some big organizations are known to bankroll those people in their efforts to tarnish our country's image," Mutaboba said.
Interior Minister Gakwaya Rwaka said the government was doing all it could to defend the rights of Rwandan prisoners within the budget it was allocated, adding the mortality rate in prisons is lower than 1 percent per year. Rwaka said this compared favorably to 3 percent mortality rate per year among Rwandans outside of prisons.
In an April 27 report, the New York-based Human Rights Watch said President Paul Kagame's government is targeting Tutsi survivors of Rwanda's 1994 genocide because they are seen to be political opponents.
In "Rwanda: The Troubled Course of Justice," released April 26 in London, Amnesty International said the 125,000 people jailed on suspicion of taking part in the genocide "are still languishing in inhuman conditions." The report said the government had worked hard to settle the huge number of cases awaiting trial, but detailed abuses such as detention without trial for several years, torture and ill-treatment and unlawful detention of civilians in military custody.
At least 500,000 minority Tutsis and politically moderate Hutus were slaughtered on the orders of an extremist Hutu government from April 6 to mid-July 1994. The Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front, made up of Tutsi exiles who had launched attacks from neighboring Uganda in October 1990, ousted the government and put an end to the killings.
