Rwandan Prisoner of Conscience Victoire Ingabire 

Ingabire Day, a day of solidarity and support for Madame Victoire Ingabire and other prisoners of conscience in Rwanda, was celebrated in October to commemorate her October 2010 arrest. Rwanda has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world, often ranking in the top three countries per capita.

Ingabire spent eight years in prison for political dissidence between 2010 and 2018. She is now imprisoned and facing trial again, this time for allegedly conspiring with eight other political dissidents who were arrested for reading a book on nonviolent resistance and undertaking nonviolence training. A journalist was also charged with reporting their story, and all nine were held in pretrial detention for three years between 2021 and 2024.

Ingabire’s story is central to understanding the history of Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo over the past 35 years.

That history began when Paul Kagame, the son of Rwandan Tutsi refugees and a high-ranking officer in the Ugandan military, left the US Army Command and General Staff College to lead an army of Tutsi refugees who invaded Rwanda from Uganda. They waged a devastating four-year war against the Rwandan government and seized power at the end of the final 90 days of ethnic massacres known as the Rwandan Genocide.

Kagame’s government totally controlled the count of the dead, and in short order—not nearly enough time for a scientific study—determined that Hutus had killed a million Tutsis. Even before this summary count of the dead, Bill Clinton’s National Security Advisor Anthony Lake told press that the US would not be talking to the deposed Hutu government, which had fled into the Democratic Republic of the Congo, because they were guilty of genocide.

The new Rwandan state was thus founded on Hutu guilt and Tutsi victimhood, but much careful research has since demonstrated that both Hutu and Tutsi were massacred, with Hutu largely massacred by Kagame’s army. Canadian journalist Judi Rever greatly contributed to this body of evidence with her groundbreaking investigation In Praise of Blood: Crimes of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, which she published in 2020 despite Rwandan operatives’ repeated threats to harm her and her family.

A Wikileaks cable demonstrated that Rwanda is largely ruled by a tyrannical Tutsi elite, despite its claims of ethnic reconciliation. Numerous human rights organizations have documented that Rwandan elections are rigged, that there is no freedom of expression and that Rwanda’s prisons are packed with dissidents who have challenged Kagame’s rule and/or disputed the legally codified history of the genocide.

In 1996, and then again in 1998, Kagame, with Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni, invaded the Democratic Republic of the Congo, claiming to pursue Rwandan Hutu refugees who threatened to return to commit another genocide in Rwanda.

Since then the Rwandan army and Congolese militias under Rwandan command have massacred hundreds of thousands of Hutu refugees, caused the death of millions of Congolese, and stolen vast quantities of Congolese resources for sale to foreign governments and corporations. This has been documented by UN investigators and other researchers for the past 25 years, but the international community continues to accept Kagame’s claim that he is in Congo to prevent Hutus from returning to commit another Tutsi genocide.

Victoire Ingabire has disputed the official history by stating the Hutus were killed and were the victims of crimes against humanity before, during, and after the genocide, though she has never used the term “Hutu genocide,” which would violate Rwandan law.

Will she be freed?

Ingabire is internationally known as a political prisoner. Her 2010 attempt to run for president and her writing and activism since have played a pivotal role in demonstrating that the Rwandan government is hugely repressive and that it holds fake elections, which Kagame most recently won by over 99%.

She has been able to publish in CNN, The Guardian, Al Jazeera, and African Arguments, and The Elephant. She has been interviewed by major international media outlets, including even ESPN in its documentary “How the NBA got into business with an African dictator.”

However, she is not as well-known as Paul Rusesabagina, the real-life hero of Hotel Rwanda, whom the Rwandan government kidnapped in Dubai in 2020 and then imprisoned for nearly three years. The US government secured Rusesabagina’s release in response to public outcry and the campaigns of human rights organizations, including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the Clooney Foundation for Justice, and his own Hotel Rwanda Rusesabagina Foundation.

Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have also championed Ingabire’s cause. The question of whether she will be released depends on how much international reputational damage Kagame thinks he would suffer by sending her back to prison or assassinating her.

In 2010, before returning to Rwanda from exile in the Netherlands, she told her supporters that if she should fall, they would need to pick up the struggle after her.

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