A third series  of grenade attacks in as many months has rocked the capital of the tiny country of Rwanda in the night of Saturday May 15, 2010. Two simultaneous attacks happened in the busy downtown Kigali and the slum quarters of Nyabugogo. Official casualties are 1 dead and 28 injured, but contacted witnesses affirm seeing more than 5 bodies and many injured in the city center. Over the few months, multiple grenades  attacks rocked the usually heavily secured city of Kigali, sending a shock in the diplomatics circles and prompting the US Embassy to send a Warden Message on March 4, 2010 and to issue warnings regarding traveling in and around the city.

The latest grenade attacks coincided with the official presidential candidacy of the Rwandan dictator General Paul Kagame. After the earlier grenade attacks, two Rwandan ambassadors, one accredited to the Netherlands and another to India, fled the country and sought asylum respectively in Ireland and South Africa. The ex-Ambassador to India was no other than the former Rwandan Patriotic Army Chief of Staff, General Kayumba Nyamwasa. He was accused of being behind the attacks, but denied his involvement. In South Africa he found another colleague, Colonel  Karegeya,  a former Rwandan army head of intelligence, who had fled a few years earlier.

Then an army mutiny was attempted but failed while General Kagame was on his way back from a trip to visit his son, a cadet at the  US West Point MilitaryAcademy. He had to stay in Kenya and then Burundi for a week , awaiting for the loyal troops, the Reserve Brigade, to put down the army mutiny.

When he reached Kigali, he bribed the soldiers by paying US$ 500 per soldier of the Republican Guard, and $100 per soldier in other units.

Despite and according to some sources as a defiance to the latest attacks, the wife of the President, Ms. Janet Kagame led a defiant march of hundreds of the Tutsi minority elite across the city, in support of her husband. The Rwandan Dictator has been facing a growing dissent within the Tutsi minority elite ruling Rwanda and reprobation by the international community and medias. Recently, the New York Times ran a series of article describing the pervasive and systemic repression by the Rwandan dictator, including the virtual enslavement of Hutu kids on the isolated and rugged island of Iwawa (See our article on the subject here).  Also, a criminal and civil case was opened against him in the US for crimes committed in 1994, including the assassination of Rwandan and Burundian presidents Juvenal Habyarimana and Cyprien Ntaryamira. The assassination triggered the 1994 Rwandan massacres.

©Copyright AfroAmerica Network, May 2010.