Manifest
The undersigned organizations, hereby present VICTOIRE INGABIRE UMUHOZA´s candidature for the Sakharov Award 2012, convinced that she is A LIVING EXAMPLE OF THE FIGHT FOR FREEDOM, DEMOCRACY AND THE HUMAN RIGHTS FOR HER PEOPLE, RWANDA, USING ALWAYS PEACEFUL AND NON VIOLENT MEANS.
This woman aged 43, married and mother of three children, during her forced exile of 16 years in Netherlands, acquired a fantastic professional training which led her to occupy the position of Head of the Accountancy Department in a multinational company placed in Netherlands. But in the middle of her comfortable and secure life, she always lived deeply worried about the serious situation of her country, subject to the fierce dictatorship of the Government of the Rwanda Patriotic Front, with the absolute power of its President Paul Kagame. Always associatively active, she opened to a politic commitment very soon and joined the groups from Rwanda´s diaspora, opponents to the dictatorship of her country. A special milestone of this commitment was her election in 2006 as President of the Unified Democratic Forces (UDF-Inkingi). From this position she continued promoting the channel for dialogue among the three ethnic groups of the country, hutus, tutsis and twas, as the only way for a new situation in Rwanda, made of prosperity and freedom for all the people.
She decided to come back to Rwanda to stand for the presidential elections in August 2010, and the 16th of January she landed in Kigali airport where she was received by many with great hope. But General Kagame´s dictatorial regime submitted her, from the first day, to all kind of outrages, humiliations and arbitrary accusations: not only she was forbidden to register her party and stand for the elections, but she was attacked in the middle of the street and her handbag with her passport and other belongings was stolen, and right at the doors of an administration office, she was threatened and libeled by the regime press, they illegally forbid her to fly to Netherlands to visit her family, they took her under arrest in her home from the 3rd of May 2010 until the 14th of October, they locked her in a police cell, where during five days she was subject to psychological torture, inhuman treatment and degradation conditions… and, why? Which are the charges the regime has against her? Three are the offenses she is charged with: ideology of genocide, divisiveness and collaboration with armed group.
The law in which are based the two first charges is a deliberately vague law, that according to International Amnesty, constitutes a clear “restriction to the freedom of speech”, while Human Rights Watch says that it is a law “used by the regime against the political opponents”. In order to prove that VICTOIRE has to do with the organization of an armed group they have prepared several false witnesses, ex rebel hutus from the FDLR, with false, inconsistent, when not openly ridiculous evidences, which VICTOIRE´s lawyers have invalidated in successive hearings at the Supreme Court. But in Rwanda, as it is well known, both the judges and the district attorney are active members of the party in power. Neither the evidences of the defense have been accepted nor she has ever been released on bail; whereas VICTOIRE is still under arrest, always shaven and dressed in her pink uniform. And like this she is since a year and a half, in the sinister prison of Kigali.
Her health has known stages of real danger, and lots of us have feared for her life. She has had to be feeded from the outside by her friends, for the threat that she could be poisoned. And in all this time she has not been allowed to keep in touch with her family, her husband and her three children, in Netherlands, neither by letter nor by telephone. What stance has taken VICTOIRE in view of such injustice in all this time? She always admitted the 1994 genocide against the tutsis, and she paid homage to them, but she also claimed the right to the memory for the victims of the other ethnic groups. She has always kept the hope and the spirit very high for love to her people and in the middle of so much injustice she has never called for revenge but to dialogue and reconciliation, both with her actions and with her words.
In the last days of April 2012 the net is being tightened against VICTOIRE: she lodged an appeal to the Constitutional Court against the Denial of Genocide Law. Few days after that, the same Court rejected it with the only pretext that the text of the law had not been enclosed. Apart from this, the defense lawyers were reporting every kind of harassments and intimidations against the witnesses of the defense. Specifically, the Court decided to shorten the testimony of a prosecution witness who accused the authorities of fabricating the evidences against VICTOIRE. As a reaction to all this, VICTOIRE has decided to withdraw the trial, to boycott its process: she does not want to stay in the hands of such a mockery of justice. But the Court has ruled that the case will continue in her absence and with no defense. And the 25th of April, the General Attorney has already asked for her to be sentenced to life imprisonment. And that will be, without doubts, the final verdict of the judges the 29th of June, as “in Rwanda there is no difference between the charge and the judges.”
For all of the above, and day to day, VICTOIRE HAS BECOME A LIVING SYMBOL OF THE FIGHT FOR FREEDOM, DEMOCRACY AND JUSTICE FOR RWANDA AND A CLEAR EXAMPLE OF THE TOTAL REPRESSION THAT SUFFER ALL WHO DARE TO DEFY THE ABSOLUTE POWER OF THE PRESIDENT PAUL KAGAME.
AND as we believe that SUPPORTING VICTOIRE INGABIRE´s CANDIDATURE to the Sakharov Award will help to protect her life, and the lives of other dissidents of the regime of Rwanda, and to bring freedom to all the people, WE SUPPORT HER WITH OUR SIGNING..
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