[Ugnet] PROTESTERS ECLIPSE KAGAME SUPPORTERS

[Edward Mulindwa]

Protesters eclipse Kagame supporters 'We are not diverted by trivial things': Rwandan president JEFF HEINRICH, The Gazette Published: Wednesday, April 26, 2006     Hundreds of demonstrators protest against Rwandan President Paul Kagame outside the Plaza Hotel on Sherbrooke St. yesterday. Kagame is in Montreal to attend a conference on Africa. Photograph by : PHIL CARPENTER, THE GAZETTE   Waving gory placards in the rain, banging drums and shouting "genocidaire!", several hundred protesters dogged Rwandan President Paul Kagame yesterday morning in Montreal during a high-security visit to a conference on Africa. The protesters outnumbered a small contingent of demonstrators backing Kagame, the tall, thin Tutsi rebel leader who rose to power after the 1994 genocide by Hutu extremists that killed more than 800,000 of his people. Inside the Sherbrooke St. E. hotel where he addressed an audience of Canadian and African academics, aid-agency officials and businesspeople, Kagame ignored his noisy opponents. Afterward, he trivialized them. They weren't Rwandans, he said; they were Congolese, loyal to a neighbouring country where the killers of 1994 fled to avoid justice and against whom Rwanda has been fighting to defend itself. "They're carrying the flag of Zaire, of (the late dictator) Mobutu - they're not even carrying their own current flag of Congo," Kagame, 48, scoffed to journalists. "Demonstrations are part of life here in Canada," he added. "We expected it and we have no serious concerns about it. ... We are not diverted by trivial things. I think this is a trivial thing." Outside, the protesters angrily rejected Kagame's portrait of them as foreign agitators. They were mostly Rwandan, they said, with some Congolese and Burundians mixed in. In the aftermath of the genocide, Kagame and his forces killed their families and chased them from Rwanda, and are getting away with murder, they claimed. They pointed to Rwanda's support for rebels in Congo who have slaughtered civilians, and to numerous incursions into Congo by pro-Ugandan Rwandan forces since 1998. Chief on their list of villains is Kagame himself, who first became president in 2000 before being elected to a seven-year term in 2003. "He's a big dictator, the Milosovic of Africa, worse than Idi Amin or even Mobuto - he has on his hands the blood of 5 million Congolese," said Ikundji Kasololo, 45, an employment counsellor from Congo. "The world isn't hearing the whole truth about the real genocide. The people who've been killed are mostly Hutu, not Tutsi. And Kagame, he's the Hitler who did it." In 1997, Louis-Antoine Muhire fled Rwanda's capital, Kigali, and came to Canada as a refugee. Yesterday, he made the trip from his home in Ottawa and held up a gruesome sign in the rain. On it were photos of the corpses of two young cousins, ages 18 and 21. They'd been shot one morning in 1997 after burying their grandmother, he said, and the gunmen were soldiers loyal to Kagame. "It's incredible that the Harper government lets him come in now," said Muhire, 24, a student. "Who's next? Bin Laden?" Philomene Nishyirembere left Rwanda in 1994 and after a three-year odyssey finally settled in Canada. Yesterday she crossed the river from Chateauguay to stand behind a police barricade, shake a tambourine and denounce Kagame. "We lost a lot of people in our family - they were executed and bombarded by the rebels," she said. "I condemn all the extremists, including Kagame. If justice is to be served, it must apply to everyone, including him. They should all be judged and condemned." In a smaller group waving commercially printed signs with formal slogans like "Paul Kagame's commitment inspires leadership globally," a young Burundian who gave his name as Robert praised Kagame. "I consider him the people's liberator from genocide - he saved so many people," Robert said. The Conference on Education and Economic Development in Africa was sponsored by the Ottawa-based Canadian Council on Africa. For participants, the confrontation was jarring. "I felt the aggression coming in," said Danielle Bergeron, a Shawinigan college program director who passed through the crowd to hear Kagame's speech. "As a Quebecer, I can't judge whether their grievances are legitimate, but it makes me want to find out more." "Whatever the cause, no one can deny there was a genocide in Rwanda," added Eugenie Aw, a university journalism teacher from Senegal, who was also in the audience. "Unfortunately, as Africans, we don't ask the same questions people ask here. We should, so that it never happens again." [EMAIL PROTECTED] Online Extra: Rwandan President Paul Kagame meets with journalists in Montreal. Read more at our website: www.montrealgazette.com © The Gazette (Montreal) 2006

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