As I am writing this, earlier today the name Southport knife murderer, which has (so far) claimed the lives of three young girls, has been officially released. Axel Muganwa Rudakubana was born in Cardiff to parents from Rwanda very nearly eighteen years ago. Apart from righteous anger at the appalling events, a natural reaction has been: What was he doing here? Quite right, but beyond the over-generous asylum system operative in this country, the UK (and the US) also have dark hands in the recent history of the central African country.
For the avoidance of doubt, nothing hereafter is necessarily linked to the Southport case and its perpetrator. Neither should the background ever be seen as being able to excuse such an event. At this stage, the public information is limited to the few details I have already given, and anything further would be speculation and subject (potentially) to criminal restrictions. We do not even definitely know from which side of the civil war the family comes1. So please treat this as background notes on the wider situation rather than as any commentary on the case.
Neville Chamberlain in 1938 famously referred to the crisis over Czechoslovakia as "a quarrel in a faraway land between people of which we know nothing." Now, Rwanda is known to us as a (failed and abandoned) strategy for processing illegal migrants (an initiative which dates back to the Blair government, as we shall see), and possibly as a genocide, dimly remembered and filtered through film and novel. Here, I revisit the “quarrel” of 30 years ago, and our involvement since.
The genesis of genocide
Information is plentiful about the Rwandan genocide of 1994, and I shall keep this as brief as possible in order to illustrate what seem to me the key geostrategic points.
Rwanda was a German colony prior to the First World War, after which it passed to Belgium. From independence (1962) to 1994, it fell into the French sphere of influence (it was, and remains, part of the informal French “Commonwealth” La Francophonie)
Traditionally the minority (15%) Tutsis have formed to dominant section of society, and were the societal elites through which both colonial powers ruled. The exception was the period of Hutu dominance from (just before) independence to 1994. In addition there is a small minority (1%) of pygmy Twa people
Although physically different (Tutsi being taller and leaner in general), there is no consensus on the exact genetic origins of the Hutus and Tutsis (unsurprisingly, the matter is politicised). Both speak Bantu languages
Sporadic violence between the groups was commonplace before 1994, leading to a number of Rwandan Tutsis based in, and fighting for, neighbouring Uganda (to the north). This coalesced into the Rwandan Patriotic Front (“RPF”), a key figure in which was the current president, Paul Kagame
Unlike many of its neighbours, Rwanda is not resource-rich, with the exception of coltan (see below)
From 1990 onwards2, the RPF began establishing bases in northern Rwanda, backed by the Ugandan hosts. Kagame at the time held posts in the Ugandan army (including head of military intelligence) as well as the RPF, but when the 1990 incursions happened, he was in the United States, receiving training at the United States Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, “studying field tactics and psyops, propaganda techniques to win hearts and minds”. “But after four RPF commanders were killed, he told his American instructors that he was dropping out to join the Rwandan invasion. The Americans apparently supported this decision and Kagame flew into Entebbe airport [in Uganda], travelled to the Rwandan border by road, and crossed over to take command of the rebels.”
There are suggestions that Kagame engineered the murder of his joint-commander Fred Rwigiyema, after which he took sole control of the RPF34.
Despite being publicly critical of the Ugandan Museveni regime, the US doubled aid to Uganda and increased arms sales. In 1991, Uganda purchased 10 times more US weapons than in the preceding 40 years combined. This was undoubtedly the source of the RPF’s arms. Backed by the stronger military of Uganda, the RPF pressured the Hutu government of Rwanda, led by Juvénal Habyarimana, into political concessions, whilst at the same time arming its own militias - largely with machetes. The CIA was predicting mass ethnic violence from January 1994.
The genocide began when Habyarimana’s plane was shot down at Kigali on 6 April 1994; the president of Burundi was also on board. It is unclear to this day who was responsible, with accusations at both more militant Hutu elements and RPF-linked agents. A French-backed 2006 judicial investigation led by Jean-Louis Bruguière suggested the latter, and has soured relations between the two countries. Motives are plausible for both sides.
Hutus massacred every Tutsi they could find; murder by machete entered Western minds. A small UN peacekeeping force was impotent, and most Westerners had been evacuated from the country well before the violence started. And although the RPF invaded, its goal was the capture of the capital rather than the protection of its fellow Tutsis. The RPF took Kigali on 4 July, aided (according to the head of the UN mission, Romeo Dallaire5, the fact that the government was more keen to maximise the genocide toll than keep the capital, as well as Kagame being a “master of psychological warfare”. Estimates of the death toll are around 500,000 - 600,000, or two-thirds of the Tutsi population of the country. Kagame was just interested in gaining power, as quickly as possible.
President at the time Bill Clinton has since expressed his regret that the US did not intervene. But at the height of the fighting for Kigali, Kagame’s Ugandan backer Museveni was being feted in America, where he received the Hubert H Humphrey public service medal and an honorary doctorate from the University of Minnesota; also meeting Clinton and his then national security adviser, Anthony Lake.
(As an aside, Kagame’s daughter was educated in the States and holds a master's in international affairs from Columbia - Brzezinski’s old university.)
At the very least, the US funded and armed the RPF indirectly, and stood aside whilst they took control of the country.
Aftermath, and enter Blair
Kagame was initially appointed Vice-President and Minister of Defence, the real source of power in the country under a puppet Hutu president, Pasteur Bizimungu, who resigned in 2000. Kagame has been President since then, winning the last election (last month) with an overwhelming democratic mandate of 99.15% of the vote.
Between 1994 and 2000, he was responsible for two incursions over the western border into (what is now) the Democratic Republic of Congo. These are known as the First and Second Congo Wars, although in reality the eastern DRC has been in a constant state of conflict, backed by Rwandan forces (amongst others) ever since. Ostensibly, these wars were to address border security issues (two million Hutus had fled across the border after the genocide). Access to mineral resources are another factor - more of this later. The conflicts were serious enough to lead to regime change in the DRC, the installation of a RPF-backed candidate, and their military presence in the capital, Kinshasa (over 2,000 miles from Kigali by road).
Kagame has moved Rwanda from the French sphere of influence firmly into that of the Anglosphere. Cricket is played in Kigali, and (despite never being a part of the Empire), Rwanda joined the Commonwealth in 2009. Both Clinton and Blair were vocal supporters during their periods in office, and since leaving, the Clinton Global Initiative supports projects in the country.
Blair’s support has been twofold: since 2008, his charity, the Africa Governance Initiative has undertaken “good works” such as funding Elon Musk’s Starlink system for schools; at a higher level, investment conferences are held. Secondly, Blair has been an unpaid adviser to Kagame. Rwanda was one of Blair’s earliest projects after leaving office (alongside Kazakhstan and Libya); it has proven to be his most consistent. We can only guess what Blair’s role as “unpaid adviser” means in practice, but he has been a great defender of Kagame’s government against charges of political repression, and (historically) against accusations of war crimes during the civil war. (Frankly, neither can be doubted.) Here’s one example from 2010:
I'm a believer in and a supporter of Paul Kagame. I don't ignore all those criticisms, having said that. But I do think you've got to recognise that Rwanda is an immensely special case because of the genocide. Secondly, you can't argue with the fact that Rwanda has gone on a remarkable path of development… You've got to make a judgment about this, and my judgment, rightly or wrongly, is that he is somebody who does want to do his best for his country, is doing his best for his country, and is a huge focus of stability in a place that still desperately needs it when we're only 16 years after the genocide."6
A typical Blair justification-by-faith.
The presence of a darker side to this may be gleaned from this article from 2015. The Cameron government had in the intervening period suspended aid to Rwanda over UN criticisms of Kigali’s backing of rebel elements in the DRC. The Government suppressed a Freedom of Information request to the Foreign Office regarding Blair’s involvement with Kagame’s government: “The Times used the Freedom of Information Act to ask the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to disclose its communications with Mr Blair about Rwanda. Officials took five months to decide, instead of the 20 days laid down by law. Eventually it confirmed that the information would remain undisclosed.”
The links don’t stop with Tone. His wife’s own charity, the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women, has promoted investment in the country. Cherie also founded the Africa Justice Foundation (a charity to train lawyers for Africa) with Suella Braverman. Braverman came in for criticism for failing to disclose the link when, as Home Secretary, she was negotiating the Rwanda asylum seekers’ plan. According to the Independent: “Several people the charity worked with are now key members of President Paul Kagame’s government and are involved in the UK’s £140m deal to send asylum seekers to Rwanda.”7
More importantly, in her role as a barrister, Cherie has represented Karenzi Karake, the former head of military intelligence accused of ordering massacres in the civil war, against extradition to Spain for ordering the killing of three Spanish charity workers. “To the Rwandan people and government, the general is a hero” she said in a BBC interview. Strong words.
But the call for extradition of alleged war criminals has been on both sides - and indeed has been one source of tension between the Kigali regime and the UK. Kagame used the negotiations over the asylum seeker deal to press for the extradition of five high-profile suspects, blocked by the UK courts on the grounds that they would not receive a fair trial in Rwanda8. The legal costs surrounding this (some £3 million) are of course borne by the British taxpayer, as will be the (undoubted) hidden costs of any protection they receive.
In order to diffuse tensions around this issue, an All-Party Parliamentary Group on [Rwandan] War Crimes was established in the last parliament, with a roll-call of stellar names, including a number of Blair insiders. It was chaired by the loathsome vintner, then International Development Secretary, now shadow Foreign Secretary, and Kagame-cheerleader Andrew Mitchell, who has been called the MP for Kigali9. Co-chair is none other than Peter, Lord Mandelson. Other notable Blairites include Harriet Harman and Margaret Hodge in the Commons, and former Lord Chancellor Lord Falconer (Blair’s old flatmate), ex-Scottish First Minster Jack McConnell, and prominent barrister Baroness (Helena) Kennedy. Former Chief of General Staff Lord Dannatt is also notable. APPGs rarely involve anything like this level of eminent members.
Finally, it is worth considering that the Rwanda scheme had its own fore-runner in the Blair government: in 2004 a scheme was proposed to process asylum-seekers for cash in Tanzania.10 The final cost of the scheme, cancelled by the new Labour government, was claimed by Yvette Cooper to have reached £700 million11. Blair would be shocked not at the idea, but at the lack of competence in execution.
The Congo angle
Rwanda, then, has attracted much attention from the Anglosphere, for a poor, landlocked, resource-poor, troubled country with which we don’t even have a historical relationship. We may gain more of an insight by looking over the border:
The DRC is vast, ungovernable but resource rich12: it contains an estimated $24 trillion in raw mineral deposits, making it the world's richest country measured by wealth of natural resources13. Diamonds and gold are lucrative, but not strategic. The Shinkolobwe uranium mine was the richest ore in the world, supplying the Manhattan project, but has been closed since 1960 (although there are fears that illicit mining could take place); further deposits in the area are also possible, were the political situation ever to be stable enough to exploit them. The south of the DRC is also the home of the cobalt mining industry - the country accounts for 70% of world production; and demand for cobalt has boomed in recent years due to it being used in lithium-ion batteries. Strategically, this area borders Zambia, one of the most stable and western-facing countries of sub-Saharan Africa, but still, much of the mining (perhaps 60% of the cobalt) takes place illegally.
For our purposes, the key mineral appears to be coltan - columbite–tantalites - the source of niobium (used in steel production, super-alloys and superconductors) and tantalum (tantalum capacitors are used for in mobile phones, computers and other electronic devices).
Goma on the map above is right on the Rwandan border, and the area is controlled by the Rwandan-backed M23 rebel forces. (Rwandan Hutu rebel groups are also active nearby.) Rwanda and the DRC are two of the world’s leading sources for coltan.
From here, information on coltan production becomes hard to trace. Here, it is quoted that in 2023, coltan exports from the DRC totalled 1,918 tons, compared to 2,070 tons for Rwanda. There is, however, much smuggling of minerals mined in the DRC over the border to Rwanda. For a country which is the local darling of the democratic west, it is hard to find information on what and where is actually mined in Rwanda, as opposed to exported from the country. There likely are mineral resources (including coltan) that are under-exploited. The Dodd-Frank Act in the US seeks (in one section) to regulate what it calls “conflict materials” from the DRC, but the realities of resources and geopolitics come first. But it is opaque where “Rwanda’s” coltan really originates. It seems the world doesn’t want to look too closely into the sources of its tantalum.
It is apparent that the particularly resource-rich areas of the DRC are bordered by broadly Western-aligned countries - Zambia to the south, and the allies of Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi in the east. (Tanzania connects these areas, but its border with the DRC is entirely along Lake Tanganyika, making it less directly militarily relevant. North of Uganda is South Sudan, and the US has been the principal supporter of the new state, including recognising its independence on the day it was declared in 2011. Military and financial support has been consistent across administrations in Washington, despite South Sudan being in an almost constant state of civil war.
Contrast this with the DRC’s neighbours to the north and west, where Russian influence is growing in the Central African Republic (linking to the emerging Sahel confederation and Sudan), and Angola to the south-west.
Rwanda was, and is, a small but strategic lynchpin in all this.
It remains to be seen whether any of this has a bearing on the background of Rudakubana. It is a part of the world with a violent history and a murky present. It’s certainly not one in which I claim any expertise. But even a brief look into it suggests that the West’s involvement is deep.
It has been suggested to me that he is Hutu, despite perhaps bearing some resemblance to a Tutsi.
https://www.iamrutendo.online/post/kagame-the-us-mercenary
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Kagame
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_genocide
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/dec/31/tony-blair-rwanda-paul-kagame
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/suella-braverman-rwanda-ministerial-code-breach-b2345537.html
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/may/16/rwanda-president-suggests-uk-extradite-genocide-suspect-asylum-deal-paul-kagame
https://unherd.com/2021/12/andrew-mitchells-friends-in-rwanda/
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/blair-wants-asylumseeker-camp-in-africa-71062.html
https://www.independent.co.uk/tv/news/rwanda-scheme-cost-yvette-cooper-b2585019.html
Map from https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-15722799#over1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_minerals_law
I was told by a French academic in 1998 that the Rwandan genocide was created by Belgian colonialism, the Tutu/Hutsi dichotomy being a result of that.
I also met a man called Alphonse who told me his entire family had been macheted to death. He was a maniacally ebullient man, and I thought at the time he displayed exceptional exuberance following this horrific experience.
In hindsight, his jubilation was inexplicable from the Western point of view. Perhaps it was vaunting - the product of the victory of an invented story, or simply the fact he was insane. Perhaps his story was true and he just thought this was normal. His character and his experiences did not match any framing we encountered in Britain, and his stories were detailed and consistent.
I doubt very much he would have been in Britain had it not been for the massacre.
“murder by machete entered Western minds”…