The age of human rights imperialism

By Andrew Mwenda

NEW VISION - 4th June 2015 -

The timing was surprising because there have hardly been incidents of human rights abuse in Rwanda for a while. Instead the hearing took place against the backdrop of widespread demonstrations in the US against police brutality meted out against African American males. Why would the US congress be bothered by human rights in Rwanda, a country 15,000 miles away, when many of its own citizens are being killed by a run-amok police while others are being sent to jail in droves? In the mid-late 1990s and early 2000s, the government of Rwanda used to be highhanded. It relied on the systematic use of force to consolidate power to a significant degree. This was a period when RPF’s political base was narrow and the government was also fighting a ferocious insurgency inside the country. Since the end of insurgency in 2001 and the rapid growth in the organisational reach of the RPF, the government has progressively moved away from force to economic performance and delivery of public goods and services to citizens to consolidate power. There are still cases of human rights abuse. But they are isolated and occasional, not systemic. Human rights groups have remained oblivious of this progress in large part because acknowledging it takes away their relevance.

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