The term “winning the battle but losing the war” refers to when someone is so concentrated into something he thought was so immense, but at the end realises the achievement is so tiny compared to the big picture that he lost.
By freeing Karenzi…., Kagame has won the battle. Karake goes home, Kagame’s hired hands in Britain get paid, and Kagame claims victory over what he nowadays calls “neocolonial” European imperialists that seek to humiliate Africans.
But here is how Kagame lost the real war:
1. This case proved to any doubters that Kagame is no presidential material. He went overboard with his style of public shaming, abusing just about everybody he imagined was responsible for Karenzi arrest. In Kagame’s abusive world everybody, every country, every world institution must obey him – the leader and his beliefs. Anyone who dares go against the leader’s authority is publicly shamed for their actions. Then they are cut off and treated as outcasts and shunned. According to Kagame, Britain and Europeans are “rubbish” and any Rwandans involved in this are “petty criminals and thugs.” And Kagame was uttering these things of all places in the law-making institution – parliament, with chief justice, speaker, and cabinet in attendance.
2. Kagame assumed that his totalitarian system applies everywhere in the world, leading him to mistakenly attack the British government for their “politically-motivated” arrest of Karenzi. In Rwanda’s totalitarian state the supreme power is concentrated in the hands of one person – Kagame himself. His decisions are not subject to legal parliamentarian or judicial restraints. Kagame is pretty well an absolute monarchy. Separation powers and areas of responsibility into a legislature, an executive, and a judiciary is therefore an alien concept to Kagame. To Kagame the government of Prime Minister David Cameron, arrested Karake and has just freed him.
3. Kagame previously believed he was invincible, but he is discovering the reality of overstaying in power. Previously Kagame would do no wrong, a Global elite’s favourite strongman who has modernised Rwanda. But the emperor is naked. The world is now seeing Kagame for what he is – a dictator that is masterminding power grab in 2017 via “popular demand” whereby his docile rubber stamping parliament just voted by 99% to support this political madness in broad daylight. Meanwhile, as we speak, Kagame’s modernization shambles is in the open for all to see. Hardly any Rwandan is currently not affected by lack of water and electricity crisis – this in a country in which 86% depend on biomass for enery, 11% on petroleum and 4% on electricity.
Now, to fellow Rwandans, human rights activists, and friends. Keep your heads up. We are believers in and advocates of the rule of law. By freeing Karake, the British judge is not saying that Karake is innocent of atrocities he is said to have committed. No. The judge’s decision is strictly contextualised by the Spanish demands for Karake extradition to face trial there. If this request is undermined in anyway, that is the end of only round one. We now await for future rounds. That is for sure – remember even Kagame had to be saved by the Obama Administration from a lawsuit by applying for immunity as long as Kagame remains in office.
The struggle continues.
Dr David Himbara
