By David Himbara
Here is the full transcript of General Paul Kagame’s remark on how he does not regret secretly listening to People’s conversations across the world. He highlights how he tracked the Financial Times which he says worked with his “enemy” who used to work for him and now lives in Canada.
Transcript
“They singled out people and gave them names against whom that technology is used because they talked about human rights activists and even talked about specific names. I want to explain my point. Let me start with the story of the human rights activists.
The names, which were mentioned, are actually names that are known to all of us. These are actually not human rights activists. These are people who in fact have indicted themselves by their own activities, including the ones who are appearing in the court of law here… That is for a fact.
Some of them are the same people who are appearing even in the reports of the UN as people who are part of the insecurity and violence in our region especially in eastern DRC. Again that is for the record. It is not me who wrote the report. I am not one of those investigators and I did not meet them nor talk to them.
If a newspaper, wherever they got their sources from, is already speaking on behalf of or sympathising with a certain group they call innocent human rights activists the government is acting against –that is already a falsehood that we can take to another step now.
The other step is –our country like any other country does intelligence. In fact they even monitor people’s communication. For us to know our enemies and what they do wherever they are is something we have always tried to do within our rights like it is in the rights of all the countries we know in this world.
Of course there are rules that govern all these things we do. Probably more things happen discreetly than those that happen in the open that is why some people will pretend and accuse people of doing certain things that they do even more than the people they are accusing.
I have only read about that story of the (pegasus) technology in the news and I think there was somebody who was in Canada and another who was in the USA and that is how they knew that somebody who was in Canada was doing something against a certain country and that is how they got to know the movement of the one who later died. It was not involving Rwanda or any African country.
In fact, now that you are asking me about it, well, I actually wish I could have access to this technology. But I also know that it is very costly. That is what I have heard and read about it and I know how best to spend my money because I wouldn’t spend so much money over nobody or nothing.
There is somebody I saw saying that we used the technology against somebody who lives in the UK. I wouldn’t spend that money, which I saw the technology costs to run after that fellow who is of absolutely no consequence. I worry about these fellows who enter and kill people (in Rwanda). But the other one who is fed by the UK government; he has no job. So it is absolute nonsense.
But that technology they are talking about was not made for me. It is very expensive and I don’t have that much money. I don’t have anybody to spend so much on following around. The few dollars that we have we spend them on education but we have done intelligence and we are going to do it for the future because that is how countries operate.
I don’t think Rwanda would be an exception. That is how we get to know about our enemies and those that support our enemies. We know a lot about them but we use mainly human intelligence. We are very good at that for your information. We really do a good job of that.
Financial Times not so long ago was writing a story about Rwanda faking data and again through human intelligence, we realised and came to know and have facts that this man who wrote this has been working with some of these enemies of ours. There is somebody who used to work for me here who lives in Canada who is faking news about us every day. So he found a friend in this writer of Financial Times and now they work together.
They wrote about how I dictate whatever is written about Rwanda. According to them everything about Rwanda is not supposed to be good and if there is anything good, Kagame has dictated it. In other words, I have dictated things with the economy, World Bank, World Economic Forum. I have dictated what Rwandans feel and say.
He has attributed a lot of powers to me, which I wish I had. If what I wished happened the way I wanted it and I had such powers I would be a happy person. So those are the powers he gave me. From this now he moves to the accusations in defence against us, in defence of certain human rights activists and using certain technology.
One thing that I also learnt that was being said was that this technology originates from Israel and Rwanda is a friend of Israel. I wish things work like that every day. We would be further ahead than where we are today. We would be very close to our targets. But for doing intelligence, I am guilty. We do a lot of it.”
