By Tom Ndahiro
0n 19 December 2019 Uganda’s The Daily Monitor, published a story in which the country’s Minister of State for Regional Affairs Dr Philemon Mateke denied accusations levelled against him by Rwanda. “Am I their citizen? Am I a mercenary? … When officials in Rwanda want to eliminate someone they start accusing them of such”, adding that those accusing him have been known for “eliminating people”. “It’s not true, rubbish. Am I a Rwandese? Am I going to be a mercenary? Do I have capacity? …” The tone is theatrically aggrieved.
“The rulers of the state are the only persons who ought to have the privilege of lying, either at home or abroad; they may be allowed to lie for the good of the state,” so asserts Plato. This is advice Dr Mateke seems to have had in mind, although, perhaps, forgetting the last “for the good of the state” part, as Mateke’s actions can only damage the Ugandan state interests.
It is also fair to say that Plato may have had in mind a more refined approach to dissembling than Dr Mateke’s incoherently crude rant, when presented with evidence of his own direct support of armed groups now seeking to destabilise Rwanda.
Following what Rwanda’s Minister of State for the EAC Cooperation, Ambassador Olivier Nduhungirehe and Uganda’s Foreign Minister Sam Kutesa described as “a frank and cordial meeting”, Dr Mateke did his utmost to get rid of the “cordial” from the discussions. The cause for his unpolished outburst was the evidence presented by the Rwandan delegation at the 13 December 2019 Kampala return leg of the Luanda MoU follow-up talks to address the current conflict between Rwanda and Uganda crisis resulting from Rwanda’s assertions of Uganda’s support to such armed groups as the FDLR and RNC.
These talks, whose first leg was in Kigali on 16 September, are aimed at giving effect to the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) signed in Luanda, Angola, by Presidents Yoweri Kaguta Museveni and Paul Kagame under the mediation of the Angolan and DRC heads of state, respectively Joao Lourenco of Angola and Félix Antoine Tshisekedi. Among other things, the MoU demands an immediate end to support for such groups.
The Kampala meeting was presented with evidence of what transpired during the night of 3rd-4th October 2019 when a deadly terror attack was carried out in the Kinigi sector of Musanze District, in Rwanda’s Northern Province, by a group known as RUD-Urunana. The attack was launched from eastern DRC, close to the Ugandan border and Rwanda’s Volcanoes National Park. Most of the attackers were killed, but some were captured alive. An assortment of material evidence, including phone handsets, and testimonies of captured attackers, was collected.
Members of the Ugandan delegation were embarrassed to hear, with evidence at hand that “one Ugandan telephone number appeared to have been in constant contact with the attackers both before and during the attack. And, as the leader of the Rwandan delegation to the talks Hon Olivier Nduhungirehe explained, this number had been found to belong to Hon Mateke Philemon, Uganda’s Minister of State for Regional Affairs.”
Earlier this year, the DRC government of handed also over two senior officers of the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), Ignace Nkaka (aka LaForge Fils Bazeye), and Lt Col Jean Pierre Nsekanabo (aka Abega Theophile Kamala). At the time of their capture, the two were respectively the genocidal terrorist armed group’s chief spokesperson and its head of military intelligence. They were intercepted by the DRC military at the Bunagana border-post between Uganda and DRC as they returned from Kampala consultation meetings with RNC representatives presided over by Minister Mateke and other Ugandan government and security officials to discuss improved coordination of the various armed groups’ activities, including joint FDLR-RNC action.
LaForge Fils Bazeye also explained the visit from which they were captured as the latest in a series of three to discuss joint strategies. The captured FDLR officials reported it was President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni’s view the FDLR and RNC should join force to give a greater impression that those opposed to President Kagame’s government represent a broad base of Rwandan Hutu and Tutsi.
Perhaps Dr Mateke’s consternation is justified. It could be argued that the Rwandan delegation may have offended diplomatic etiquette by presenting to the meeting the kind of highly compromising evidence of facts that are impossible to deny. He may have felt the least they could have done was to leave him some wriggle room for plausible denials to save both his and his master’s faces.
In addition to Plato, perhaps Mateke subscribes to Mark Twain’s view that “the truth is the most valuable thing we have. Let’s economize it.” He may thus have felt that, in the circumstances, the Rwandan delegation had been altogether too profligate with the truth.
In voicing his denial to The Daily Monitor journalist, the octogenarian Mateke was channelling some of his innermost long-held and deeply felt resentments: “Those people are very malicious as they have always been. When they want to eliminate a person, normally these are the excuses they give, you know their job is to eliminate people, but I’m not their citizen …!” He was almost natural. Caught red-handed, Mateke, Museveni’s liaison to his Rwandan genocidal proxies had to bluster. His intempestive and intemperate attack against Rwanda might be even more revealing about his associations than the evidence produced by Rwanda, damning as that may have been. His virulent attack is taken almost verbatim from his genocidaire relatives’ play-book.