2018-11-23
Dr Frank Habineza is the President of the Democratic Green Party of Rwanda, and in September 2018 was elected as one of two Greens MPs in the Rwandan national parliament. In October 2018, former Australian Greens Senator Scott Ludlam caught up with him in Kigali, Rwanda’s capital, to hear his extraordinary story of persecution, exile and electoral success.
By Scott Ludlam
It has been a very tough journey. From 2009 we broke away from the ruling party. And they took it as treason. They were not happy at all. So we had the first president of the ruling party who joined me – it was a major defection, and with him, many followed: former ministers, ambassadors, other officials.
We have a real objective of taking over political power through democratic means, but they thought we wanted to use military means, which was not our objective. So we had problems: we were beaten, at our national congress … people with guns would stop in at our meetings, or we’d need permission to meet.
The worst was when my deputy president was gruesomely murdered. On the 14th of July 2010 we found his head cut off. That was very, very bad. I had death threats myself, so I left for exile, two or three days before the elections. That was in August 2010. I went to Sweden, where I stayed for two years, and then came back in September 2012 and tried to again register the party.
Exile
When I was in exile I didn’t sit down, I tried to get support for different governments, and also the Greens all over the world were supporting me. While in Sweden, the Swedish Greens were very active, supporting me in parliament and in government.
And then the Australian Greens, with Senator Bob Brown, they were very active supporting me, raising our issues with government. The Australian Greens also arranged for me to come to the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Perth, in 2011. There, we had the first time whereby we were able to meet with government officials from Rwanda and there was a confrontation where they were saying ‘well you don’t want to come back home, you left your party to die; you’re a coward.’
I was able to raise a lot of support, whereby I had an international lawyer … from Australia, he was willing to come with me. So I was confident that if I come back and if I’m arrested, I’ll have lawyers to fight for me in courts of law. And if I’m killed … I don’t see how I could be killed, I didn’t do anything wrong. So I took a risk and came. And then, finally, we were registered in 2013.
Politics in Rwanda
Rwandan politics is a bit different because we had something that has not happened in many other countries; except for the Jewish people. We have had a genocide, which happened in just 90 days, and it claimed one million lives. It left the country completely destroyed, devastated, with no manpower, no money, nothing. Just corpses in the street.
So the new government that stopped the genocide had a lot of work to rebuild the country. But the army was very involved in all that process. So at the time, nobody thought about democracy – what people wanted was just to survive. To live, and to have the country back; to have water, to have roads or electricity, to have schools, have hospitals.
So as time went by, we started realising that also we need democracy; other things, not just the economic part, but other things taking place. So it was a bit of a hurdle because on one side the government was scared of opening up free political space because those people who had caused the genocide were very active, with guns, in the Congo – and they are still there.
So it was always the fear that if they fully opened up political space here, political parties could be used by rebels or by foreign agents of destabilisation. So that makes politics a little bit difficult for us; that major suspicion that was there. And then the threat of genocide again was there, because the people who did it are still there; and planned it.
You could say that our politics is characterised by prudence, because of what we saw twenty years ago, but you also see now tolerance. Political parties learned to be more tolerant than before. You can see them accepting a registered party like us – that’s one of the milestones. Authority being criticised – that’s not easy for them, because most of them are soldiers and they’re not used to that. But they’re learning, and its good that we’re moving together forward.
So you could say that our democracy is still in a young stage. And Rwanda has chosen more consensus in democracy than confrontation in democracy. The parties we had in the 1990s before the genocide were very confrontational; were fighting every time, holding demonstrations every time on the streets, destroying peoples cars, buildings, killing each other, taking people from other parties by force, burning houses. There are so many people who lived in that period who still remember everything. So they say if political parties behave like that then the country can turn into fire again.
And that’s why they established in the 2003 Rwandan constitution, a national consultative forum of political organisations in Rwanda. It was put in the constitution as a body that would bring politicians together, to come and discuss their confrontational views there, between themselves. The people would say you go and fight there, yourselves, but don’t bring your problems to us in the villages.
The 2018 election, and after
It’s a big achievement for the Democratic Greens Party of Rwanda. Not just for us in Rwanda, but also for Greens in Africa, and also Greens from all over the world. It proved that the politics of peace and patience wins. Because we chose to live the spirit of nonviolence as described in the Green charter.
Yesterday I got elected as the chairperson of the Consultative Forum. And two days before that I got elected as the deputy Chairman of the social affairs committee of the parliament, which is also a big achievement for a new entrant.
We have a manifesto that we campaigned for, which is a pro-people manifesto, where we identify a lot of issues that have to be resolved, but also new processes to be made: some laws which we have to put in place. We have a very good environmental program, where we have to do our best to stop climate change, stop flooding and control desertification, soil erosion, many things. Also: give clean water to people because we don’t have a lot of clean water in Rwanda.
We will try to work with other MPs to see if we can advance our agenda in different ways. So these five years we’re going to work hard, to work with everybody. We have some, what other people call private members bills – here we call them draft laws – that we are going to introduce.
We also aim to help to advocate for peoples’ welfare. There are a lot of problems in the villages. My committee – the social affairs committee – is concerned with a lot of peoples’ problems. They’re concerned with peoples’ disabilities, people suffering from HIV/AIDS; people who have no house, or no food; street kids, malnutrition, poor housing.
I’m very grateful to all the people who stood with us. All Greens who stood with us, from Australian Greens, Swedish Greens, all international Greens … we had people all over the world, from London in the UK, from Belgium, from Germany, from America, even Pakistan, India. So people stood with us and we are very grateful. And we promise to continue promoting the Green agenda, and standing for the Green charter.