In order to properly understand Victoire Ingabire, you have to think of the suicide bomber as metaphor. You need to know what it means when you hear what made some individual (usually in faraway lands) decide to become a suicide bomber. That person will be ready to blow themselves up and cause mass destruction of lives or property, most often in service of some ideology or doctrine, or as a means of revenge against those they hate – usually whose belief systems or creeds differ from theirs – and similar other things. If the suicide bomber himself dies in the process, they will have achieved something. Or so, they think. Different societies, for varied reasons, have produced suicide bombers. Victoire Ingabire may not necessarily strap a bomb around her midriff, but her goal is the destruction of the Rwandan state and the administration, as it is under the administration of President Kagame, whom she hates with every breath in her body. That is because of what he stands for: a new Rwanda where the Parmehutu extremism, of which she is the standard bearer, has been confined to the dustbin of history, but where no ethnicity is discriminated against. People like Victoire Ingabire and her followers can never come to terms with the reality of a Rwanda whereby its national politics isn’t dominated by one ethnicity, theirs. That is anathema. They must always be in power, dominate everyone else, and retain the prerogative to kill anyone and everyone they deem either inconvenient, or a rival to their desired order of things. I am not making this up. That is what they did right from the start in the days of Gregoire Kayibanda, up to the short-lived Sindikubwabo/Kambanda regime that attempted to finish what Habyarimana (and his wife Agathe Kanziga and their kitchen cabinet of the likes of Theoneste Bagosora) started. Today you will see the supporters of this woman, especially the Hutu Power ideologues holed up in Europe (in Belgium first and foremost) still at it, keeping alive the genocidal ideology and hate that led to the horrors of 1994 in this country. If you are on X (Twitter), Facebook, TikTok or YouTube you will see them hard at work, using hate speech, manipulated images, edited videos and more to negatively manipulate opinion, all to instigate Hutus to “rise up against “RPF Inyenzi” – meaning cockroaches. Yes, they still call anyone of the Tutsi ethnicity “cockroaches”, like they did in the past when killing multitudes of Tutsi civilians. However, unlike individuals like “Gitifu Sebatware” (a pseudonym for a Belgium-based extremist thought to be the son of a perpetrator of genocide in 94), Ingabire has shown herself ready to advance their “Hutu Power” ideology right from inside her house here in Kigali. This woman, who now is in the custody of law enforcers on suspicion of plotting to incite public unrest – read that efforts to foment violent riots against the authorities – has been known among other things to coordinate the activities of the Congo-based genocidal militia, FDLR - as part of a wider plot to destabilize the administration in Kigali. FDLR, in case you are new to Rwandan affairs, was born from the remnants of the forces that slaughtered over a million people before suffering defeat at the hands of the RPF liberators and fleeing to the then Zaire. Ingabire, herself a daughter of genocidaire parents – her mother Therese Dusabe, a nurse in the Butamwa health center, became notorious for cutting open the wombs of expectant Tutsi mothers “to kill the cockroach fetuses” – happened to be in Holland. But she was very active in the founding of FDLR, an event that formally took place in Kinshasa in 2010. Today Ingabire is the de-facto head of the group, though she disguises her acts in Kigali as “opposition politics”. Her so-called party “Dalfa-Umurinzi” is FDLR by another name. As we know, the DR Congo government has partnered with FDLR (amongst a legion of other groups) in their mutual plot to bring war and violent upheaval back here to, in the words of Congolese President Felix Tshisekedi, “overthrow the regime in Kigali.” Here, one has to mull the question: what makes Ingabire think that, if they were to succeed in bringing mass chaos, death, and destruction back to Rwanda, she would be spared? Now hear me out, because this isn’t far-fetched: like a suicide bomber, the woman probably thinks if she died, but succeeded in wreaking havoc and destruction, it would be worth it. Think about it. Victoire Ingabire also is ready, if it were possible, to ignite mass riots across the width and breadth of Rwanda, to achieve the goal of “ending the rule of ‘inyenzi.’” How does she imagine she, or any of her followers working with her in Kigali, would survive the resulting widespread upheavals or mass violence? She probably thinks: “ok, if I die but we bring back Hutu Power rule so be it!” That is how the mind of a suicide-bombing terrorist works.
