Opinion: ‘Rwanda is not safe and sending vulnerable people there brings only shame on Britain’

EXPENSIVE TRIP: Home Secretary James Cleverly took a private jet to Rwanda last December

The Accidental Diplomat, a column by Paul Knott

The only thing the Rwanda plan will prove is this Government’s cruelty

For years, Tory Prime Ministers have shouted about immigration being a problem but done nothing to manage it properly. Instead, they have spent their time, and over five hundred million pounds of the public’s money, on a proposal to send a few asylum seekers to Rwanda.

The only thing this “plan” will achieve is to prove the Government’s cruelty, because Rwanda is not a safe country to which anyone should be sent by force.

Since Boris Johnson announced the scheme to send a few hundred migrants to Rwanda in April 2022, about 1.5 million people have moved to the UK. Most of these have come for routine reasons such as marriage and temporary purposes like university study or work postings with international companies. In the same period, about 700,000 people left the country.

Only about three per cent of the new arrivals came by unofficial routes such as the so-called “small boats” across the Channel.

This last group are amongst the roughly 80,000 people per year who seek asylum in the UK to escape war or other extreme suffering, as permitted under international law.

Due to the Government’s incompetence, the UK takes much longer to process these cases than similar countries such as France and Germany. It also sends fewer people who fail to meet the requirements home. Rather than building a working system to process people’s asylum claims fairly and humanely, the Government has chosen to stir up hatred against them instead.

The Rwanda scheme may have distracted attention from the Government’s own failures but it has achieved nothing to solve the supposed problem.

So far, the only people who have boarded planes to Rwanda are Tory politicians seeking photo opportunities. Over £400,000 of our money has already been spent on ministerial visits to the capital, Kigali. The current Home Secretary James Cleverly spent £165,651 alone on chartering a private jet to make a 24-hour trip last December.

Even if the Government does meet its target of sending 300 asylum seekers to Rwanda, National Audit Office figures show that the scheme would cost £1.8m per person over its five-year duration. It would be literally cheaper to send them to stay at a luxury hotel in Las Vegas instead.

As well as blowing millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money, the Government’s scheme is immoral and illegal. No fair-minded person or independent court would judge Rwanda to be a “safe country of asylum” under international law.

Rather than being somewhere suitable to send vulnerable people escaping from war and abusive regimes, Rwanda is the kind of place such unfortunate people need protection from. President Paul Kagame’s Rwandan dictatorship is brutal at home and has been causing conflict for years beyond its borders.

Kagame came to power after the horrific 1994 Rwandan genocide, at the head of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) rebel movement that chased out the government responsible for those atrocities. Over half-a-million people were murdered in the genocide, mostly from the Tutsi ethnic group to which Kagame belongs.

At first, Kagame and his colleagues did some of what was needed to rebuild Rwanda in very difficult circumstances. Society was stabilised and some justice and reconciliation achieved. With massive financial aid, mostly from Western countries, Rwanda rebuilt its infrastructure, public services and economy.

But that was not the full story even back then. Rather than preparing Rwanda to become a free and democratic nation, Kagame’s RPF has spent the last thirty years creating a police state. In his most recent “re-election” as President in 2017, Kagame claimed to have won 98.8 per cent of the vote – a bogus outcome even Vladimir Putin would be too embarrassed to announce.

DUBIOUS POLL: Rwanda President Paul Kagame claimed to have been re-elected with 98.8 per cent of the vote

Worse, independent international human rights organisations have reported on the Rwandan government’s abuse of any citizen who criticises it. According to Human Rights Watch, it “has often responded violently to criticism, using a range of measures to deal with real or suspected opponents, including killings, enforced disappearances, torture, political prosecutions and unlawful detention, as well as threats, intimidation and harassment”.

Rwanda’s status as the wrong place to host vulnerable asylum seekers is made even clearer by its record of waging war in its neighbour, the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Congo is a huge, badly governed country. Its eastern areas are close to the border with Rwanda and far from any control by the Congolese government in Kinshasa, the capital, 1,500 miles away. Immediately after the 1994 genocide, the armed forces of the new Rwandan regime had a reason to intervene in eastern Congo because most of the surviving murderers had fled there to rebuild their forces.

But that reason has long gone. The remaining militia in Congo created by the previous Rwandan regime has been reduced to a small group of 500 to 1,000 fighters and is no longer a serious threat to Rwanda.

One of the real reasons Rwanda continues to interfere in Congo is because it contains vast amounts of valuable minerals, including gold, tin, cobalt and tungsten. Huge smuggling operations involving these resources are believed to boost Rwanda’s state coffers and the bank accounts of some of its elites.

The United Nations says Rwanda mostly does this by supporting, equipping and directing a brutal local militia called M23. M23 is notorious for its abuse of civilians, even by the grim standards of the region’s many guerilla forces. The “Doctors Without Borders” aid organisation reports that up to a million people have been forced to flee their homes over the last two years due to the renewed fighting caused by M23. It has also treated at least 700 female victims of sexual violence at the hands of the guerillas.

In 2012, when M23 was last on the rampage, the British government led a successful international pressure campaign to make Rwanda reign in the militia and reduce the death and destruction it was causing in Congo. Now that our Government’s disastrous refugee scheme has left it relying on Rwanda instead, it no longer has such influence.

By making itself dependent on such an appalling regime as Rwanda’s, the Tory Government is bringing shame on Britain. And all for a scheme that will cost us a fortune and have no real impact on managing immigration at all.