1. I have been keenly following talks on allegations of crimes
committed by Paul Kagame, leader of Rwanda, and his attempts,
against all odds, 

to deny them. 

I deem it necessary to inform Rwandans and the international 

community at large of the crimes I witnessed in the hope that he would 

stop deceiving people. 

It took quite a long time before I decided to make public this
statement because I was in Uganda, where Kagame
has a lot of covert agents 

who would have eliminated me. I know him very well because 

I worked with him in the Rwandese Patriotic Army since its creation.

 More so, I served in his escort for nearly 10 years, until I fled the
country.

2. My name is Aloys Ruyenzi, I was born on 1st March 1971 in Mbarara, Uganda of 

Rwandan refugee parents. I grew up in Uganda and I joined the National Resistance

Army of Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni in 1987. I had a six-month course

 in Basic Military Training, after which I attended a six-month course in military 

intelligence. After the training, I was posted in the 23rd battalion based in northern

 Uganda, as intelligence staff. A year later, I was called back to Kampala and posted at 

the Directorate of Military Intelligence (DMI), where Kagame was a senior officer. 

While in DMI, I was selected for another course called "the Intelligence and
Self-Defence".

 When I fled the country, I was working in the Republican Guard, an RPA (Rwanda 

Patriotic Army) special unit that provides elements for the Presidential Protection Unit. 

I was Second Lieutenant and my army number was OP1460.

3. When the Rwandan Patriotic Front attacked Rwanda on 1st October 1990, 

I was among the fighters. First I was with the 4th battalion operating in the Akagera 

National Park, until we were pushed back to Uganda and started guerrilla warfare.

 I then joined the then LIMA Combined Mobile Force, from where I eventually 

joined the High Command Unit. This is equivalent to army headquarters in a regular

 army. However unlike the latter the unit's main duty was to escort Major Kagame, 

then RPA boss. I first was in the missile unit, before being appointed in the escort
of Kagame.

4. When I joined the escort, I resumed my duties as intelligence officer. I would be most

 of the time close to Kagame as a member of the close bodyguards’ team. In this capacity,

 I hardly missed any detail of what he would say or instruct to be done. Hence, 

my testimony is not a piece of hearsays, but a testimony of an eyewitness.

5. After the take over of government by RPF, I once again attended courses in military 

intelligence and Protection of VIPs. I took up duties as a presidential bodyguard. When 

the invasion of Zaire started, I was sent there as one of the confidants of Kagame to follow

 and give detailed account of any military operation that took place. This was in a bid

 to make sure that he did not miss any detail by sending his own escorts. The crimes that

 I witnessed there are so much that I cannot detail them here. I was there on special 

assignment as member of the Republican Guards unit. I will do it in a different paper 

once I have time. What I can simply say for the time being is that a lot of crimes that 

were committed by the RPA were ordered by Kagame.

6. People were killed on a very large scale on orders of Kagame and officers who did 

not carry out orders to kill were either relieved of their duties or disappeared. Kagame

 does not tolerate anybody disobeying his orders. Similarly, during the time the RPA

 was fighting the so-called "infiltrators" in northern Rwanda in Ruhengeri and Gisenyi, 

many unarmed Hutu civilians were killed in what looked like a true ethnic cleansing. 

I opposed those atrocities, until I was labelled as an enemy collaborator.

7. As I said earlier, I joined and served RPA since its creation. When I joined it, 

I sincerely believed that I was struggling to end injustice towards our brothers, our 

parents and our motherland, and eventually to return home. In any case, this is what we 

were told. I never envisaged that our return would lead to killings and expulsion of the

 population we found inside the country. To my dismay, I realised that our leader and 

current President of Rwanda, Paul Kagame had a hidden agenda. To make matters worse, 

he would not tolerate any dissenting voice and opposing his orders could even lead to

 disappearance.

8. I had the misfortune of working in his escort, where the climate is abominable. 

There is a permanent climate of terror and mistrust, as everybody spies on everybody else. 

I was intelligence officer, but I knew very well that I was myself being spied on.

9. The intelligence officers do not carry out ordinary military intelligence work they are 

paid for. They are a squad of criminals that was set up by Kagame for his own ends.

 Its sole mission is killings opponents and other unwanted elements, so as to consolidate

his murderous regime. It is therefore very difficult to work with him, more so as

intelligence officer without adhering to his criminal policies. My aim now is that before 

I am eliminated I want make public a list of assassinations ordered personally by 

Kagame. The list is indeed very long.

10. I defected because I was realising that we were becoming a gang of killers. I 

could not stomach that situation which was contrary to what we fought for, that it is

 fighting for restoring a rule of law.

11. But it took time before I could flee for fear of being arrested and killed as a deserter.

 I feared being killed by the butt of a used hoe agafuni. The latter is the acronym given

 to the part of a hoe that RPA used to smash heads of people condemned to death. It is

 very sad that I kept on working deliberately with a man whose criminal records are so

 horrendous.

12. The opposition to atrocities planned and ordered by Kagame landed me in trouble

 as this was considered as tantamount to treason. In fact I was being suspected of 

possible treasonable acts. I was eventually trailed and attempts were made over my life. 

I was by now labelled as one of the so-called "negative forces". This was a label given to

 Interahamwe militia living in Zaire. I was even accused of having released Interahamwe 

in Nkamira-Gisenyi and put under arrest. This was mere fabrication. Not only there is no

 Interahamwe prison there, but also I never released anybody with evidence that he was 

involved in killings. There is no way I could show mercy to such people. I will emphasize

 here that I do not refer to those innocent Hutus who were labelled Interahamwe simply 

by virtue of being Hutus.

13. By the time I worked with the Gendarmerie, people who were detained there were 

suspected of common law crimes mostly related to land and cattle disputes. I was unfairly

 arrested on 8th June 1999. Those who arrested me eventually got ashamed and I was

 released and allowed to resume my duties in the escort of Kagame.

14. After allegations of conniving with the enemy were levelled against me simply because

 I did not support killings innocent people, attempts were made to get rid of me in ambushes. The first time I survived an ambush was in Gisenyi on my way to Kabaya thanks to a friend who had warned me.

 It was on 13th April 1999.

15. I did also escape narrowly a second attempt on my life, but my escort perished.

 One was called James Kabera, a private soldier, the other one was Hodari, a Mugogwe 

(a local ethnic Tutsi group of Gisenyi). It was on 15th May 2001. I was again going to 

Gisenyi on special assignment. I was ambushed in the mountains of Buranga in 

Ruhengeri. This time around, I had not been warned at all, as I could not imagine that

 I could be ambushed while on

 such a mission. I did not understand why I had been selected for the mission but

 even if I had known, I could not refuse the order. A vehicle trailed me right from 

Kigali and kept on indicating my position. The Toyota Land cruiser vehicle that I was

 in was sprayed with bullets and two of my escort were killed on the spot. I don’t know 

how I survived.

16. The last attempt on my life was on 18th November 2001. This had been assigned

 to two groups to ensure that I don’t escape anymore. One of the people involved felt bad 

and told me to flee, as he did not have any quarrel with me. The same day I fled to Uganda.

17. I was first kept under tight surveillance, under CMI (Chieftaincy of Military 

Intelligence) custody purportedly for my own security. When they gathered enough 

information and confirmed that I was a genuine asylum seeker, I was allowed to go out 

and look for shelter. I realised that I could not remain in Uganda, as Rwandan 

intelligence services there are even more active that Ugandan own services. Many 

Rwandan asylum seekers were picked there and sneaked back to Rwanda where they 

were tortured and killed. This is why I decided to go far from Rwanda in my quest 

for asylum. I am now in a place where I can denounce the atrocities committed by 

General Paul Kagame and his henchmen. I insisted on giving all these details in order to 

explain the difficulties faced by an RPA soldier who does not support what Kagame wants. 

I am hoping that slowly by slowly, the tendency of considering all Tutsi officers 

as killers will vanish in the minds of many people.

^{18.General Kagame is of quite a very bad character. He is extremely nervous, so much} 

^{so that at time he can crash everything on his way and ransack a whole house. He does} 

^{not tolerate any dissenting voice, what he says is gospel truth. I worked with him for a} 

^{long time. He does not tolerate any advice and is trigger-happy. Once one of his close} 

^{allies simply tells him that you are suspected of disloyalty, this is enough to warrant your} 

^death.

19. Kagame can spend a whole month without smiling. He can spend sleepless night 

abusing people and roughing them up. He does not spare anybody, he beats people at 

random. Anybody summoned at his home starts shaking excepts henchmen like Major 

general James Kabarebe. Other officers up to the rank of colonel like Ndugutse could be 

beaten to our disgust. He is a bloodthirsty person. When I worked with him, he would go 

very early in the morning to visit detention places of DMI to sometime supervise 

killing. I recall once in Muhura when we were fighting to capture Kigali, he personally

went on a 12.7mm AAC 

(anti air craft) mounted on a jeep of his escort and sprayed bullets on a peaceful market 

crowd of peasants gathered on a market place. It was in 1994. He then ordered his

 soldiers to use all available weapons and shell the market. It is very saddening to see 

a leader getting involved in massacring people in a market, while sarcastically laughing. 

The few times you will ever see him smiling is mainly when he is killing or seeing people 

killed.

20. General Paul Kagame supervises the smallest detail of everything going on in 

the army. He even follows conversations between soldiers on military patrols on their 

walkie-talkie radios.

21. Every morning, he summons his signal officer and reads through all operations 

and routine army messages, to make sure that he does not miss anything. He uses 

to short circuit his military commanding officers by giving direct orders to field 

commanders without passing through the chain of command. Here I simply want to 

stress that there is nothing he can pretend to ignore. Nothing can take place within RPA 

without his knowledge. Apart from very isolated incidents carried out by petty criminals, 

all atrocities committed by the army in operational areas are sanctioned by him. 

The officers detained for so-called operational blunders are in actual facts detained 

because they did not kill the way he wants. They are not in remand for killing civilians, 

but for not concealing their bodies. 

For him that is a crime. The one who manages to kill the maximum and clear all the 

evidence will surely be promoted.

22. Major general Paul Kagame manages Rwandan army as his own militiamen. 

The whole army has become a wide intelligence network. When there are officially 

5 intelligence officers, you can rest assured that there are another 20 under cover. 

There is no clear chain of command in the intelligence network, everybody spies on 

everybody else and reports to Major General Paul Kagame in person. Kagame is a 

very rough and security cautious person. He has got a network of criminals who are by 

this virtue untouchable. They are ready to carry out any dirty mission that Kagame 

assigns them. Those people are so deadly that nobody dares flee the country because 

they may be tracked anywhere and be killed. Kagame does not fear anybody. 

He does not care even about his health. He sleeps at 2.30 am and wakes up at 4.00 am. 

He does what he wants, when he wants. He is very stubborn and arrogant. He does 

not hesitate to call his entourage stupid people because he thinks that he is the 

cleverest man. He does not trust anybody and is very unpredictable.

23. Major general Paul Kagame personally ordered the shooting down of President 

Juvénal Habyarimana’s plane.

24. I got astonished when I heard him denying it. I equally got surprised by Rwandan 

Radio and some international media manoeuvre to absolve him of that act. I heard 

even civilian people like Minister Charles Muligande, trying to explain how militarily 

it was impossible.

25. Let me make it crystal clear, I attended the last meeting where the plan was hatched. 

I was there physically and I even know the names of those who carried out the shooting.

 I was working with them in the High Command unit. It is Lt Frank Nziza and cpl Eric 

Hakizimana.

26. It is not hearsays; I was present when the meeting took place. That was on 31st 

March 1994 from 2.30pm to 3.30pm.The Chairman of the meeting was Major 

general Paul Kagame, and the following officers were present: Col Kayumba Nyamwasa, 

Col Théoneste Lizinde, Lt Col James Kabarebe, Major Jacob Tumwine, Captain Charles

 Karamba. I heard P. Kagame asking Col. Lizinde to report about his investigations 

and I have seen Col Lizinde giving to Paul Kagame a map of the selected place for 

the plane shooting etc. I don’t want to jeopardise the investigation, because I would be 

playing around with criminals who would take the opportunity to prepare their defence. 

But I simply want to say that I am ready to give evidence in court, should my testimony 

be needed. I would then say the whole truth, if I were still alive.

27. He ordered at numerous occasions to kill as many civilians as possible. This took place

 in many areas in Byumba, Ruhengeri and elsewhere, and long before the Tutsi 

genocide. I say so because some people think that RPA killed in reprisal after the genocide.

 Even during the genocide, I saw and heard on several occasions major general Paul

 Kagame giving orders to kill civilians, especially in Mutara, Byumba and Kibungo. 

He would enjoy it like a football fan watching a football game and cheering his team. 

At time, he even used his escort or selected DMI operatives to kill civilians.

28. Before the plan to get rid of Juvénal Habyarimana was hatched, meeting had been 

going on to prepare the final assault on Kigali. This had been the ultimate goal 

whatever the outcome of the negotiations. At that time, I was acting I.O for then Lt Silas 

Udahemuka (currently strong man in Kigali), who had got involved in an accident. In this 

capacity, I could attend all the meetings of the High Command. In one of the meetings, 

major general Paul Kagame ordered that civilians be lured into attending a public rally 

under the pretext of emergency food supply or security meetings, in order to round them 

up and eliminate them. And this happened the way it had been planned. The reality is 

that mass killings of people took place under his orders. Furthermore, he had a special 

hatred against religious people. Whenever the latter would be spotted and rounded up, 

local commanders would always ask major General Kagame what to do. Invariably, he 

ordered for their killings. I am even aware of the talks he had with Lieutenant colonel Fred 

Ibingira before the bishops were killed in Kabgayi. Similar incidents happened in Rwesero. 

The execution squad took the priests to Karushya and killed them.

29. All the reports were unanimously stating that Tutsi would be wiped out if the war 

resumed. Any pretext would be enough to kick off the killings. Major general Paul 

Kagame did not care at all about those threats. Recently, when one of former RPA 

officers who deserted and fled the country said that RPA was to blame for the killing of 

Tutsi, Rwandan foreign affairs minister, Charles Muligande attempted against all odds 

to refute it. Why does he so pathetically tell lies? It will suffice to recall that Kagame 

himself used to say that Tutsi living inside Rwanda were opportunists and reactionary 

elements that had refused to flee. Their death was none of his concerns. In fact, all the 

forces that were used to kill innocent civilians in liberated areas would have been 

used to rescue Tutsi. This did not happen. God willing, I will, jointly with other colleagues,

 compile a comprehensive report about ethnic cleansing that was ordered by Kagame. At

 times, he did it personally. I saw him personally instructing for the digging of mass graves

 for people who had been massacred in Byumba, Muhura and Murambi. Later, 

he ordered their removal and to be taken to crematory centres in Gabiro, Nasho, 

Masaka, Nyungwe, Kami, Gitarama military barracks and Mukamira. At times, 

people would be packed alive into lorries and be taken directly to the above place to 

be executed on the spot.

30. Apart from the war of 1990-1994, he launched two bloody wars in Zaire and is 

still disturbing that country.

31. Major general Paul Kagame also instructed his officers and men led by then Col 

Kayumba Nyamwasa to massacre civilians in Ruhengeri and Gisenyi. I saw personally 

heavy artillery pieces and helicopter gunship shelling villages under the excuse of 

fighting insurgency. At time, no single infiltrators would have set foot there, or they 

may have been there but left long before the counterattack. People would be summarily 

executed after long suffering by torture.

32. He did not spare his own tribes mates Tutsi. Bagogwe and Banyamulenge of Zaire 

were killed to safeguard his own selfish interests. It is not easy to find the right 

wording, but what he did is indescribable. He killed so many Congolese of Rwandan 

origin, Hutu and Tutsi alike. This will also be detailed later. We were Inkotanyi-members 

of RPA, we know all the elements who were misguided into getting involved in crimes. 

People should be assured that soon or later, all crimes that took place on the Rwandan 

soil will be accounted for. It will serve as a lesson for many, for one may conceal a 

crime, but the crime does not conceal itself.

33. I take this opportunity to call upon all Rwandan fighting the general Kagame’s regime, 

to avoid getting involved in any activities that would lead to shedding the blood of 

innocent people. Kagame concealed his crimes for nearly 10 years, but time has come to 

expose him. All criminals will end up being taken to court to answer for their deeds. 

Why do they take the risk of being arrested one day and spend the rest of their lives 

in prison?