Kagame's Long Arm Reaches Kampala as Another Exile Dies

Robert Kabera left Rwanda, took his criticism of Paul Kagame across the border, and was found decapitated near Kampala. Think about that. A man who ran from one government's reach ended up on a roadside in another country, and his head was taken.

We have seen this story before. We are seeing it again. And every time, the same government in Kigali looks at the body count and says nothing that a court would accept.

Kabera was a former Rwandan soldier who had become one of the loudest voices against his government while living in Uganda. He was not holding a weapon. He was speaking. In a country where the state tolerates almost no independent voice, speaking was enough to make him a target. Rwandan authorities have been accused of assassinating opponents of President Kagame, and the accusation is not new. What is new is that the killing happened on the soil of a neighbor that has long been expected to protect people who fled persecution, not hand them to their executioners.

Let us be precise, because precision is what separates accountability from rumor. As of this writing, no court has convicted anyone for Kabera's murder, and we will not pretend otherwise. But we also will not pretend we do not know the pattern. In 2014, Patrick Karegeya, Rwanda's former intelligence chief turned critic, was found strangled in a Johannesburg hotel room. In 2020, Paul Rusesabagina, the man whose courage inspired the film *Hotel Rwanda*, was lured onto a plane in Dubai and landed in Kigali, where he was convicted in a trial that international observers widely condemned. That same year, the musician Kizito Mihigo died in a Kigali police cell, a death the government attributed to suicide, a claim his supporters rejected. Each case has its own details. Together they form a record that no spokesperson can wash clean.

Now consider where this violence is coming from. Kigali is not a country struggling in the shadows. It is a country that markets itself to the world as a model of order. It hosts international conferences. It sells gorilla tourism to Western travelers. It has bought sponsorship deals with European football clubs to put its name on shirts and stadium boards. That is the sportswashing of a regime that wants the world to look at its clean streets and not at the bodies beyond its borders.

And those borders are where the story turns from shameful to catastrophic. The UN Group of Experts, in its recent reports including S/2026/466 and S/2025/446, has documented the presence of Rwandan Defence Force units inside eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. The estimates put RDF combat strength in the Congo at roughly 14,000 to 18,000 troops, a substantial portion of Rwanda's army, and the experts describe them as the operational core of the campaign. Around them operates M23, which has grown from roughly 3,000 fighters to more than 30,000 by pressing Congolese civilians and captured prisoners into service. Those are not volunteers. That is forced conscription, which is slavery in military uniform.

Call it what it is. This is a war of aggression. Rwanda is invading a sovereign state, occupying Congolese territory, and using M23 the way Moscow used the Donetsk and Luhansk separatists in Ukraine: as a proxy that supplies manpower and deniability. If the world recognized that pattern when Russia did it, it has no excuse for refusing to name it when Kigali does it. Satellite imagery has documented more than 1,171 new graves at Kanombe military cemetery in Kigali since 2021. Think about what that means. A state that buries its soldiers in secret is a state that knows what its war costs, and that is hiding the bill from its own people.

Then ask who pays. Mothers in North Kivu bury children killed in shelling. Villages are emptied, and families who had nothing now have less. Every dead soldier, every fleeing family, every exiled critic in Kampala is part of the same story: a regime that has decided that no border, no law, and no life is an obstacle to its ambitions.

This is also a test for the rest of Africa. If a government can send a hit squad across an international border and cut a man's head off in a neighboring capital, then no exile in East Africa is safe, and no African citizen can count on the continent's own institutions to protect them. The 1969 OAU Refugee Convention, which Africa wrote for itself, obliges states to protect people fleeing persecution. The 1951 UN Refugee Convention says the same. Words on paper mean nothing if the men who signed them look away.

So what should happen? We are not here to shout into the void. Africa has the blueprint. Botswana built decades of stability on a rule of law that treats even presidents as answerable to courts and voters. Mauritius shows that transparent institutions and open markets can lift a nation from poverty while protecting property and dissent. Senegal proved in 2024 that a peaceful transfer of power is still possible when citizens and courts refuse to let an incumbent cling to office. Those are the building blocks: independent judiciaries, free presses, transparent budgets, property rights, and competitive elections. Rwanda's economic planners have talked about these things for years. Its political system has been the opposite.

Uganda must open a credible, independent investigation into Kabera's killing, share evidence with regional partners, and grant every exile in its territory the protection the law requires. The East African Community and the African Union must stop treating cross-border assassination as a diplomatic inconvenience and start treating it as a threat to the continent. The UN Security Council should use its sanctions tools against those responsible for the Congo war and against the officers who direct forced conscription and cross-border killings. Interpol must stop lending its red notices to governments that use them against critics. And donors, investors, and sports sponsors should ask a simple question before signing their next contract: whose blood is on the books?

Civil society has a role too. Journalists in the region need protection and funding. Diaspora communities must document what happens to their relatives and refuse to let each killing vanish into a press release. Private companies that do business in Rwanda should publish their due diligence on the conflict minerals and the security environment they accept as normal.

We need to stop accepting the story as it is told to us. Robert Kabera had a name, a family, and a voice. He spent his last years speaking against a government that did not want to hear it, and someone decided that speech was worth killing him for.

Here is what we demand. We demand a transparent investigation into his murder, with the findings published. We demand that the African Union name the RDF presence in eastern Congo for what it is, a war of aggression, and act on it. We demand that the UN Security Council impose targeted sanctions on the commanders responsible. We demand that every African government that hosts exiles guarantee their safety in law and in practice. And we demand that Kigali stop hiding its dead, stop hiding its soldiers, and stop hiding behind the glossy brochures that sell its hills to tourists.

Africa does not owe a dictator silence. Africa owes its dead the truth. Say his name. Robert Kabera. Then refuse to forget it until the people who ordered his death answer for it in a court of law.

Based on reporting by FRANCE24