Is anywhere safe for Paul Kagame’s critics?

After weeks of travelling – first Paris, then Kinshasa – I was looking forward to my evening at L’Horloge du Sud in Brussels. Known for its poisson liboké (fish wrapped in banana leaf) and other African specialities, the restaurant is popular with the city’s African diaspora. I’d been invited by a Pan-African thinktank to discuss my book on Rwanda.

It was not to be. The day before, I got a call from the Benin journalist due to chair the event. He sounded rattled. The restaurant owner, he said, had been receiving complaints from pro-government Rwandan groups in Brussels, along with threatening emails and anonymous calls from Rwanda itself. His organisation was telling the owner to hold fast, but in its history of staging contentious African debates, it had never experienced this level of intimidation.

With every phone call and retweet denouncing me, the Kigali regime was confirming my central thesis

‘Tell him this is just the way dictatorships silence debate,’ I said. ‘Plenty of African governments do it.’ ‘You don’t understand,’ said my would-be chair, his voice rising. ‘They are accusing you of being a well-known négationniste. They are threatening to take the owner to court and say they are ready to wreck the place.’

Ah yes, négationnisme – ‘genocide denial’ – in theory, a crime under Belgian law. As a journalist who in 1994 walked through churches and classrooms in Rwanda where hundreds of men, women and children had been macheted and shot, I have never felt remotely inclined to deny the genocide. I saw the bodies; on a bad day, I can still recall the whiff of putrefaction. Why on earth would I deny an episode upon which I once reported?

But that misses the point. Négationniste has become a term used by the ruling Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) to refer to anyone who dares to criticise President Paul Kagame.