Who is Rwanda’s Rose Kabuye?

Timothy Kalyegira

Kampala

The Chief of Protocol in the Office of the President in Rwanda, Lt. Col. Rose N. Kabuye, has been in the news this week over her arrest in Frankfurt, Germany on Sunday, November 9.

She is wanted in France as one of the suspects for an arrest warrant was issued by the French anti-terrorist judge Jean-Louis Bruguière in November 2006 over the April 1994 shooting down of the Rwandese presidential jet, the act that triggered off the genocide.

Lt. Col. Kabuye was concurrently issued with an arrest warrant in February by the Spanish judge, Fernando Andreu, over what he called atrocities committed by her and 40 RPA officers in the period following the RPF’s rise to power in Rwanda after 1994.
Lt. Col. Kabuye was raised in the Nakivale Refugee Camp in western Uganda, the same camp that was home to some of the founders of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF).

She attended primary and secondary school in western Uganda then went on to Makerere University in Kampala in 1986 where she studied political science. After university, she joined the then Ugandan national army, the National Resistance Army (NRA) at the rank of lieutenant.

She got a job in the Uganda’s Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Local Government as a personal assistant (or possibly aide-de-camp) to Major (rtd) Nuwe Amanya Mushega, when he was the minister in both those ministries.
She also was an aide to the then army commander, Major-General Elly Tumwine and at some point stayed at his home in Kololo, a suburb of Kampala.

She got married to Lt. (now Captain) David Kabuye in 1988. Until April 2007, David Kabuye was the Managing Director of the New Times newspaper of Rwanda but lost his job in still controversial circumstances, leading to speculation that he had fallen out with the Kagame regime. He is also a businessman but maintains a low profile in society.

In October 1990, Lt. Rose Kabuye was one of the fighters that went into Rwanda as part of the first invasion force of the RPF.

Today, at the rank of Lt. Col. Kabuye is the highest-ranking and some say most influential woman officer in the Rwandan army.

The Qatar-based satellite television Al-Jazeera on November 11 described her as something of “an iconic figure” in Rwanda. Unlike many women who served the RPA in uniform in an honorary capacity, Lt. Col. Kabuye was an actual soldier.

At that time, she was nursing a two-month old baby and sometimes appeared at RPF press conferences holding the baby and by that, capturing the attention of the world’s photojournalists covering the war.

In 1993, the now Major Rose Kabuye was arrested on the orders of the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) commander, Major-General Paul Kagame. She spent the better part of a year in the RPA jail. It is not clear what offence, if any, led to her detention.

During her time in jail, she spent most of her days and nights listening to world and local news on her small black World Band radio model. She told some of her guards that she was a lawyer by profession and got along well with them.

At that time she and her husband David Kabuye had grown distant and although a few senior RPA came to visit her in jail, her husband did not once come, according to people in the know.
During her time in jail, her extreme distaste for the Hutu people came strongly across. She blamed them for sending her Tutsi people into exile and in particular, said some of her relatives had been sent to a refugee camp near the Tanzania border where they died of cholera.

Lt. Col. Kabuye also said that if by any chance the RPA could capture alive the then army commander, Major General Deogratias Nsabimana, they would get him to join the RPA because, although a Hutu and loyalist to Habyarimana, he was a very well-trained and professional soldier.

She also explained how the Rwandese Tutsi exiles had worked their way into Ugandan society in the 1960s. She said beautiful girls among the refugees would be handpicked, married off to prominent Ugandans, with the hope that some of that money would be sent back to the refugee camps to help educate the young school-age children.

Upon her release from detention, Lt. Col. Kabuye was deployed at the RPA’s headquarters in Mulindi where she handled administrative and logistical work. She was also part of the RPF team that planned and attended the peace talks with the MRND government of Habyarimana, in Arusha, Tanzania.

After the RPF took power in Kigali in July 1994, she worked in its administrative structures and later became the second RPF-appointed mayor of the capital.

She gained a reputation both for her toughness and notoriety, reported on some occasions to slap male clerks who worked under her in the mayor’s office. Some people familiar with Lt. Col. Kabuye say she is the kind of person whom, when she enters a room, people keep quiet.

According to another source who knew her well, Rose Kabuye as Mayor of Kigali used to wear army combat uniform and behave in what he called a “suicide way”, the term in Uganda for flamboyant, publicity-seeking stunts among army officers.

In recent years, a number of leading RPF/RPA figures started to fall out with or at least have strained relations with President Kagame. Officially, she was sidelined after she involved herself in business (something illegal for a serving army officer in Rwanda) and got embroiled in a number of corrupt dealings such as that of the construction of the taxi park.

Some sources say Lt. Col. Kabuye, who was close to the late Major-General Fred Rwigyema (RPF’s first leader), was suspected of being sympathetic to the disgruntled elements and so was transferred to the President’s Office in the less influential position of Chief of Protocol.