(Source: Human Rights Watch/RSF/Index on Censorship/CPJ/INSI/IFEX)

Rwandan President Paul Kagame won another seven-year term in elections held on 9 August, after already being in power for 15 years. International human rights and press freedom organisations claim he captured 93 percent of the vote by banning opposition parties and eliminating critical domestic news coverage. In the months leading up to election day, the government systematically shut down news outlets and terrorised critical journalists into fleeing the country.

Reports suggest that the government justified its assault on the media by saying it needed to prevent a recurrence of the 1994 genocide and by constantly invoking the role played by the hate media in inciting the killing. As a result, independent media is struggling to survive; journalists have been killed, arrested, intimidated, driven into exile and fined.

In April, two critical weeklies were suspended by the government-influenced Media High Council. Editor John-Bosco Gasasira of Umuvugizi left the country after receiving threatening phone calls and being kept under surveillance by military intelligence. The following month, the editor of Umuseso, Didas Gasana, fled Rwanda fearing arrest. (Read more on this story here).

Defiant, Mr. Gasasira kept his news outlet alive in Rwanda with deputy editor Jean-Leonard Rugambage. But Mr. Rugambage was shot dead on 24 June. (Read more about this story here). Exiled Umuseso journalists launched a new weekly, Newsline, and tried to send it into Rwanda by bus, but police confiscated the paper at the Ugandan border.

Back inside Rwanda, editor Agnès Uwimana Nkusi and journalist Saidat Mukakibibi were arrested in July. Nkusi’s Kinyarwanda-language weekly Umurabyo shed light on the murder of Rugambage, the fallout between President Kagame and two now-exiled military leaders, and reports alleging lavish government spending on luxury jets. Both journalists have been charged with inciting civil disobedience, insulting the President, spreading false rumours and denying the Tutsi genocide.

One week before elections, the Media High Council suspended 30 media outlets. The Council issued a communiqué on 26 July listing 19 radio stations and 22 newspapers that had met the criteria of the country’s media law, inviting them to apply for an operating license. Other media outlets excluded from the list were effectively banned from covering the election process.

This tactic has silenced Rwanda’s most prominent newspapers and several radio stations, including Voice of Africa Rwanda and Voice of America. On 28 July the Council ordered security forces to shut down newspapers and radio stations operating illegally.

Human Rights Watch also reports that President Kagame severely reduced political space prior to the elections. The three other parties that ran were broadly supportive of Kagame’s party, the Rwandan Patriotic Front. Conversely, the three parties that openly criticised the ruling party were not even permitted to take part in the election. Members of opposition parties have been beaten and arrested over the last eight months and on 13 July, the vice president of the Democratic Green Party disappeared. The next day, his mutilated body was found near the town of Butare in the south of the country.

In a recent travel advisory for journalists, the International News Safety Institute (INSI) warned that telephone lines are tapped and Internet may be monitored in Rwanda. INSI added that under the Genocide Law, anyone who challenges the official version of the 1994 genocide could be imprisoned for anywhere between 10 and 25 years.

Link: President Kagame silences critics surrounding re-election (IFEX).