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OfJohannes Dieterich
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shut down
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The government in Kigali is said to have used the NSO Group’s program against other African heads of state
The international wiretapping scandal, at the center of which is the Israeli software company “NSO Group”, is also raging in Africa. In addition to the government of Morocco, which has already come into the public spotlight because of its alleged espionage attack on French President Emmanuel Macron, the Rwandan government is also said to have benefited from the technology of the Tel Aviv company. This emerges from the “Pegasus Project”, as part of which Amnesty International (AI), together with dozens of journalists from all over the world, combed a list of more than 50,000 phone numbers of possibly intercepted people from politics, business and diplomacy.
Rwanda’s secret service alone is said to have compiled a list of around 3,500 names of African heads of state, politicians, diplomats, journalists and activists, in whose cell phones the espionage program should be installed – or has already been installed. Among them is South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa, whose government has problematic relations with Kigali after the murder of the Rwandan opposition politician Patrick Karegeya in Johannesburg in 2013 (presumably through Rwandan agents). “Of course we are not happy to be selected as a target,” said Ramaphosa’s spokeswoman Khumbudzo Ntshavheni in Pretoria: “This is both an attack on the privacy of our president and on the sovereignty of the South African state.”
Pegasus scandal: The heads of state of South Africa and Burundi were on Rwanda’s list
The relationship between Kigali and Pretoria has deteriorated further with the recent dispatch of around 1,000 Rwandan soldiers to the troubled north of Mozambique. South Africa regards Mozambique as its sphere of influence and has already sent 1,500 soldiers to the region, which has been unsettled by Islamist extremists. The number of troops is soon to be doubled. Experts fear that the mission in the natural gas-rich north of Mozambique could be jeopardized by the different interests of the nations sending troops.
The Rwandan government’s eavesdropping list apparently also included the president of the neighboring state of Burundi, with which Kigali has extremely strained relations, as well as numerous high-ranking politicians and the military in Uganda, another of Rwanda’s competitors. Carine Kanimba, daughter of the former manager of the “Mille Collines” hotel in Kigali, which achieved worldwide fame as the model for the movie “Hotel Rwanda”, raises the most concrete allegations against the surveillance state led by Rwandan President Paul Kagame. Rwanda’s government accuses Paul Rusesabagina of not offering protection to refugees during the 1994 genocide in the Mille Collines, but of having handed many of them over to the Interahamwe militia. He has also been said to have been supporting the Rwandan opposition and the FDLR militia entrenched in neighboring Congolese for years. A charge that Rusesabagina denies.
Rwanda has built one of the most comprehensive surveillance systems in Africa
The former hotel manager was kidnapped in a sensational coup to Rwanda at the end of August last year: there he was arrested and brought to justice. During his lawyers’ visits to prison, it became apparent that the Rwandan authorities had information that they could only have obtained by tapping their cell phones, Kanimba said on the US broadcaster CNN. Her conversation with the Belgian Foreign Minister Sophie Wilmès was also demonstrably overheard.
Hardly any other African country is more closely monitored than Rwanda, says the British author Michela Wrong, whose critical book about Kagame’s rule (“Do not Disturb”) recently made headlines. “The strong arm of the Rwandan state extends beyond its borders,” says the Africa expert. The allegations raised as part of the Pegasus project are denied in Kigali. Rwanda does not use this software “and does not have the necessary technical knowledge,” said Foreign Minister Vincent Biruta. And in a statement by the NSO Group it is said: To hold the Israeli company responsible for the wiretapping scandal is “like blaming a car manufacturer for the accident of a drunk driver”.
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