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Ann Garrison Correspondent
As Burundian voters went to the polls last Tuesday, the US State Department warned that “elections held under the current conditions in Burundi will not be credible and will further discredit the government.”

It also said it planned to suspend partnerships that it hasn’t already suspended with “anyone promoting instability in Burundi through violence.”

Will those “promoting instability through violence” include the renegade Burundian military officers who staged a failed coup attempt in May, then fled to Rwanda and declared war on Burundi?

Will it include Rwandan military and political support for a rebel force?

And why did the State Department accept the “credibility” of the presidential election in Rwanda, Burundi’s neighbour and ethnic twin, in 2010?

August 9 will mark the fifth anniversary of that 2010 Rwandan presidential election.

When it was announced that the US and UK would send election observers that year, Rwandan American legal scholar Charles Kambanda, a former member of Kagame’s ruling party, told KPFA Radio that there was nothing to observe.

Victoire Ingabire attempted to stand for the presidency in Rwanda in 2010.

She has been in prison since, and prison authorities have refused to let her meet with the lawyers preparing her appeal to the African Court of Human and People’s Rights.

She was not quite in prison by election day, but she had, since April 1, been under house arrest, forbidden to leave Rwanda’s capital to speak with the country’s rural, subsistence farming majority.

She was finally imprisoned on October 14, 2010, two weeks after the release of the UN Mapping Report on Human Rights Abuse in the Democratic Republic of Congo, 1993-2003, which documented Kagame’s army’s atrocities in Congo and said an international court of law would likely rule that they included genocide — meaning the ethnic massacre of Rwanda Hutu refugees and Congolese Hutus.

No such international criminal tribunal has ever been convened.

An international criminal defence attorney travelled to Rwanda in May to defend Victoire Ingabire while she was still under house arrest, but he was thrown in prison for “denying” Rwanda’s constitutionally codified, legally enforced genocide history.

Victoire Ingabire remains behind bars today, convicted and sentenced to 15 years on preposterous charges of terrorism, urging Rwandans to rise up against their government, and “genocide ideology,” which means challenging President Paul Kagame, the Rwandan government or the constitutionally codified, legally enforced genocide history.

Last week, Victoire’s party reported that prison authorities have refused to let her meet with the lawyers preparing her appeal to the African Court of Human and People’s Rights, have confined her in harsher isolation, and have even taken away her books and hymnals.

Bernard Ntaganda, another 2010 presidential contender, was sentenced to four years in prison long before the polls for organising an illegal gathering, “threatening state security” and “inciting ethnic divisions.”

Regarding those ethnic divisions, Ntaganda had actually said: “The problem in Rwanda is not Tutsi. The problem is not Hutu. The problem is a small group of people, a small group of people who have between their hands all power, government power. They have the wealth. And they have the majority of Rwandese, who are very poor.”

Deo Mushayidi, former president of the Rwandan Journalists Association, was sentenced to life in prison after a summary trial way ahead of the polls in 2010. Mushayidi is a Tutsi who lost his entire family in the Rwandan massacres.

Rwandan journalists Agnes Uwimana and Saidath-Mukakibibi were imprisoned ahead of the polls for writing a series of articles that criticised President Kagame and other officials and, like Victoire Ingabire, challenged Rwanda’s constitutionally codified, legally enforced genocide history.

There was no credible investigation of the June 25, 2010, murder of Rwandan journalist Jean Leonard Rugambage or of the July 14, 2010, murder of Rwandan Green Party Vice President Andre Kagwa Rwisereka, whose body was found beheaded by the banks of Rwanda’s Makula River.

Nor has there ever been any Web accessible report of any investigation into the July 15, 2010 murder of international criminal defence lawyer and University of Dar Es Salaam professor Jwani Mwaikusa.

Professor Mwaikusa was at the time preparing his client’s appeal to the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda’s Appeals Chamber.

During the 2010 World Cup festivities in Johannesburg, South Africa, a team of assassins shot former Rwandan Gen Kayumba Nyamwasa in front of his home, then followed an ambulance to a hospital, where they tried and failed again to kill him before being arrested. Pambazuka News.