WARNING: This is Version 1 of my old archive, so Photos will NOT work and many links will NOT work. But you can find articles by searching on the Titles. There is a lot of information in this archive. Use the SEARCH BAR at the top right. Prior to December 2012; I was a pro-Christian type of Conservative. I was unaware of the mass of Jewish lies in history, especially the lies regarding WW2 and Hitler. So in here you will find pro-Jewish and pro-Israel material. I was definitely WRONG about the Boeremag and Janusz Walus. They were for real.
Original Post Date: 2009-05-19 Time: 16:00:05 Posted By: Jan
By Shyaka Kanuma
In August last year a bulldozer demolished the house which stood on old man Kamiri Batsinda’s plot in Remera. Batsinda had fought a long battle to save his house and his plot; but it was a losing battle for he was against much more powerful people than him
But this tenacious man refuses to give up even as someone else already has claimed his plot and walled it off. This is a fellow called Augustin Bizimana whom Batsinda has never met, and never interacted with. Batsinda, and his lawyer Francois Rwangampuhwe, suspect “there are other people hidden behind this Bizimana.
Batsinda through his lawyer has filed a case against Gasabo District in the Nyamirambo High Court, demanding justice. The house Nyinawagaga razed is property he inherited from Emile Butera, a brother of his whom-together with his family of more than 30 people-perished during the Genocide.
The Nyamirambo High Court, as is typical of Rwanda’s judicial institutions, won’t hear the old man’s case for the next six months because “turashaka kujya mumizi y’urubanza” (they say they want to get at the root of the case), whatever that means.
The fact of the matter is that old man Batsinda, a returnee who spent years of his life in exile in Burundi, has been looking for help in every court in Kigali and the district of Gasabo and all they have done is give him the run around. The Rwanda Focus has copies of every document he has filed in the courts-including the Gasabo Court of First Instance which would only refer Batsinda “to another jurisdiction”.
The fact of the matter however is that Gasabo District officials refused to answer the court’s summons for the case to be heard (Nyinawagaga in a phone interview with this newspaper however denied ever being summoned by the court, though we have seen Gasabo court documents detailing the particulars of this case). As Batsinda says, “the courts in this country, it is obvious, only work for the interests of abayobozi (big leaders) not for ordinary people.”
It is clear that Mutsindashyaka and Nyinawagaga are some of the abayobozi that our courts cannot touch-that is unless someone more powerful, for instance the Prosecutor General of the country, wants them to answer for something.
Mutsindashyaka signs a fraudulent demolition order
The first time someone tried to demolish Batsinda’s house was in 2004.
On 18 November of that year Mutsindashyaka signed a form, a copy of which The Rwanda Focus has, ordering the house’s demolition. At the time, Nyinawagaga was one of Mutsindashyaka’s vice mayors and, as this article will show, she was complicit in her boss’s scheme.
Here is one of Mutsindashyaka’s stated reasons to have the house demolished:
That the house was built illegally-that is, with no proper documents from the authorities. This is clearly a lie because Batsinda has a document called autorisation de batir-or a permit to build-issued to his brother Butera in 1982 and signed by Joseph Nzirorera (later the current government recognized this as a legal and valid document as it was notarized by a government notary called Landrine Ruzindana on 5 December 2006). Batsinda also has a fiche cadastrale which recognizes and endorses the blue prints of the house. We have seen originals, and we have copies of these documents.
Mutsindashyaka’s other accusations were that the house was built on land reserved for government usage; that it was constructed with illegal materials i.e. sticks, adobe bricks et cetera; that it was built over public installations such as electric cables, water pipes; that construction overlapped the demarcations of the plots and so on and so forth.
One can see in all these reasons that Mutsindashyaka only was fishing around for justification for his plot grab.
If one were looking to demolish every house constructed with sticks and adobe bricks they would soon flatten three quarters of the city. Everyone knows the haphazard, unplanned ways Rwandans built during the Habyarimana regime and others that preceded it. What you did was apply for an autorisation de batir and, most probably after greasing a few palms, you got the authorization and proceed to add your own irregular box of rukarakara, inturusu and corrugated iron to whatever slum they permitted you to build in.
Nevertheless if you had a document it was legal and binding.
We tried to raise Minister Mutsindashyaka to find out why he singled out one person (and we are talking about 2004, five years before a master plan for Kigali ever came into being) to attempt to have his house demolished using his powers as mayor but we couldn’t trace him. (If we may remark here, Theoneste Mutsindashyaka is one of the most difficult officials to reach, either for media people or for ordinary citizens).
On the occasion Mutsindashyaka first attempted to flatten Batsinda’s house however the old man got help from the public Ombudsman, one Louis Marie de Montfort, who took one look at Batsinda’s documents and called for a halt to the demolition before it could begin. The Ombudsman wrote a letter to anyone concerned that Batsinda’s house was legal and couldn’t be demolished.
But scarcely a week later the mayor sent his bulldozer back, to the dismay of Batsinda. “It was then that I realized Mutsindashyaka was determined to get my plot and it would be very difficult to stop him,” the old man narrated.
What saved his house on the second occasion were some brave Rwandans who wouldn’t stand by and do nothing as an act of injustice was perpetrated.
One of these is Florence Kayiraba, a former mayor of Kicukiro District. Someone had raised the alarm that a bulldozer was about to raze a building and she rushed to the site in her car. She asked the policemen standing by whether the demolition was proceeding lawfully, i.e. if the owner of the house actually had no legal documents.
The policemen, (policemen normally have to accompany demolition crews to maintain law and order) were caught unawares.
They assumed since the mayor of the city ordered it then it was legal. They asked Batsinda for his documents and he produced each and every one they asked for. The Police straight away called for a halt to the demolition. Kayiraba was acting outside her jurisdiction so she called the head of Remera Sector Callixte Kanamugire to ask him whether he knew of the impending demolition and his answer was an emphatic no.
Kanamugire advised Batsinda after looking at his documents, including the Ombudsman’s letter, that his house was safe and no one would touch it as long as he was in Remera.
Nyinawagaga succeeds where Mutsindashyaka failed
But Kanamugire could not have been very sure of his assurances for later on when Claudine Nyinawagaga became mayor of Gasabo she succeeded through various ruses and heavy handed acts to have Batsinda’s house demolished-and his plot grabbed.
One of Nyinawagaga’s ruses was to dredge up the case of a relative of Batsinda’s, an old woman called Felisita Kasine who was a sister in law of Batsinda’s brother, the late Butera, from whom he inherited the house.
This old woman had been discovered by agents of Mutsindashyaka who tried to use her in court for her to claim Batsinda’s house actually was hers.
Batsinda was astounded when she took him to court. “Yes, Felisita is a family member but how could she end up in a court saying a house I inherited from my brother belonged to her, unless someone powerful was driving her?” he asked. “She wasn’t even the wife of Emile and all of a sudden she has the courage to claim his house? This world we live in surely is mad!”
Batsinda explained the probable reasons why Mutsindashyaka had to use Kasine. “Since I was unwilling to sell my plot to them they had to find someone else to claim it whom they could easily manipulate into handing it over to them once they succeeded in convincing the courts through their lawyers and judges to take it away from me and give it to her,” said Batsinda.
But Batsinda fought the case tooth and nail in the Nyamirambo Court of First Instance and the Vice President of the court, one Cecile Juru, ruled Batsinda and Kasine should divide up the property between the two of them.
If Mutsindashyaka thought he would pounce to buy from the old woman her part of the property and later use that as a wedge to drive out Batsinda he had underestimated the old man. Batsinda immediately settled his dispute with Kasine by writing her a check for Frw 4,980,000, “even if I felt she had no possible legal claim on the property, but I knew she was someone’s tool (igikoresho) and I had to sort that problem as quickly as possible.”
Still Batsinda’s payment of Kasine has not prevented Nyinawagaga from using the case as “proof” that the house in fact does not belong to Batsinda.
“That man is a liar,” the Gasabo mayor told The Rwanda Focus. “He is walking around claiming the plot is his but it isn’t at all,” she said, giving no logical explanation to back this assertion.
She insists Batsinda never gave Kasine the money he paid her. But the executive secretary of Remera Sector at the time, Jacques Uwimana, signed up as one of the witnesses to this transaction and he says he is ready to stand up in a court of law to testify to this fact.
There isn’t any depth Nyinawagaga wouldn’t plumb in her determination to drive Batsinda out of his property however.
On top of accusing Batsinda everywhere that he is a liar; on top of making accusations that “the house is umwanda” (rubbish) that shouldn’t be in the city; that it is in a place where government wants to put “developments of benefit to the public” (she never says what these are), she (and Mutsindashyaka) have constantly been bombarding the poor man with all kinds of “official” letters which are nothing but a constant form of harassment.
Focus has seen a letter signed by the mayor in which she gives Batsinda a “last warning” that he should report to Kigali City Council in not more than 15 days to receive a check in payment for the plot. It is dated 22 October 2007. It does not specify why he should sell or for what amount, and the reason it gives for its “last warning” is that there have been “too many disputes and litigations” concerning the plot.
Batsinda once again appealed to the Ombudsman, but that could only help him for one year.
Finally on 28 August 2008 Nyinawagaga disregarded all legal niceties and the pleadings of local authorities, and herself supervised as a Gasabo bulldozer went to work razing Batsinda’s house.
The old man stood by, tears rolling down his face, as his late brother’s house; one of the few things he left in the world was reduced to rubble.
Batsinda has gone to court, but he has very little faith left in the country’s institutions.
Original date published: 15 May 2009
Source: http://allafrica.com/stories/200905190147.html?viewall=1