In February 1992, a very busy Paul Kagame while commanding Rwanda Patriotic Army rebels, set aside some time to have an exclusive conversation with Sam Mukalazi, a Ugandan journalist at one of the rebel bases at Muvumba in Rwanda.
The war had entered its second year since the former refugees united and armed under Rwanda Patriotic Front/army overran Kagitumba border post on October 1, 1990.
The clashes were intense as heavily armed and well trained government forces, with support of air power, inflicted heavy casualties on rebels.
Kagame told Mukalazi that the rebel movement had suffered major losses and the rebels had lost morale especially influenced by successive deaths of their commanders at the start of the war.
Kagame, who was away on the first day of attack, flew back from the US to replace fallen commander Fred Rwigema who had been killed in action.
During this conversation, Kagame told the journalist that he had vowed to reorganise the rebel group and had begun achieving remarkable success, for example, his efforts had paid off in capturing a vast stretch of several kilometres deep from Kgaitumba to Ruhengeri and was considered the rebel operational zone.
“There is a large portion of this stretch on which the enemy cannot dare step,” Kagame told the journalist.
Commander Kagame boasted that the biggest and most successful battle in 1992 was in Butaro, starting January 23 and continuing for 10 days.
“We attacked enemy defences in Nyamucucu,Kitenge and Butaro and we overrun six of their seven defences,” he said.
He told Mukalazi that these RPA victories on the battlefield had provided strength to the rebels.
However, President Juvenal Habyarimana in Kigali was planning something terrible against rebel leader Kagame.
It should be remembered that 1992 was a busy year for both fighting sides.
The government army was fiercely fighting with the rebels while their political representatives were dressed up in suits for roundtable peace talks in neighbouring Arusha, Tanzania.
Habyarimana had carefully identified a non suspecting person to deliver and administer poison to Kagame. The Kigali regime had on several occasions declared Kagame dead.
“We arrested a woman sent by the Kigali government with some poison meant to finish me off,” Kagame disclosed to Mukalazi with a smile. “Even if I died, the struggle would go on,” Kagame added.
The woman was identified as Eugenia Kaitesi and said to be a wife of the former Rwandan Minister of Finance.
Kaitesi had been arrested in mid 1991 and was still being held by the rebels at the time of the conversation with this journalist.
According to Kagame, the woman assassin had claimed that her assignment was being coordinated by a Rwandan diplomat in Uganda and that if she had succeeded with this assassination mission, she was going to acquire a big mansion in Brussels at the expense of the Rwanda government.
Jean Pierre Claver Kanyarushoki was the Rwandan ambassador to Uganda and led the Rwanda government delegation to Arusha peace talks in the same year.
The intention of the Habyarimana regime announcing the rebel commander’s death might have been to raise the morale of government demoralised troops that had lost subsequent battles.
