While waiting for his claim to asylum to be reviewed, Munyakazi taught French, first at a high school and then at colleges in New Jersey and Maryland. While in the United States, Munyakazi learned that he was allegedly on a list of opponents of the regime, and applied for asylum. Leopold Munyakazi is a Rwandan linguist and trade union leader who came to the United States to participate in a conference on French literature in Atlanta in 2004. His case makes clear that to counter this global threat, democracies have to seriously examine their own institutions. Munyakazi’s targeting, which was made possible by interstate cooperation rather than a unilateral violation of sovereignty, illustrates how authoritarians can manipulate democratic governments to perpetrate transnational repression. Unlike Rusesabagina, Munyakazi wasn’t clandestinely kidnapped via private jet. But in many ways, it is more emblematic of most cases of transnational repression. The case of Leopold Munyakazi, another critic of the Rwandan government who is currently in prison there, has garnered fewer headlines or statements of support from celebrities. They are among an increasing number of examples of transnational repression - the targeting of exiles and others in diasporas by their home governments outside of the country’s borders. His case joined that of Saudi dissident and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, gruesomely murdered in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul in 2018, and preceded that of Belarusian journalist Raman Pratasevich, abducted by Belarus from a deliberately rerouted flight in May 2021. Once in Rwanda’s capital Kigali, he was convicted on terrorism-related charges and sentenced to life in prison. The Rwandan government had abducted Rusesabagina in 2020 while he was in transit in Dubai. Paul Rusesabagina, the real-life hero of Hollywood’s Hotel Rwanda and a vocal critic of Rwanda’s president Paul Kagame, was released from prison last month and allowed to return home to the United States, resolving a particularly high-profile case in a growing and disturbing pattern worldwide.
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