Students claim ruling party "politicising" education

One of the Rwandan students who fled to Uganda has criticised the ruling Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) for "politicising" an academic issue. In an interview with the BBC Kinyarwanda service, the student - one of 42 English-speaking Rwandan students fleeing the Rwandese authorities - said the government was about to jail them because they had refused to study in
French, a language they did not know. "The RPF played a major role," he said. "It realised the students were going to cause insecurity in the country." "What is sad is that an academic issue became politicised," he added. The students had written to the prime minister, a member of the Hutu Mouvement democratique republicain (MDR), regarding their plight.
"The government started to say that we were working with the MDR," the student said. "They started to call us Interahamwe."

A Rwandan ruling party official, quoted by the BBC, said the students had failed their exams because they had refused the language lessons offered to them. Regional analysts told IRIN the issue is significant as "for the first time there are Tutsi casualties of government policy". "These people who returned in 1994 are now refugees again," one analyst said. But, he
added, the government is refusing to set the precedent whereby students can dispute their language of instruction.