20100719
africanews

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Rwanda needs to tightly control journalists and politicians to prevent the ethnically divisive rhetoric that sparked a 1994 genocide, Foreign Minister Louise Mushikiwabo said on Monday.

Rwandan President Paul Kagame is expected to win an August 9 election, but critics have expressed concerns about an increasingly repressive environment ahead of the poll in the impoverished central African nation.

Kagame won praise for rebuilding political institutions and attracting foreign investors after the genocide, when about 800,000 ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed. But he is also accused of trampling political and press freedoms.

"Politicians, people who want to run for office, people who want to lead Rwandans today, need to stay away from some of the rhetoric that is bound to take people back to where they were," Mushikiwabo, who describes herself as an independent politician, told Reuters in an interview in New York.

"This is not a matter of freedom of expression."

"Anybody who's going to have any influence in politics in Rwanda has to talk about issues and not talk about genocide ... (not) bring very dangerous language in terms of Hutu/Tutsis division," she said.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban ki-Moon told Kagame during a meeting in Madrid last week that he was concerned about several recent incidents that raised political tensions in Rwanda. Ban also stressed the need to uphold human rights.

An aspiring Rwandan opposition politician, Andre Kagwa Rwisereka, was found murdered last week. Rwandan police said they had arrested a business associate of Rwisereka.