KIGALI - Two thousand supporters of Rwanda’s ruling party marched on Monday through the streets of its capital Kigali on the first day of campaigning for September elections, police said.
An AFP correspondent saw hundreds of marchers, mainly the young or female, many of whom brandished placards urging Rwandans to vote for President Paul Kagame’s Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF).
They said the RPF was a “sole pillar of security and national development” for the central African country.
The RPF won a landslide victory in the last general election, in 2003, the first since around 800,000 people, mainly minority Tutsis, were massacred during the 1994 genocide carried out by extremist Hutus.
The genocide was ended when the Tutsi-dominated RPF rebellion seized power.
In a statement issued from Brussels, opponents of Kagame’s party said the elections, to be held in mid-September, were a “smokescreen.”
At the end of July, Kagame said he expected a comfortable victory, as with 2010 presidential polls.
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