Jeffrey Smith, founding director of Vanguard Africa, a U.S.-based democracy advocacy group, said the Rusesabagina case is a prime example of Rwanda’s habit of targeting its opponents in foreign countries.

“Western leaders are hesitant to speak out,” Mr. Smith said. “They’re desperate for a development success story – something they can sell to their citizens as to why their taxpayer dollars are going abroad – even when cases like this one point to a darker, more sinister reality on the ground. And Paul Kagame and his ruling party know how to play off the collective guilt from the lack of response to the 1994 genocide.”

According to Jeffrey Smith, founding director of the pro-democracy nonprofit Vanguard Africa, “The State Department’s call for due process and a fair trial in Rwanda is farcical, and I expect that officials [at the State Department] know as much,” he said. “All they have to do is read their own country reports going back decades, to know that none of these conditions will be remotely met in Rwanda.”

Pedro Pizano and Jeffrey Smith, with the McCain Institute and Vanguard Africa respectively, discuss the reputation laundering that musicians, actors and athletes facilitate when they agree to perform for dictators and kleptocrats. They also describe how these same artists can use their platforms for good instead and show support for the citizens living under brutal regimes.

Jeffrey Smith, the executive director of Vanguard Africa, a pro-democracy advocacy group, said it was not surprising that neither Belgium nor the US had publicly launched a campaign on Rusesabagina’s behalf.

Smith said he believed it reflected a reticence to criticise a country that was seen as having benefited from development aid and western support, and emerged as an African success story – even as grave human rights abuses by Kagame’s government had been ignored by the western leaders who supported him.

"We have seen this pattern in Rwanda for a long time,” says Jeffrey Smith of Vanguard Africa. “Journalists and political activists disappear, they are murdered and imprisoned on unclear grounds. The list of attacks is long ... and it is growing."

Human rights groups say regimes are kidnapping dissidents with impunity. “Leaders like Paul Kagame know they can flout international law and not pay a price for it,” Jeffrey Smith, of Vanguard Africa, a pro-democracy activist group in Washington, said.

“The growing list of human rights defenders, journalists, civic activists, opposition members and critics of Kagame, like Rusesabagina, who have been arrested, or otherwise killed or disappeared, is truly staggering,” said Jeffrey Smith, the executive director of Vanguard Africa, a nonprofit that advocates ethical leadership and democracy on the continent. “What Kagame and Rwanda’s ruling party have effectively done is to make the argument, both in rhetoric and in practice, that criticism, resistance or opposition to their rule amounts to terrorism.”

In a speech to legislators in June, Magufuli promised a free and fair election this fall. But Jeffrey Smith, founding director of the pro-democracy nonprofit Vanguard Africa, is blunt in his assessment of this claim. “It’s Orwellian to its core,” he said. Magufuli “presents this reality to the world, [which] might not otherwise be watching, while doing the complete opposite on the ground.” According to Smith, sustained international attention is vital in the months ahead. “That is the only way people like Tundu are going to stay alive.”

"This sort of incendiary rhetoric may seem shocking, but in fact, it's the norm for Mnangagwa well before he was president," Jeffrey Smith, director of Vanguard Africa, a nonprofit pro-democracy initiative, told DW.

When he was deputy president in 2015, Mnangagwa likened Zimbabwe's political opposition to Satan and announced to an assembled crowd in Midlands that "we have come to cleanse you of the sins of the MDC," Smith recalls.

ZANU-PF, which has ruled Zimbabwe since independence in 1980, has always displayed an utterly callous disregard for human rights, said Jeffrey Smith, director of Vanguard Africa, a nonprofit supporting pro-democracy initiatives.

"The record is clear," Smith commented. "And the Mnangagwa regime is a continuation of this trend. It's the same corrupt cabal that has devastated Zimbabwe, and its latent potential, for decades."