Stock photo of Geoffrey York.Erin Conway-Smith/The Globe and Mail
Even by the standards of a Twittersphere where anonymous snark is common, the personal attacks by the Twitter account known as @RichardGoldston were extraordinarily nasty. Hiding behind a fake biography and a stolen photo, the account targeted anyone who was critical of the Rwandan government, using vicious gossip and misogynistic slurs to assault its enemies.
Journalists were attacked. Human-rights researchers were slammed. Even the South African president, Jacob Zuma, was denounced as a "retard."
A few days ago, the office of Rwandan president Paul Kagame made a stunning confession: the anonymous attacks were written by one of its own employees. The employee was "reprimanded" and the account has been deleted, the presidency said.
It was a grudging and belated admission. Researchers such as freelancer writer Steve Terrill, himself a frequent target of the anonymous attacks, had long suspected that the fake Twitter account was a vehicle for someone in the Rwandan government. He had noticed that many senior Rwandan officials, for example, were following @RichardGoldston, and the fake account had once used a government-linked e-mail address as its own.
The proof finally came when the fake account tried to reply to a tweet from Mr. Terrill – and accidentally replied from the official Twitter account of Mr. Kagame himself. Only then did the presidency acknowledge what its employee was doing.
If this was an isolated incident, it might be hardly worth noting. But it fits a much broader pattern: the Rwandan government has for many years had a habit of using anonymous Internet sites, and much worse, to attack its perceived enemies.
Last week, after an attempted assassination of a Rwandan dissident in Johannesburg, South Africa expelled three Rwandan diplomats. It was the fourth attack on the dissident, former Kagame ally and army chief Faustin Kayumba Nyamwasa, over the past few years, and it took place at a "safe house" – guarded by police – that the South African government had provided for him. Six to eight attackers, armed with Kalashnikovs, raided the house and narrowly missed Mr. Nyamwasa and his family members because they had gone out, local reports said.
Other Rwandan dissidents have also been targeted in South Africa and elsewhere. One prominent exile, Patrick Karegeya, was strangled to death on New Year's Day in his hotel room in Johannesburg.
South Africa has never provided formal proof that the Rwandan government is responsible for the attacks on dissidents, but several Rwandans were arrested after at attempted assassination of Mr. Nyamwasa in 2010, and prosecutors said Rwandan government "operatives" were implicated in the attack. South Africa temporarily recalled its ambassador from Rwanda to protest the attack – a foreshadowing of its much stronger demarche last week.
There is still no official South African statement to explain why the three Rwandan diplomats were expelled. But in off-the-record comments to local media, South African officials have been scathing. "Kagame is an outlaw," one official told the Johannesburg Star. "He's sending his people all over the world to hunt down people and execute them."
The expulsions are a signal that Rwanda must not "wage war" against its enemies on South African soil, the official reportedly said.
A separate report, by an investigative journalist at City Press newspaper, said the South African state security agency had "irrefutable evidence" that Mr. Kagame had "sent his killers" to South Africa. One of the expelled diplomats was the co-ordinator of the recent wave of attacks on Rwandan dissidents, the report said.
Rwanda has admitted nothing. Instead, it accused South Africa of "harbouring terrorists" – and then it expelled six South African diplomats, twice as many as South Africa had expelled.
Follow me on Twitter: @geoffreyyork