Arsenal signed a deal to promote Rwanda despite criticism and renewed it despite even greater criticism. This is why countries sportswash.
Well, no-one can say that they weren’t warned. Arsenal’s decision to partner with the government of Rwanda on sleeve sponsorship ruffled feathers when it was first announced in 2018. It did so again when it was renewed in 2021. And now the very slogan used to sell the benefits of travelling to that particular country has taken a frankly sinister edge amid the British government’s descent into ugliness with its recent showboating over deporting refugees there for ‘processing’.
The idea of one of the world’s 20 poorest countries giving a Premier League football club £30m immediately left a sour taste in the mouth, but could be countered by claims from experts that the deal could result in considerably greater tourist revenue. But there was something else unpleasant about all this. It may be well-known that the Rwandan president Paul Kagame is an Arsenal supporter, but Rwanda has seen allegations of human rights abuses, including claims that vocal critics of Kagame were being murdered or disappearing, with Human Rights Watch, the United Nations and the UK’s Foreign Office all raising concerns.
Kagame has been the president of Rwanda since 2000, and since then he has won three elections, in 2003, 2010 and 2017 with 95%, 93%, and 98.8% of the votes respectively, as well as a referendum allowing him to change the country’s constitution to permit him running for president for a third time, which he won with 98.3% of the vote. There has been widespread condemnation of election conduct in the country since he came to power, with credible reports of the intimidation and murder of political opponents and journalists. Amnesty International reported that the 2017 elections were held in a ‘climate of fear and repression’.
And now this. It’s saying something about the direction of the Overton Window in Britain in recent years that speaking out against forcibly deporting refugees to a third country with a shady reputation, likely thousands of miles from both their original home and the country in which they’d sought refuge, will probably get you labelled as a communist, but that’s where we are. As the British government loads refugees onto airliners with the intention of wiping their hands of them (or at least sending a very clear dog-whistle of their intentions, should the courts have the temerity to…
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