Three years ago, Human Rights Watch published a detailed report titled “Join Us or Die”: Rwanda’s Extraterritorial Repression. It mapped the long reach of the Rwandan state beyond its borders—how dissidents, refugees, and exiles are stalked, intimidated, and, in some cases, hunted.
If you skimmed it then, or dismissed the warnings as routine human-rights rhetoric, reopen it now. Skip the executive summary and policy recommendations. Go straight to the long entry on Sgt. Maj. Robert Kabera.
The warnings in that report have now been borne out in the most brutal way.
Over the weekend of 16–17 October 2026, residents in Luwala village, Kammengo Sub-county, Mpigi District—outside Kampala, Uganda—discovered a headless body discarded in the brush near a eucalyptus plantation where Kabera had been building a house. Relatives and Ugandan police quickly confirmed the identity: 50-year-old Robert Kabera, the former Rwanda Defence Force military instructor, musician, and outspoken YouTuber who used his channel (Major Robert TV / SM Robert TV) to criticise President Paul Kagame. His head has still not been recovered.
Ugandan police have registered the case as murder. Spokesperson Kituuma Rusoke confirmed that the killers took the head and that investigators believe the killing occurred either on the night of 16 October or in the early hours of 17 October. No suspects have been publicly identified, and the Rwandan government has not commented.
Kabera fled Rwanda in November 2020, citing political persecution. Rwandan military prosecutors later announced an investigation into sexual-assault allegations that he denied and described as a witch-hunt. In Uganda he was granted asylum on political-persecution grounds and, according to Ugandan police statements cited by Human Rights Watch, received additional protection. He repeatedly reported threats, harassment, an assault in 2022, and the alleged disappearance of his wife. The 2023 Human Rights Watch report documented these patterns in detail.
A missing head is not an ordinary homicide. It functions as a grotesque message. For many in the Rwandan exile community, it confirms long-standing claims that threats from Kigali are not mere online trolling. Kabera’s roughly 144,000 YouTube subscribers—and anyone else who believed a border could shield dissent—have been sent a stark warning.
The international community has often preferred to highlight Rwanda’s economic growth and order while downplaying documented patterns of extraterritorial repression.
Kabera’s entry in the 2023 report is no longer background reading. It now reads like a forensic blueprint of a murder that was foreshadowed.
Go back and read it.
