Can Kagame pull a rabbit out of the hat?

Paul Kagame can't just catch a break. Every time he beats them back the hordes keep coming at him, and for a man who's genteel mien belies a steely exterior honed by one of the world's worst atrocities, it is a strange place to be.

The latest instalment begun when a leaked "Group of Experts" UN report accused him of backing mutinous rebels in the troubled eastern Congo following a spate of violence around March.

Despite his government's best diplomatic efforts at discrediting the damaging report, the charges have seemed to stick with each passing week.

A darling of Western donors, no doubt desperate to atone for their inertia during the 1994 genocide horror, even this group of fair-weather friends have all melted away in the light of the allegations, carting off with them suitcases of aid.

The UN, US and everyone else who is anyone in the scheme of things have all rapped him for his alleged role in the Congo, not unlike a mother scolding a recalcitrant child.

This weekend it was the turn of a most unlikely club - the Southern African Development Community. The bloc's final communiqué following a heads of state get-together in Maputo was unusually coarse, categorically accusing him of "interference" in the Congo.

For a group better known for burying their heads in the sand, the harsh tone caused pundits to wag that the region's recurrent political problems would be history if the bloc adopted the same tough-guy approach to Madagascar and Zimbabwe. Problems there have festered over the last few years, with the bloc often accused of mollycoddling their errant leaders.

As if on cue, a group of political activists that Kagame would no doubt dismiss as busybodies asked the International Criminal Court to pursue the Rwandan leader for war crimes.

The party of long-time opponent Victoire Ingabire, who is incarcerated in Rwanda, was behind the request, which the court said would be treated "like hundreds of such communications received every year" from all sorts of places.

Kagame was sufficiently moved by all the noise to pen a response, in which he accused unnamed international actors of complicating things and basically being shallow.

His description of their alleged meddling is interesting: "They came to us and said: 'You know what, we want to arrest some people in Congo and we want you to help arrest these people'.

"[We said]: 'Go ahead and arrest them, why do you even come to us?' They said, 'No, we want you to help the government of DRC arrest so and so.'

"We said, 'Oh, how did this become our problem? Why don’t you go and help arrest the people you want to arrest for the International Criminal Court?'"

He could not resist a last salvo for the bunglers: "They don’t listen — the same way they never listened when genocide was taking place here in Rwanda."

There is no doubt the pressure on him is unrelenting, but Kagame is not a suave and wily political survivor for nothing.

Charges of complicity in the genocide and a general disdain for the opposition and dissidents have been like water off a duck's back, and for the rapt audience that hangs on to his every move, you can be sure that he will pull a rabbit out of his hat.

One that would make the great escape artist Harry Houdini proud.

Twitter: @shrewdafrican