LONDON, 8 April 2004 — Rwandan President Paul Kagame remains bitterly critical of Western failure to halt the genocidal slaughter that started a decade ago today. And he is absolutely right. International inaction in April 1994 was one of the 20th century’s most shameful chapters.
Yet although Kagame is good at dishing out sharp words, he is not very good at accepting them. The poker-faced president leads an increasingly authoritarian government that exploits Western guilt to excuse his own abuses, which are legion. The independent press is harassed and intimidated. Two weeks ago the editor of the Kinyarwanda-language Umuseso fled to Tanzania after receiving death threats. In neighboring Congo, his country’s troops and their rebel proxies have committed horrific abuses, including pillage of diamonds and gold, murder of civilians and widespread rape.
But Kagame unfairly brands his critics as “genocide apologists”, just as Israel smears its opponents as anti-Semites. Kagame also directs his vitriol at former friends. Alison des Forges, a human rights expert, painstakingly documented the gory details of the 1994 genocide. Now she is derided as an ill-intentioned meddler for daring to question some of Kagame’s actions. Anywhere else, the abuses perpetuated by Rwanda’s government would trigger a cascade of international condemnation. But in Rwanda, donors turn a blind eye and pile in with bilateral aid. This acquiescent policy was pioneered under Clare Short, the former UK secretary of state for international development. She has gone from that job, but Britain, which is giving 37 million pounds sterling this year, remains the largest donor. Only the Netherlands has held back some funding in protest.
Donors argue that Kagame is stewarding a necessarily painful transition to normality. And donors like Rwanda because funds donated for education, healthcare and preventing AIDS are, by and large, wisely spent.
It is also true that Kagame has notched up a series of near-miraculous achievements. Only a decade after the devilish orgy, Rwanda is one of Africa’s safest countries. Kigali residents can walk the streets at night without fear of muggings or carjackings. In the hilly countryside, Hutu and Tutsi families live side by side in a coexistence that is, on the surface at least, harmonious. The government has embarked on imaginative reforms, such as using the traditional courts to help deal with 90,000 genocide suspects.
And the economy is among Africa’s fastest growing, albeit largely thanks to the aid funds inflow.
But the West’s guilt-swathed generosity, bereft of criticism of Kagame’s vice-like grip on power, may be storing up problems for the future. Rwandans are reserved and difficult to read. In public, many subscribe to the official mantra that they are “not Hutu, not Tutsi, but Rwandan”. Underneath the thin democratic veneer, however, dangerous currents are swirling.
