No country in the postwar era has endured greater horror than Rwanda. Paul Kagame, its President for the past 12 years, merits credit for important gains. He helped to drive out genocidal militias from Rwanda in 1994 and returned the country to order. He presided over a form of peace and reconciliation. Under his leadership, Rwanda has achieved a measure of new prosperity.
His achievements should not, however, have blinded Western governments to his shortcomings.
Yet that is what has happened. Under the previous Labour Government, Britain began to see Rwanda as a way forward for Africa. To this day, Britain gives more bilateral aid to Rwanda than any other EU country. Yet Mr Kagame’s rule has come to be characterised by repression of his opponents and increasingly incredible margins of electoral victory. Speaking to The Times, Lieutenant Joel Mutabazi, who served for 20 years as Mr Kagame’s bodyguard, has given an insight into the way his former master operates . Mr Mutabazi fled Rwanda’s intelligence service in fear of his life, after suffering 17 months of solitary confinement and torture. He describes accompanying Mr Kagame to prisons run by the security services, in which inmates lived and died terribly. Mr Kagame came to power in the aftermath of the most horrific genocide since 1945.

The overwhelming majority of Rwanda’s Tutsi population — some 800,000 out of a total of 930,000 — were killed by Hutu extremists in 1994, in 100 days. The spark for this murderous madness was the assassination of President Habyarimana when a missile shot down his plane, which was carrying also the President of Burundi. It is most likely that the murderers were Hutus, seeking to undermine a peace accord negotiated by Habyarimana and Tutsi representatives at Arusha in Tanzania. Amid the carnage, Mr Kagame came to prominence. He led a Tutsi invasion from Uganda and pushed back the Hutu génocidaires. It was, like the Vietnamese overthrow of Pol Pot in 1979, a belated but essential act to end suffering of a nature and on a scale that is scarcely imaginable. And, like Vietnamese oppression in Cambodia, Mr Kagame’s subsequent rule has outstayed that welcome. The evidence has long been substantiated and known that Mr Kagame has weak democratic credentials. He has attacked or exiled his political opponents and harassed his country’s press. He has ignored UN reports of the massacre of civilians by his own forces after the genocide.

Mr Kagame’s influence has extended to destabilising the Democratic Republic of Congo by supporting a rebel group. Rwanda is accused by the UN of shielding Bosco Ntaganda, an indicted war criminal. The EU has frozen new aid to Rwanda in consequence. The US has called on Mr Kagame to denounce the rebels. That leaves the UK. In his last day as Secretary of State for International Development, Andrew Mitchell, now the Chief Whip, resumed aid to the Government of Rwanda, in the form of a previously frozen £8 million tranche of budgetary support. After a terrible recent past, Rwanda under Mr Kagame’s rule achieved relative peace and the limited beginnings of recovery. But Mr Kagame needs to be held to account. British politicians have sought a country where aid works; and in b Rwanda, it is not doing so.

Source: The Times – UK