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Paul Kagame: Rwanda's redeemer or ruthless dictator?
- Telegraph Page 1 of 9
Paul Kagame: Rwanda's redeemer or ruthless dictator?

President Paul Kagame, the Rwandan hero who united a country torn by genocide,
defends his uncompromising approach to democracy
President Paul Kagame of Rwanda Photo: Getty Images
By Richard Grant
9:00AM BST 22 Jul 2010
The presidential chair, lean and straight-backed, awaits its occupant in a big, hushed room with long,
beige curtains drawn against the African sun. After some delay, His Excellency is announced and Paul
Kagame enters the room with a brisk loping stride – a tall, thin, gangly man with small steel-rimmed
spectacles, a narrow moustache and a blue suit hanging off his bony shoulders.
His eyes have a keen, piercing intelligence, and he radiates a

quality of intense seriousness that is both impressive and
intimidating. Kagame, the president of Rwanda, is widely
considered to be the most dynamic and effective leader in Africa
today, and also ruthless, repressive and intolerant of criticism.
Like any African strongman who depends on aid from Western

Machetes, used in the genocide,
abandoned by fleeing Hutus at Rwanda's democracies – Britain is the single largest donor to his regime,
border with Tanzania giving £70 million last year – it is necessary for Kagame to cry
foul when he’s accused of abusing human rights, but his self-
professed model for Rwanda is Singapore: a small, tightly controlled authoritarian state that has
achieved a vibrant prosperity based on trade, banking and communications.
The interview begins with Kagame asking the questions. 'Tell me your impressions of Rwanda,’ he says,
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Paul Kagame: Rwanda's redeemer or ruthless dictator? - Telegraph Page 2 of 9
'a) before you came here, and b) now that you are here.’
Like most foreign visitors, I have been impressed by the cleanliness, order and efficiency of the country.
Sixteen years after the genocide in which Hutu fanatics orchestrated the slaughter of more than 800,000
Tutsis and moderate Hutus, leaving the country a nightmarish ruin, with the treasury looted and corpses
stuffed down the wells, Rwanda is now the safest, cleanest country in Africa, with no slums and virtually
no begging or street crime. It has one of the highest sustained rates of economic growth on the
continent, the least amount of corruption and red tape, and it is the only country in the world to have a
majority of women in its parliament.
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Plastic bags are outlawed for environmental reasons, and in Kigali, the capital city, skyscrapers are
rising, and the streets are swept clean every morning. The death penalty has been abolished, and
English adopted as the official language. There is a national health system, 19 out of 20 children are
now in school, and rural Rwanda, while still in severe poverty, has better internet service than rural
Britain, and a good network of immaculately paved roads.
Meanwhile the survivors of the genocide are doing something almost unimaginable: co-existing with the
men who hacked their family members to death, and so often tortured and raped them. In many cases
survivors and killers are now living as neighbours again in the same villages, and while this is a tense
arrangement to say the least, there has been remarkably little violence, and some inspiring examples of
forgiveness and reconciliation.
'These achievements are extraordinary but they seem fragile,’ I say. 'The country still feels so
traumatised and volatile. I have been asking Rwandans what they would like to ask you, and two
questions keep coming up: how can we heal the ethnic division in our hearts? And what happens if
Kagame drops dead tomorrow? Many think there would be another genocide.’
These remarks hang impertinently in the air for a few moments. Then Kagame, who is Tutsi and runs a
Tutsi-dominated government, nods slowly and composes his reply.
'For me, this fragility is to be expected. Sixteen years is a very short time, and the trauma runs much
deeper than people from outside, however well meaning, will ever understand. Sometimes our partners
from other countries ask us why we have not got further with our reconciliation, as if we possess a magic
to just get rid of this tragic history of ours. No, we have to find a way to live with it and also to build a new
nation. The first phase was to achieve peace and stability, and now we are moving forward with
development. And if Kagame, for one reason or other, is no longer there, people can look back at
everything that has been done in 16 years, and they can feel a part of it, and be reassured that this
stability will continue.’
Rwanda’s curse has been ethnic hatred expressed as ethnic politics, so Kagame’s government, in
typically bold, authoritarian style, has made it illegal. Any politician or citizen who makes a statement
encouraging ethnic animosity, or expressing ethnic solidarity, risks a lengthy imprisonment for the crime
of 'divisionism’. The very words Hutu and Tutsi are now fraught and taboo, and if you ask someone
which group they belong to, they will usually look uncomfortable and reply as the government has
dictated: 'We are all Rwandans now.’
To Kagame’s critics, this is simply a strategy to keep the Hutus, who make up 85 per cent of the
population, from organising politically against his small Tutsi elite now controlling the country. There are
Hutu members and ministers in Kagame’s ruling party, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), but the inner
circle is all Tutsi. And in the past, whenever Hutu politicians have started to gather power or criticise the
government, it has usually meant their imprisonment, exile, disappearance or, in the case of Seth
Sendashonga and a few others, unsolved assassination.
According to Human Rights Watch, one of Kagame’s most persistent critics, by denying Hutus a political
voice and access to power he is building resentment and bottling tensions.
Kagame bristles fiercely at these criticisms. 'There are people who think we will never get out of this, that
in Rwanda either these ones will do the killing, or these ones will,’ he says. 'I do not accept this. I cannot
accept that there is something wrong with us in this way. It will be a long, difficult process – we are under
no illusions – and development is really the key. We must create economic opportunity, build a culture of
entrepreneurship, get people to take responsibility for improving their lives, rather than putting them in a
position where they sit back in their poverty and blame others for it.’
To Kagame’s fans, who include Tony Blair, Bill Clinton, Bill Gates and the CEOs of Google and
Starbucks, the tinderbox nature of post-genocide Rwanda, and the results he has achieved so far, justify
his strong hand and poor human rights record. The fact that Rwanda is ranked 183 out of 195 countries
for freedom of the press, for example, is outweighed by the fact that the per-capita GDP has tripled.
Also, the West lives with the guilty knowledge that it was Kagame and his rebel army who stopped the
genocide, while we dithered and blundered, and Kagame has been skilful and relentless at using this
guilt to his advantage.
Like so many rebel generals who have made the switch to civilian leadership, Kagame places a high
premium on loyalty and discipline, likes to operate in secrecy, is comfortable using violence and threats
of violence against his enemies, and tends to equate criticism with treason. Unusually, he doesn’t
appear motivated by wealth or luxury, either for himself or his relations. One of his sisters runs a small
dairy. Another operates a souvenir stand at the airport.
When I ask Kagame to sum up his political philosophy, he says, 'Pragmatic, doing what is doable,’ and
adds that fighting war is more to his liking. 'Even with all the hardships and hunger, war is straightforward
and clear-cut,’ he explains. 'But building a nation from nothing? A nation that has just experienced
genocide? There is no strategy manual for this. There is nothing that is not a priority, and the priorities
are always conflicting. I try to look at problems very clearly and think, “How do we get out of this? What
will work? What will be the consequences for the people involved?”’
Kagame has very little formal schooling, so his ideas and solutions are formed by his life experiences,
which have been harsher than most of us can imagine, and his voracious reading. Having put in a 12-
hour day dealing with affairs of state, taken his exercise (gym or tennis), spent time with his wife and four
children and said goodnight to them, he then stays up reading for three or four hours a night. 'Mainly it is
books about economics, business management, development issues, politics, international affairs,’ he
says. 'I get newspapers from Britain and other countries twice a week, and read them almost page to
page. Sometimes I find I’m reading things I don’t even need to read, because my mind is still hungry. I
don’t need much sleep. Four hours is enough.’
Paul Kagame was born in 1957 into an aristocratic Tutsi family that fled Rwanda when he was a small
boy. His earliest memories are of houses burning on a hill, shouting and commotion, his desperate
mother, the family scrambling into a car as a Hutu death squad came running down the hill towards
them. This was in 1959 and again in 1960, during the first of the Hutu pogroms against the Tutsi that
some historians now interpret as 'warm-up genocides’.
The Kagames were among tens of thousands of Rwandan Tutsis who ended up living in refugee camps
across the border in Uganda. 'You will always hear me talking about the importance of dignity,’ Kagame
says. 'It is really the key to people’s lives, and obviously for me it relates back to the refugee camp, the
lining up for food every day, the rationing. When we started primary school, we used to study under a
tree. We used to write on our thighs with a piece of dry, hard grass, and the teacher would come over
and look at your thigh, and write his mark with another piece of dry grass. You develop some sense of
questioning, some sense of justice, saying, “Why do I live like this? Why should anybody live like this?”
There was also a hardening that is still there in the way I approach many things. You can’t shock me,
because what can be worse than what I have seen and lived through?’
As a young man he joined the leftist Ugandan rebel army led by Yoweri Museveni, the current president
of Uganda, and spent five years as a guerrilla fighter in the bush. Intelligence was Kagame’s speciality,
gathering information about the terrain, the enemy, the villagers. It suited his observant, analytical,
conspiratorial mind. When Museveni took power in 1986, he sent Kagame to Cuba for training with 67
intelligence officers under his command.
On his return, Kagame and his closest boyhood friend from the refugee camp, Fred Rwigyema, started
building a clandestine army of Rwandan exiles within the Ugandan national army, with the aim of
invading Rwanda and overthrowing the Hutu regime. It was one of the most audacious covert operations
in military history, involving thousands of people, and it was how the Rwandan Patriotic Front began.
In 1989, through relations in the Rwandan Tutsi diaspora, Kagame met and married his wife, Jeanette,
then living in Nairobi. Soon afterwards the newlyweds went to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where
Museveni had arranged training for Kagame at the prestigious US Army Command and Staff College, to
complement what he had learnt in Cuba. Kagame and Rwigyema continued to plot their invasion by
telephone, as the Ugandan military became increasingly suspicious of the Rwandans in their midst.
In October 1990, with Kagame still in Kansas tidying up his affairs, the RPF detached itself from the
Ugandan army, ripped the insignias off its uniforms, and crossed the border into Rwanda. By the time
Kagame got there Rwigyema had been killed, and the RPF had been routed. Kagame took command of
the remnants and led them to the remote Virunga mountains. There he rebuilt his army in secret, and
began a four-year guerrilla war against the Hutu government headed by President Juvénal Habyarimana
and backed by the French.
It was Hutu Power extremists in the ruling elite who conceived of genocide against Tutsis, imported the
machetes from China, trained the Interahamwe death squads, and then used the radio to whip up hatred
and paranoia among the Hutu population, and coordinate the killing district by district. As the horror
began, Kagame was in close contact with the UN commander on the ground, Romeo Dallaire, whose
superiors in New York ordered him to stay neutral and not get involved. Kagame was also in contact with
the Clinton administration, which justified its inaction by claiming that 'acts of genocide’ were taking
place, but not genocide itself. Furious and disgusted by the international response, Kagame and the
RPF took matters into their own hands and marched on Kigali.
The night before the RPF reached the city, the genocidaires fled, leaving the streets heaped with
corpses, government buildings stripped down to the wiring, the treasury and banks emptied. Moving into
the countryside beyond Kigali, the RPF found more horror, stench and eerie silence. It seemed
impossible that so many people had been killed with machetes and clubs in such a short time, and
indeed the Rwandan genocide, with 800,000 dead in 100 days, was the fastest genocide in history.
When the self-styled 'international community’ did finally intervene, it did nothing for the survivors, and
chose instead to help the perpetrators of the genocide. The French landed 3,000 soldiers and created a
protected zone for the fleeing government army, death squads and general Hutu population, which
included many genocidal killers. From there, a great exodus of Hutus crossed into the Democratic
Republic of Congo, or Zaire as it was then, and a massive international aid campaign was launched to
feed them, shelter them in refugee camps, and bring them medical supplies. Neither the television
coverage nor the televised appeals for money by the aid organisations made it clear that these people
had just committed genocide. In accordance with the principles of humanitarian neutrality, they were
described as 'refugees from the genocide in Rwanda’, and most viewers naturally assumed they were
innocent survivors.
Kagame’s blood starts to boil when he remembers this time. 'They had armoured personnel carriers,
anti-aircraft, armouries and ammunition in the camps, and the human rights people, and the
humanitarian people, were feeding them, and telling us they were feeding refugees. And, as they very
well knew, these so-called refugees were selling most of what they were given so they could maintain
their military machine, because they wanted to come back and overthrow us.’
There were two important long-term consequences. One was that Kagame developed a deep contempt
for the international community and its claims to moral authority. The second was that his army invaded
Zaire/Congo (while he strenuously denied that an invasion was taking place). Fighting alongside a
Congolese rebel army, it scattered but did not defeat the Hutu war machine, committed a series of brutal
massacres against fleeing, unarmed Hutus (also denied, even when the mass graves were discovered),
deposed the dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, and set in motion a horrific cycle of violence, upheaval and
pillage in Congo that has been dubbed Africa’s World War. Depending on whose figures you believe, it
has caused three million, five million or seven million deaths, mostly from war-related disease and
privation.
The gravest charges against Kagame’s regime relate to the actions of his army. There is clear evidence
that the RPF committed systematic massacres of Hutus both in Rwanda when they took power, and then
in Congo. According to UN reports, the Rwandan military has also plundered some $100 million worth of
gold, diamonds, tin, coltan and other minerals from war-ravaged eastern Congo. It is not a defence of
Rwanda but a point of context to mention that eight other African nations, and a dizzying cast of
Congolese warlords, have also been fighting over the vast mineral wealth in this region.
Kagame has only this to say on the subject of Congo: 'The problems there are so enormous and many
decades old, so I think it is a mistake to say that the problem starts with Rwanda’s hand in it, and this is
where it ends. Even if we were to take Rwanda away, and put it someplace else, Congo still has a lot of
problems to contend with – corruption, bad governance, lack of effective institutions, and so on. But at
least for those problems related to us we are gradually overcoming them, and are doing so by working
very well with the Congolese.’
Regarding the RPF massacres of Hutus in Rwanda, he offers a more spirited defence, saying that it was
extremely difficult to restrain his troops, especially the new recruits who had just seen their family
members raped and butchered. 'You can imagine trying to stand between people who are so seriously
aggrieved, and having the desire to settle it because there was no justice infrastructure at that time.
Then you have the ones being accused, and some felt justified and thought they did right in killing, and
others said no, we weren’t a part of it, even if they were involved, and trying to sort all this out was
probably the most difficult thing of all.’
There were still thousands of unburied bodies when human rights activists made their first calls for free
and fair democratic elections in Rwanda. There were millions of displaced people, and a genocidal war
machine reassembling itself just across the border. There was no currency in circulation, and the trauma
of the survivors was still in the first stage of shock. 'You would look in their eyes and see a blankness,’
Kagame says. 'They were just wondering how it was possible to cope with everything they had seen.’
Some 200 humanitarian NGOs (non-governmental organisations) arrived in Rwanda to help rebuild it,
and while Kagame was grateful for the goodwill, the money and the services they could provide, he
rankled at the mixture of naivety and entitlement that came along in their cultural baggage, and threw 80
of them out because they refused to register. 'Of the rest, you would be lucky to find five in 100 that are
doing it altruistically. The others will choose for you where you should put their money, and try to control
what you do in other areas. They come here knowing almost nothing, understanding almost nothing, and
they judge and criticise and tell you what you should do. A big part of the misunderstanding is that they
expect us to be a normal country, like the ones where they are from. They do not understand that we are
operating in a very different context.’
In the Great Lakes region of Africa – Rwanda, Burundi, Congo, Uganda – it is normal for presidents to
seize power at the head of rebel armies. Ethnic violence and ethnic patronage are basic tools of politics,
and if you lose power there is a serious risk of death, imprisonment or exile, and perhaps a wave of
ethnic cleansing or genocide against your people. In Kagame’s case, his electorate is 85 per cent Hutu.
Many of them were involved in the most committed attempt at genocide that Africa has ever seen. It is
not hard to understand why his government lacks enthusiasm for genuinely free and fair elections, or
why it clamps down so hard on the slightest suggestion of ethnic politics. Nor does it ever admit
mistakes, apologise or show any other sign of weakness.
Another basic requirement for politicians in the region is to present a facade of democracy to keep the
donors happy and the aid money flowing. In this spirit, the RPF wrote a parliamentary constitution for
Rwanda after it took power. To show Rwandans and the West that they were not a military dictatorship
of Tutsi exiles, they appointed a Hutu president, Pasteur Bizimungu, and a Hutu prime minister. Kagame
was vice-president, minister of defence, general of the army, and the one who took important meetings
with foreign heads of state. Bizimungu proved obstinate, greedy and ambitious. In 2000, having resigned
while drunk in public, he was then arrested and sentenced to 15 years for divisionism. The crime was
committed in a magazine interview, in which Bizimungu predicted Hutu violence and civil war unless the
RPF started sharing power in a genuine way.
Kagame assumed the presidency. He started devouring books about Singapore, South Korea, China
and the other 'Asian Tigers’, which had managed to leap out of poverty in less than a generation by
means of disciplined, authoritarian leadership and entrepreneurial capitalism. Rwanda is a small,
landlocked, overpopulated country with few natural resources, and long, expensive trade routes. How
was it going to develop? Kagame announced an ambitious plan to turn Rwanda into the high-tech
commercial, banking and communications hub of east and central Africa by 2020.
The region is rich in resources, especially Congo, but it has been crippled by corruption, inefficiency,
political instability, poverty, disease and ignorance. Kagame’s government began tackling these
problems with a harsh, bullying, unwavering determination entirely new to the region. Government
employees were required to be at their desks by 7am, and quickly fired if they didn’t produce results. The
anti-corruption tsar was given real power, and used it zealously. The rebuilding of Rwanda’s
infrastructure and institutions, especially in health and education, has been largely financed by foreign
aid, which provided 100 per cent of the government’s budget in the immediate aftermath of the genocide,
and is now at 42 per cent. Kagame wants to reduce Rwanda’s dependency on aid, regarding it as a trap
that stifles entrepreneurship and dignity, but it has been integral to his progress so far, and for the
donors Rwanda has been a rare success story. Here at last is an African government that doesn’t
embezzle or squander the money, but uses it efficiently and gets results.
The government has also been effective at courting influential friends abroad (Clinton, Blair et al), and
bringing in foreign investment, mainly from America and China. The World Bank has named Rwanda the
top business reformer in the world, and the region’s most business-friendly country. The coffee business
is booming, thanks in no small part to Starbucks, and tourism, unimaginable after the genocide, has
grown into a $200 million a year industry. Another important part of the Rwandan economic miracle, but
hard to measure, has been the secret flow of illegal minerals from Congo.
The other African countries involved have plundered minerals for the personal enrichment of a few
individuals, with the profits banked in Switzerland or London. In Rwanda’s case, the mineral wealth
appears to have been funnelled through government channels, with most of it spent on the military, and
the rest of it helping to finance Kagame’s vision of an African Singapore.
The dream is still a long way from coming true. In Kigali there is a prosperous elite, most of them Tutsis
returned from the diaspora, and an emerging middle class, but nine out of 10 Rwandans are still
subsistence farmers. Hope rests on the generation currently in school, who are growing up with laptops
and the internet, speaking English, and moving towards the universities and the new technical colleges.
Rwandese society has always encouraged obedience to power (this is one reason why so many Hutus
followed their orders to kill Tutsis), and younger Rwandans are being pounded with exhortations to study
hard, work hard, take responsibility, be entrepreneurs.
No one is watching the Rwanda experiment more closely than other Africans. Kagame is widely admired
and respected on the continent, and considered a shoo-in for the presidency of the African Union if he
ever wants the job. But the Rwanda model is not easily replicated. It requires a Kagame, and men like
Kagame do not come along often. There has never been a shortage of autocrats in Africa, but very few
of them have been so driven and determined to better their countries, and most have concentrated on
enriching themselves and shoring up their power with patronage. Kagame has shown Africa that strong
leadership can turn a country around, and that a strong leader shows no quarter to his opponents.
He faced his first presidential election in 2003. Opposition candidates proved hard to find because the
likeliest were either in prison, dead or had fled the country. Finally the former prime minister, a Hutu
named Faustin Twagiramungu, returned from exile, announced his candidacy and made a speech
accusing Kagame of running a dictatorship. The majority-female parliament promptly voted to ban his
political party. Twagiramungu persevered, even after two of his most prominent supporters disappeared
without trace, and Kagame won 95 per cent of the vote. He insists it was a free and fair election, saying,
'You cannot blame me for the weakness of the opposition.’
Now he has another election on August 9. The government has closed down two critical newspapers,
and arrested a journalist for defamation (he compared Kagame with Hitler) and divisionism. A dissident
general has survived an assassination attempt in South Africa, and a newspaper editor who linked it to
the Rwandan government was murdered in Kigali. Two opposition parties have been prevented from
registering, and the vice-president of one, Andre Kagwa Rwisereka of the Democratic Greens, has
turned up dead from machete wounds. Political rallies have been been broken up violently by the police,
and two Hutu opposition candidates have been arrested, one for divisionism, the other, Victoire Ingabire,
for the Orwellian crime of 'genocide ideology’.
Ingabire had been living in Belgium. On returning to Rwanda to announce her candidacy, she went
straight to the genocide memorial in Kigali and asked why there was no memorial for the moderate
Hutus who were killed – her brother was one of them. She was announcing herself, in RPF eyes, as a
Hutu candidate, and challenging the government version of the genocide, which is a strict morality play
involving Hutu villains, Tutsi victims and RPF heroes. To raise questions about the RPF atrocities
against Hutus, or draw attention to the moderate Hutus who were killed, is equated under the law with
denying or diminishing the genocide.
All in all, it seems a foregone conclusion that Kagame will win re-election and remain in power for at
least another seven years. Then comes the big question. Will he abide by the Rwandan constitution,
which limits presidents to two terms? Or will he devise a reason to hold on to power for longer? Kagame
insists he will step down, and says that if there is no peaceful democratic transfer of power in 2017, his
presidency will have been a failure. He insists that Rwanda will become an increasingly open and
democratic society, but not to impress the international community, or because meddlesome foreigners
are demanding it. 'No,’ he says, 'we must do it because fundamentally we believe in it, because these
values are universal and we share them, and because it is good for us.’
Is this deceitful rhetoric, or does he really intend to open up political space once development has got
further, as the donors and many Rwandans would like to believe? Is Kagame a benevolent dictator, the
strong hand needed to pull Rwanda forward into a better future, or is he an incurable despot? If you hold
him up to the light in the right way, you can see both facets glinting at once.
© Copyright of Telegraph Media Group Limited 2011

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Paul Kagame: Rwanda's redeemer or ruthless dictator?

Paul Kagame: Rwanda's redeemer or ruthless dictator?

President Paul Kagame of Rwanda Photo: Getty Images

His eyes have a keen, piercing intelligence, and he radiates a

Like any African strongman who depends on aid from Western

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© Copyright of Telegraph Media Group Limited 2011

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