Rwanda, Then and Now

Eduardo del Buey
Foto: Afp
La Jornada Maya

Martes 9 de abril, 2019

Twenty-five years ago, Rwanda suffered a tremendous human tragedy. From April until mid-July 1994, over 800,000 Rwandans were massacred in a fit of intercommunal violence between the majority Hutus and minority Tutsis.

The victims were mostly Tutsis along with moderate Hutus and minority Twa people. The vast majority were hacked to death with machetes by radical Hutu elements bent on eliminating Tutsis and Twa.

The international community was nowhere to be found.

The small contingent of United Nations peacekeepers under the command of Canadian Lieutenant General Romeo Dallaire were ordered to not intervene by United Nations Headquarters. As well, most of its Rwandan staff were killed early on, and this hindered the UN force’s ability to intervene.

Then U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali reportedly warned general Dallaire that the global community would not tolerate the deaths of 450 peacekeepers. Yet, as stated above, over 800,000 Rwandans were murdered while the world watched.

General Dallaire tried to help as many people as possible but, given the small size of the contingent and his orders from U.N. headquarters, he was unable to legally or safely act. The best that his troops could do was to protect a few thousand Tutsi and Hutu refugees at its headquarters and other UN bases and assist in the evacuation of foreign nationals.

The massacre finally came to an end when the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a guerrilla group under the command of Paul Kagame and based in neighboring Uganda finally defeated Hutu forces in Kigali at the end of July of that year.

Throughout, the international community played a miserable role in this disgusting tragedy.

France had traditionally supported the Hutu. An investigation by a French Parliamentary Commission accused France of “military cooperation against a background of ethnic tensions, massacres and violence" (New York Times February 9, 2013). This past month, French President Emmanuel Macron ordered a two-year government investigation into the French government’s role in the massacre. While it’s easy to criticize French actions now, a two-year investigation twenty-five years later changes nothing.

The U.S. Clinton Administration, still smarting from its ignoble departure from Somalia in 1993, was unwilling to become involved in what was felt to be just another African tragedy. President Clinton told advisors that U.S. forces would not participate in humanitarian missions that did not have direct bearing on U.S. interests. He later expressed his regret that the U.S. did nothing to stop this massacre. Again, it was too little, too late.

At that time, I was Departmental Spokesperson for Latin America and Africa at the Canadian Foreign Ministry. Day after day we received the reports of the ongoing terrible massacre, and dealt with Canadian media asking what Canada could do to stop the tragedy. The answer was an unfortunate “nothing”. Canada is not a military power, and the presence of one Canadian general in a small United Nations contingent could not stand in the way of the perpetrators.

However professional we sought to be at the office, each night when I returned home the extent of the tragedy would hit home. I could not conceive of tens of thousands of human beings being hacked to death weekly by other human beings simply for their ethnicity.

Then I remembered other massacres and the Holocaust, and understood that human nature can, in the moment, ignore high levels of unfathomable cruelty. Africa has been the scene of countless inhuman military and civilian campaigns. Europe has had the Holocaust, the pogroms of Eastern Europe, the religious wars of the 17th century, the Spanish Civil War, and the massacres in Bosnia. Man’s inhumanity to man shone through these sickening events.

We view Rwanda through the prism of history and cringe at our ability to turn away from human cruelty and mass murder.

Yet today, hundreds of thousands are being massacred in Syria, Yemen, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, while global leaders and people everywhere wring their hands in frustration at not being able to end the violence in those countries.

While the exodus of millions of refugees has been met with generosity by many, it has also created significant political problems on Europe with the result that many governments are retreating behind the walls of nationalism. Indeed, one of the reasons why the European Union seems to be diminishing in its unity is the unwillingness of many countries to accept these refugees.

Is there any hope?

Rwanda provides some hope indeed.

After the RPF took power under Kagame, the new government sought to erase ethnic labels from its political lexicon. Kagame has turned into an autocratic leader and has passed laws against ethnic divisionism and genocide ideology but has used them to exert strong control over society. Given Rwanda’s past, Kagame appears to have been given a pass by a guilt-ridden international community for his autocratic leadership.

In 2008 and 2009 I visited Rwanda and managed a Commonwealth media relations seminar with a group of experts to train Rwandan journalists in how to cover politics. We invited journalists from other states that had had similar problems (such as Sierra Leone) to share their experiences about how they had created a professional space for themselves after years of civil war and accompanying carnage. The Rwandan journalists appeared awed by their suggestions, noting that doing similar work in Rwanda could lead to unfortunate consequences. Consequently, Rwandan journalists self-censor their work to this day.

While democratization is not working in Rwanda, ethnic violence has disappeared and today it is a peaceful country with strong economic growth. According to many reports, Rwanda is one of Africa’s least corrupt countries and ranked 8th in the world in Transparency International’s 2017 Corruption Perceptions Index.

Indeed, after the events of 1994, Rwanda has become the poster child for Africa in terms of economic growth and investment potential. According to Forbes, the country currently finances about 84 percent of its budget from domestic funds – up from 36 percent twenty years ago. Forbes reports that “The reforms have for the last two decades addressed challenges that have often kept investors up at night. Steps that are cumbersome in countries across the world, such as business registration, were eased to a six-hour activity, while tax declaration and registration were simplified to online processes”.

Impressive in a neighborhood in which corruption is often rampant and mismanagement is everywhere.

Rwanda provides a model for development based on an autocratic government with an autocratic leader. It is an illiberal democracy trying to overcome the trauma of a vicious past. Its leader focuses on education and technological development and plans to make Rwanda the hub of African technology and connectivity. Kagame has done away with ethnic rivalries and brought Rwandans together.

His main objective is to ensure that the 60 percent of its population who were born after the genocide do not slide back into ethnic divisions after he is gone. This is the great hope which he uses to justify his leadership style during a delicate time in the country’s history.

As many know from my writings, I am a liberal democrat convinced that liberal democracy is the best system of governance. Indeed, Germany, Korea, and Japan were able to leave their tragic histories of dictatorship and mass violence behind and become liberal democracies with full respect for human and political rights.

While Kagame has created a social and economic miracle in twenty-five years, much remains to be accomplished in setting up the democratic institutions capable of surviving after he is gone.

In this way, the institutions he puts in place will help maintain hope for his country to avoid future conflicts and continued prosperity.

This should be Kagame’s focus while he still governs. To ensure that his legacy is to leave a country capable of being governed by others in peace and tranquility.

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