Kigali, Rwanda March 31st 2011
Soldiers with guns are something a traveller will become used to in Africa. They are not exactly comforting but are easy to ignore. In Rwanda, which prides itself—with some justification—on being non-corrupt, soldiers in the streets of the capital, Kigali, have tended to add to the sense of security in this orderly country.
But there is something different this time—the soldiers stationed every 100 yards downtown and at just about every intersection in the city, standing, mute, with their machine guns. This is new, something that has happened in the last year which saw grenade attacks in the capital and a disputed election in which the president, Paul Kagame, won 93% of the vote—a margin of victory that puts any leader in dictator territory.
Political space has been closing in Rwanda for some time although in the last election the government dropped the pretence of being even handed—opposition candidates were openly harassed and most dropped out, were barred from running or were jailed. Former regime insiders are continuing to defect and seek asylum abroad—many who do so are targeted for assassination by Rwanda’s über efficient intelligence service. Three weeks ago several exiled senior army commanders, all previous allies of the president—one of whom escaped an assassination attempt in Johannesburg last year—were sentenced, in absentia, to long jail terms by a military court, charged with promoting “ethnic division”.
Ethnic division—this is a code word for virtually anyone who challenges the government which has become more narrowly based and less tolerant of dissent. Rwanda experienced a genocide of its Tutsi population 16 years ago and its current, de facto, Tutsi rulers are loath to give up—or share—power and trust in the good intentions of their fellow non Tutsi citizens. Officially, ethnicity does not even exist although in reality it is the one great unspoken but burning issue in the country. Ethnic reconciliation has not been achieved between Hutu and Tutsi and many see in the current government’s overwhelming control reminders of the country’s historical Tutsi supremacy—in fact a cycle of alternating Hutu and Tutsi control that has been at the heart of Rwandan politics for decades, including waves of ethnic violence, culminating in the 1994 genocide.
The genocide is something the current government, to its credit, stopped and has since made honest effort to achieve justice for survivors and the many tens of thousands of perpetrators. But the genocide is also something the government has failed to provide real closure to—its own political legitimacy and historical purpose is too closely tied up with the genocide to actually move past it.
There is some element of victor’s justice to the government’s tight control over historical narrative, a story in which it is not entirely blameless. Defensiveness marks much of it’s discourse with the outside world and with its own citizens. The state press—there doesn’t seem to be any other—is full of angry op-ed articles denouncing genocide denialism in one form or another. There are, indeed, genocide deniers—exiled Hutu genocidaires and sympathisers for one, but also a few odd-ball western academics who embrace revisionist history. A more serious, and valid, criticism of the government concerns its own responsibility for human rights abuses in the course of the war against the ex-genocidal regime, both at home and in the subsequent wars it pursued with them in the Congo. Yet another UN report released in the last year regarding massacres of Hutu refugees in the course of the Congo wars at the hands of the Rwandan army has produced predictable outrage from the government. At some point opposition to genocide denialism has been conflated with rejection of criticism from any quarter and on any topic. The current government sits in an historical and intellectual bunker of its own making. Even Rwanda’s Tutsis are no longer entirely comfortable with it.
People are reluctant to speak openly about the topic of ethnicity, at least in public, although that is now true of many things in Rwanda. One recent political conversation with acquaintances in a popular Kigali restaurant led to lowered voices and nervous glances. There is political surveillance in Rwanda and it is very efficient. Foreigners are not immune—the government keeps tabs on friendly and non friendly journalists; it even arrested an American lawyer recently who had acted for the defence in a genocide trial.
So is this remarkable, postage stamp sized, country an African success story or a powder keg about to explode? Evidence for both can be found easily enough. In its favour the government is relatively uncorrupt, economically competent and is taking advantage of its opportunities—growth is strong and poverty is falling. Official goals are ambitious: to remake this over crowded country—with the highest population density on the continent—into some kind of African Singapore. It invests heavily in information technology, infrastructure and education and welcomes foreign investment. Superficially at least, signs of prosperity in the capital are obvious.
The other side of the adopted Singapore model is tight political control and top down planning in an authoritarian state. Plastic bags are banned in Rwanda—your luggage is even searched on entering the country. Overnight English was made the official language at the expense of French, with little or no public debate. Billboards in the capital promote official goals, whether combating corruption or exhorting the population to be entrepreneurial. The streets are clean, perhaps even too clean and orderly. Directives from on high, together with the regimented environment, create the sense of an Orwellian state. The press, which is state owned or controlled, makes little attempt to avoid sounding like government propaganda; one magazine carries as its tag line the truly scary statement: “You buy the truth we pay the price”.
At the centre of all this stands Rwanda’s enigmatic president Paul Kagame. An austere, rail thin man, he is a highly intelligent politician who can match wits with world leaders and discuss global affairs and development policy comfortably at international forums—the epitome, it would seem, of a modernising African leader. This month he has earned notoriety for backing the western no fly zone in Libya, almost the only African leader to do so, the rest, sticking firmly to the doctrine of non-intervention in their own domestic affairs.
He also directs a government that has increasingly become a one man show. Many former colleagues have fallen out with him and, as there is no room for them at home, invariably they have gone into exile. Even there they are vulnerable to assassination. Those who are a challenge or fall into disfavour at home can be assured of being investigated for fraud and corruption or suddenly finding previously unknown skeletons in their closet related to the genocide.
Kagame’s twin life influences are the genocide and his coming of age in exile as a guerrilla commander. The child of parents who fled Rwanda in 1960 during a pogrom against Tutsis in which 150,000 people were killed, he grew up in a refugee camp in Uganda, eventually rising to prominence as a rebel commander at the head of the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF), the armed movement that toppled Rwanda’s last Hutu government, and ended the genocide. The genocide and the disciplined approach to running an effective rebel army are things he is not, apparently, able to leave behind. Many consider him to be a brilliant but cunning figure.
One could still plausibly claim that this is the best government Rwanda has ever had—disciplined, ambitious, trying—desperately—to move this country with few resources into the 21st century. Compared with the mediocre, economically incompetent or genocidal regimes that proceeded it, the current austere administration is positively virtuous.
But there is a fatal flaw at the core of this regime, something that will, as with any authoritarian government anywhere, lead to its own rot, corruption and downfall. It is not loved by its own people—regardless of whether what it does being ostensibly for their own benefit. It rules on a throne of bayonets, something Napoleon said cannot be done indefinitely.
Normally leaving the safety and order of Rwanda for the chaos of the Congo produces a sense of foreboding. This time is different. The control and self-censorship that permeates life in Rwanda, combined with the realisation that all is not as it appears and all is not well, begins to make the Congo’s anarchic freedoms almost attractive. Crossing the border at Gisenyi into Goma feels like coming home. The beautiful and exuberant Congolese live in a ridiculous, shambolic country—but at least they all know that and no one pretends otherwise.
This is a really interesting read, brilliantly written.
I suppose as most things do, it makes me think of the reduction of the political to the personal, and I imagine people rather than systems of governance. Anarchic and self-aware versus the self-censoring rectitude of virtuous comportment. There’s room, necessity, even, for both, but it makes for a compelling polemic–how would the reader choose to live? To which God pray, Dionysius or Apollo?