The man who brought Rwanda back

By Bella English Globe Staff / August 16, 2008

 

A Thousand Hills: Rwanda's Rebirth and the Man Who Dreamed It
By Stephen Kinzer
Wiley, 380 pp., $25.95

As the world knows, the tiny African country of Rwanda in 1994 was the scene of one of the swiftest and bloodiest genocides in history: Some 800,000 people - 10 percent of the population - were slaughtered in the space of 100 days, most of them hacked with machetes or beaten with clubs. While the United Nations refused to intervene, the Rwandan Patriotic Front, a shadowy rebel army, defeated the government militia and stopped the killings.

The Hutu genocidaires did more than kill their fellow countrymen; they in effect killed their country. They looted vaults, burned down schools, churches, stores, and homes, and murdered much of the professional class that had helped make the country run: judges, professors, doctors, even the prime minister who had counseled peace.

Since then, it has fallen largely on one man to bring Rwanda back to life: its president, Paul Kagame, the enigmatic RPF general who grew up in exile. In "A Thousand Hills," journalist Stephen Kinzer, a former foreign correspondent for The New York Times, profiles the man and his vision for Rwanda, which Kagame fled during a Tutsi pogrom when he was 2 years old.

Though many books have been written about Rwanda, Kinzer's is the one that, through extensive interviews with the president, his supporters, and his detractors, captures the elusive essence of Kagame. It is through the president's keen eyes that the reader sees the country, the genocide, and its aftermath. Authoritarian and ambitious, Kagame is a complex man who, with limited means but limitless vision, is resurrecting his homeland.

Kinzer gives Kagame's critics a voice, and they describe human-rights abuses, a curtailing of press freedom, a one-party state, and a strict police presence everywhere. The author also allows Kagame to respond to the charges, and many of his arguments make sense in the fragile country where genocidaires still wait hungrily across the border.

The story of post-genocide Rwanda and its leader is all the more impressive when compared with its neighbors' recent troubles: the chaos in the Congo, the recent violence in Kenya, the bloody dictatorship in Zimbabwe, the genocide in Darfur. Certain political leaders emerge at critical junctures in their nation's history, Lincoln, Churchill, Gandhi, and Mandela among them. In Kinzer's view, Kagame is the man who is going to determine whether Rwanda can fully emerge from its horrific past and take its place as an African gem. The goal is ambitious and has never been achieved in Africa: taking a country from abject poverty and genocide to a middle-class mecca in a generation. It's clear that Kinzer believes if anyone can do it, Kagame can.

With a journalist's eye for detail and a historian's understanding of context, Kinzer provides a compelling account of the enmity between Hutu and Tutsi since colonial times and the political machinations of a murderous regime bent on exterminating every single Tutsi. He also offers a fascinating behind-the-scenes history of the secret rebel army in exile and the brilliant strategy that led to the government militia's defeat.

In the book, many people and institutions come in for valid criticism, including the colonial powers, the Hutu fanatics, the United States, the UN, and the Catholic Church in Rwanda, whose priests Kinzer says often collaborated with the regime. But Kinzer saves much of his bile for the French, whom the Rwandan government has accused of arming and training the genocidaires. The French, writes Kinzer, helped the genocidaires escape the advancing rebels and offered asylum to the massacre's top architects.

The most remarkable thing about Rwanda today is, as Kinzer notes, the reconciliation between survivors and perpetrators. "Reconciliation" is the unofficial government motto, for Kagame - and the rest of the citizenry - know how easily another genocide could occur. The government has turned to the gacaca, or traditional village hearing, for the mass of cases. Kinzer, like most outsiders, can't fathom the ability of so many Rwandans to forgive those who raped and killed their loved ones. Those he interviewed explain it in spiritual terms: It's what God wants. The subtext is that it's also what Kagame wants.

Is Paul Kagame a savior or a semi-dictator? Will he be able to effect a Rwandan miracle?

"If Kagame can achieve half of what he has set out to do, he will go down in African history," Kinzer writes. "If he can achieve it all, leaders of every poor country on earth will look to Rwanda for lessons, and bands of angels will sing in heaven."

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