Rwanda’s hardened reformer moves forward despite growing criticism
Rwanda has overcome the legacy of its horrific 1994 genocide to become one of Africa’s most successful developing nations. Elisa Nabel, a Harvard senior who spent a year in Rwanda, attested, “You can see how everyone is so eager to get the country running.” In an oft-told narrative, the man behind Rwanda’s progress is President Paul Kagame, who is entering his tenth year at the helm following a largely uncontested re-election. Kagame has overseen annual GDP growth of 8 percent, spurred by new initiatives to attract foreign investment and regional integration.
But many international groups see in Kagame nothing less than a dictator. Citing the silencing and even killing of opposition leaders, Alan Kuperman, a professor of public affairs at the University of Texas, told the HPR that the Rwandan president is “a genocidal dictator, the next Mugabe.” There is no doubt that Kagame has succeeded in bringing stability and economic growth to a country torn apart by ethnic violence. But it will be important to see how far Kagame is willing to go in curtailing the rights of opposition groups, suppressing free speech, and intimidating his opponents, in order to judge the ultimate value of the balance he has struck.
Toughness and Progress
Despite his reformer image, Kagame is anything but mild in his political methods. Charles Landow, associate director of the Civil Society, Markets, and Democracy Initiative at the Council on Foreign Relations, told the HPR, “There were indications of increased tensions in the uneasy political climate before last month’s presidential election, when some opposition figures were killed and some opponents were prevented from challenging him.”
There have also been attempts to control the media. Landow pointed to Rwanda’s “genocide ideology law,” which “prohibits any speech construed as promoting ethnic divisions.” Many believe, said Landow, that the law “is overly broad, allowing the government to go after not just dangerous hate speech but also peaceful opposition.” In the past few years, the Kagame government has used the law to chase Umuseso and Umuvugizi, two popular, occasionally critical newspapers, out of the Rwandan media.
Freedom vs. Security
Still, Kagame has his defenders. Stephen Kinzer, author of A Thousand Hills: Rwanda’s Rebirth and the Man Who Dreamed It, said in an interview with the HPR that “every society has to strike some balance between freedom and security.” He continued, “It is an especially difficult balance to strike in Rwanda. The last time there was a majority rule, the majority massacred the minority.” Kinzer concluded, “The government would argue that limiting some forms of speech reduces the possibility for another explosion of violence.”
Kagame coasted to 93 percent of the vote in his bid for a third term, but international observers have hardly been indignant over this outcome. Phil Clark, a research fellow in courts and public policy at the University of Oxford, told the HPR that “many Hutu would have voted for Kagame completely uncoerced this year because of the widespread peace he has achieved.”
Rwanda’s first truly effective president, Kagame has largely ended interethnic violence and given genocide victims a forum to seek justice and compensation in government-authorized courts. In a country that takes autocracy for granted, a successful Kagame may be worth sacrificing for.
A Vision of Rwanda
Rwanda’s “Vision 2020” policy agenda speaks of a country in which individuals are plugged into the global infrastructure of communication and trade. Kagame imagines a Rwanda that can be self-reliant and develop without foreign aid. Kinzer added, “Some donor governments consider Rwanda one of the most effective users of foreign aid, the least likely to waste aid money or allow it to be stolen.”
Still, more democratic models for African reform have taken hold in Ghana and Botswana. And Kuperman credits much of Rwanda’s recent success to abiding trends in geography and climate, in particular its lack of tropical disease and its high population density. For the time being, Rwandans seem to have accepted suboptimal levels of political freedom in the name of progress; they are hardly the first or the only ones.
Kagame is said to admire the limited democratic models of Singapore and South Korea, where economic competence is valued over political liberty. As the world observes and judges Rwanda, they will find a country tenuously balancing its need for stability and growth against the virtues of open democracy.
Jimmy Wu ’13 is the Circulation Manager and Joshua Lipson ’14 is a Contributing Writer.
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