Rwandan President Paul Kagame won a sham election on Aug. 28 with 94 percent of the vote. His nearest challenger, Fausten Twagiramungu, won 3 percent -- a reasonable result, given that the state media accused him of inciting genocide, his posters were impounded, his campaign team was arrested and his observers were intimidated into withdrawing.
Human rights groups are howling foul -- notably Amnesty International, whose American researcher was mysteriously drugged and robbed of his laptop and notes two weeks before the vote. Yet the western donors who paid for the charade, and contribute 75 percent of Kagame's budget, seem unperturbed. Can this be good for Rwanda's recovery from the 1994 genocide, when 800,000 Tutsis and Hutu moderates were butchered?
Kagame's latest abuses were not surprising. On seizing power, at the head of the Tutsi rebel army that toppled the genocidal Hutu-fascist regime, he stressed reconciliation. Tribal ID cards were abolished. Moderate Hutus, including Twagiramungu (the first post-genocide prime minister) were brought into a government of unity. But over the past few years -- roughly since Kagame signed an agreement with Britain, Rwanda's biggest donor, on improving human rights and political freedom -- the call to unity has come to justify an increasingly repressive dictatorship.
ILLUSTRATION: MOUNTAIN PEOPLE
Kagame's leading opponents all stand accused of "divisionism," a word synonymous in Rwanda with ethnic hatred. Most have fled. Others, including Pasteur Bizimungu -- a Hutu moderate who was the first post-genocide president and is still Kagame's main rival -- have been imprisoned without trial. Several dissidents have "disappeared" in recent months, according to Human Rights Watch.
Early this year, Twagiramungu's main opposition Democratic Republican Movement party was abolished, as were all independent newspapers. Civil society has been coopted or silenced, including the Tutsi genocide survivors' association, whose leader fled to Europe.
Nor are foreigners immune: the International Crisis Group (ICG) a think tank, was barred after advocating democratic reform. Human Rights Watch researchers have been labelled "genocide apologists."
These measures are not helping unity. According to ICG's offending report, "government repression is radicalizing the opposition both inside and outside Rwanda."
In the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, UN efforts to repatriate the remnants of the Hutu militia are failing, with the militiamen citing Bizimungu's imprisonment as a reason to fear returning home.
Besides justifying repression, Kagame's use of the genocide as a political tool suggests to Rwandans that only he can prevent a renewal of the genocide. It also confuses guilty western donors into thinking that his Tutsi-dominated government represents the genocide's true victims. Thus, Glenys Kinnock, a British MEP, in Kigali as an EU observer, said of his election abuses: "It's difficult for us to be too vicious in our criticism, because of what they've been through." Only an ignorance of the genocide's history allows such a view.
Rwanda's ethnic division is rooted in the efforts of small cliques in both tribes to gain power. In pre-colonial days, the tribes were best understood as political identities, with prosperous Hutus able to graduate to the ranks of the ruling Tutsi minority.
Under German and then Belgian rule, the tribal identities were fixed, with the Tutsis judged a superior race and favored accordingly. At independence, populist Hutu politicians incited the resentful majority to rise against their privileged neighbors, causing several exoduses of Tutsis to neighboring countries.
Kagame's Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) was recruited from among these refugees, invading from Uganda in 1989. Hutu-fascism was then waning, with the government of Juvenal Habyarimana improving the rights of the remaining Tutsis and negotiating on the return of refugees. The RPF invasion reversed that policy, reigniting fear of Tutsi domination and giving new life to the fascistic ideology of Hutu power.
In April 1994, Habyarimana was assassinated and the Hutu militias began exterminating Tutsis. In the chaos, the RPF was at last able to take Kigali. The UN responded miserably, evacuating half its peacekeeping force from Kigali. Yet, when it sought to redress the damage, the RPF objected, claiming that the genocide was over. In fact, it had three months to run.
As Rwanda's leader, Kagame has been exemplary in his efforts to rebuild Rwanda's devastated society. His government is an African paragon of honesty and efficiency in its spending of aid money.
Efforts to reconcile Hutus and Tutsis at village level are ongoing. But, when challenged, he resorts to the intimidatory and divisive politics that have bedeviled Rwanda's modern history. This week's election is just the latest example.
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