Book review: A scathing critique of Paul Kagame’s government

According to President Bill Clinton, Paul Kagame, his Rwandan counterpart, was “one of the greatest leaders of our time”. When he was Britain’s prime minister, David Cameron extolled Rwanda as a paragon of development. True, even Mr Kagame’s admirers admit he is ruthless, but they contend that as ruler of a once-benighted land—where in 1994 his fellow Tutsis were murdered in a genocide by Hutus, who also killed some of their own—he is on balance beneficent, even benevolent. At a minimum he is defended as “a progressive dictator”.Not if you believe even half of this book. Michela Wrong begins and ends her account with the murder of Patrick Karegeya, once a confidant of Mr Kagame as head of his foreign intelligence service, who fled from Rwanda in 2007. Seven years later his body was found, drugged and strangled, in a hotel bedroom behind the “Do Not Disturb” sign of the title. No guesses as to who Ms Wrong thinks ordered the assassination. (Mr Kagame has denied that his government was involved—but said he wished it had been.) She weaves her tale of woe in remorseless, compelling detail.

Under her scrutiny, Mr Kagame has almost no redeeming features. Brought up among Tutsi exiles in Uganda, Rwanda’s neighbour to the north, in this telling he was the school sneak, watchful and cunning, lacking in grace and jealous of those like the better-educated Karegeya who outshone him. A natural spy, he rose in the intelligence service of Yoweri Museveni, the guerrilla leader who took over Uganda in 1986 (with the help of many Tutsis) and has ruled it ever since.

Mr Kagame then shifted his focus to reconquering Rwanda. He did so with an army of Tutsis, a group that had been persecuted there since 1959 when Belgium, the colonial power, began to favour the majority Hutus. At that time the Hutus perpetrated the first of several pogroms against the Tutsis, who had once lorded it over them.

According to Ms Wrong, Mr Kagame’s venom has always been directed as much against his own Tutsis as Hutus. As a disciplinarian and enforcer, she reports, he was known to comrades as “Pilato” (after Pontius Pilate) for overseeing punishments while washing his hands of moral responsibility. She cites cases when he personally whipped commanders who displeased him and threw underlings out of the room. The list of enemies at home and abroad who have met a sticky end, one way or another, is long. Mr Kagame is depicted as a paranoid sadist and manipulative bully.

The book also argues that the official story of the genocide is simplistic. It is true that Hutu extremists murdered hundreds of thousands of Tutsis in 1994. But Ms Wrong also notes the role of Mr Kagame’s Rwandan Patriotic Front (rpf) in fomenting hatred and division in a build-up that lasted at least four years, culminating in that terrible bloodbath. She blames the rpf for a string of atrocities, amounting to many thousands of deaths, before and after the climactic three-month horror. The genocide, she observes, “was part of a process that began much, much earlier”.

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Perhaps most contentiously, she accuses the rpf of shooting down the plane that in 1994 was carrying Juvénal Habyarimana, a Hutu and then Rwanda’s president, back from a conference where a power-sharing deal had been arranged. This much-disputed deed was the starting pistol for the genocide. Could it have been carried out under Mr Kagame’s orders, when he must have known a massacre would ensue? He emphatically denies involvement; the official explanation fingers Hutu extremists. But Ms Wrong cites Karegeya saying that for Mr Kagame such a possibility “didn’t matter. He didn’t give a damn”, as long as it led to the Hutu government’s demise.

He is blasted, too, as a menace in the region. He should bear the bulk of guilt, reckons Ms Wrong, for a death toll that may reach into the millions from civil wars initiated mainly by him in Congo, across Rwanda’s western border, in the decade or so after the genocide. On paper, Rwanda’s chief aim in invading Congo in 1996 was to neutralise the Hutu génocidaires who had fled and regrouped there. But, notes Ms Wrong, plunder was also a motive.

Whatever his failings, Mr Kagame has been a past-master at the game of geopolitics. Governments in Kenya, Mozambique and South Africa have been loth to complain when his Rwandan opponents have been murdered on their soil. In 2018 Mr Kagame chaired the African Union.

He has persuaded Israel, among others, that his friendship is a must. Ms Wrong refers to a couple of Israeli firms which, she says, have played a vital part in his spyware—and in trolling his critics on social media. He remains a donors’ darling in the West. Ministers who dispense development aid have praised him, as have Bill Gates and other bigwig philanthropists. Ms Wrong wags a finger at Samantha Power, Joe Biden’s choice for head of USAID, for her “overwhelmingly sympathetic” assessment of Mr Kagame in the past.

For all that, the author writes, “the wheels are beginning to come off Rwanda’s ‘development miracle’ story”. She cites a statistician and aid pundits who reckon that Mr Kagame’s figures for Rwanda’s breakneck economic growth are routinely fiddled. Woe betide anyone, Rwandan or foreign, who dares to question them.

This massively documented and footnoted book—with “anonymity requested” by a striking number of sources—will enrage Mr Kagame and rattle his friends at home and abroad. Its thesis will be contested as unbalanced (Rwanda’s ambassador to Britain dismisses it as racist). Little space is afforded to the un-backed international criminal tribunal where the genocide and its careful planning by Hutus were unpicked in exhaustive detail. Nor does Ms Wrong mention the traditional gacaca courts, where the crimes of hundreds of thousands of Hutus were judged.

Yet her conclusions are persuasive. The notion that Tutsis and Hutus have buried their machetes to the extent that—under Mr Kagame’s benign oversight—they have dispensed with ethnic labels and think of themselves only as Rwandans is fanciful. And the longer Mr Kagame stays in charge, the likelier it is that the large-scale bloodletting and ethnic hatred he claims to have ended will burst forth again. 

This article was originally published by The Economist. [Photo: Getty Images]