His grip on power is almost unattainable. Since becoming president more than two decades ago, he has expanded constitutional term limits, shut down press freedom and cracked down on dissent. Reporters were exiled, even killed; opposition figures were jailed or found dead. His country was reduced to autocracy.
But this dictator is not an unruly man, like Russia’s Vladimir Putin or Syria’s Bashar al-Assad. Instead, he is one of the West’s best and most trusted friends: Paul Kagame, the president of Rwanda. Since coming to power in 1994, Mr. Kagame has won the hearts of the West. He has been invited to speak — on human rights, nothing more and less — at universities like HarvardYale and Oxford, and hailed by prominent political leaders including Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and former United Nations secretary-general Ban Ki-moon.
It doesn’t end there. Mr. Kagame’s Western friends include FIFA, which held its annual meeting at a posh sports complex in Kigali in March, and the NBA, whose Africa Basketball Tournament plays in Rwanda . Europe’s largest car manufacturer, Volkswagen, operates an assembly plant in Rwanda, and major international organizations such as the Gates Foundation and the World Economic Forum are close partners. Western sponsors finance a whopping 70% of Rwanda’s national budget.
But perhaps Mr. Kagame’s greatest endorsement was an agreement with the British government to receive asylum seekers expelled from England. This controversial agreement, possibly contrary to international law, has cemented Rwanda’s reputation as a steadfast partner of Western countries. Far from the existence of a dictatorship, Mr. Kagame’s Rwanda is now hailed as a haven for those fleeing the dictatorship.
Mr. Kagame owes much of his success to his skillful political rhetoric, an art form that Rwandans call “ubwenge.” In press conferences where Rwandan journalists, aware of the risks faced by less-soft colleagues, threw him light-hearted questions, Mr. Kagame shone. Usually, his target is the West. He keep speaking up an anti-imperialist message about Europe’s “violation of people’s rights” and criticism of the West’s “superior complex”.
This pose makes him the leading avatar of a new type of post-colonial ruler. Other populist nationalist presidents such as Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico and Narendra Modi of India have also lobbied their people to support similar sentiments, position themselves as world leaders no longer beholden to the West. Often, the focus of their defiant speeches is on old crimes – massacres, genocides and expropriation committed by European empires since the 16th century.
Such appeals work because Western leaders still offer only reluctant words of “regret” about such atrocities and rarely apologize, in part out of fear that other nations may not be able to do so. Their families will have to pay huge sums of money. This allows grievances to persist. Many in the former colonies still feel the humiliations of the past instinctively present, now manifest in institutions dominated by Western interests, such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, or in international aid and trade negotiations. Postcolonial leaders like Mr. Kagame are widely known for their insistence that the West should atone for its history, however unlikely that may be.
The price of avoiding apology, however, is that Western leaders see their moral authority diminished. Instead, they engage in pacifying behaviors — praise and cooperation, rather than condemnation. Perhaps nowhere is this dynamic more evident than in Rwanda, where Mr. Kagame’s leverage with Western leaders is particularly strong because of the country’s recent grievances. He is very good at guilt West, and his stabs dealt a blow to the house.
Rwanda’s 1994 genocide – in which nearly a million Rwandans, many of them ethnic Tutsis, were killed – was carried out under the noses of UN peacekeepers, who diligently filing reports of murders while seemingly powerless to stop them. Although Mr. Kagame’s former ambassador to the United States and other political allies have accused him about the genocide that “triggered” Rwanda and did little to stop it, he considered himself the hero of ending it.
In the event of criticism, Mr. Kagame’s tried-and-tested tactic is to dismiss any Western leader who dares to preach to poorer nations about democracy, human rights and the rule of law. His eloquence resonates in a world hungry for African success stories, especially in the West. Back in 2011, journalist Tristan McConnell describe How the West’s support for Mr. Kagame is motivated by “a real perceived desire to counter the image of a basket-shaped continent”. The following year, Time magazine called Mr. Kagame “the embodiment of a new Africa”.
Behind the lionization is a darker truth. Since coming to power in 1994 as commander-in-chief of the Rwandan army, and then president, Mr. Kagame has had it all. rigged electionaccounted for nearly 99 percent of the vote in 2017. Many of his opponents were disappearin some cases found murdered, in one case almost beheading. The self-proclaimed hero who is credited with ending the genocide in Rwanda is also commanding an army that the United Nations accuses of being responsible kill tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of Hutus and for potential acts of “genocide” following the two invasions of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Regardless of the historical record, however, Mr. Kagame creates an alternate reality in which the West is to blame for his country’s ills and he is its brave champion. This anti-imperialist narrative outweighs reports of dissidents and journalists being harassed, jailed or forced into exile. Hard to get accurate information about the country doesn’t help either: Mr. Kagame bans criticism from foreign reporters, ensuring that international media often repeat government propaganda.
The desire for postcolonial leaders to stand up to the West is understandable, rooted in the way imperialism continues to structure relationships between former colonies and colonial powers. old land. Justice for colonial crimes will also be welcomed by many around the world, even if it is unlikely to happen anytime soon. At the very least, Western leaders – starting with Britain – should do something simple and stop rewarding autocrats like Mr. Kagame.
