South Africa’s recent expulsion of three Rwandan diplomats for their involvement in the murder and attempted murder of political dissidents is yet another troubling instance of President Kagame’s willingness to use violence to silence his critics. In December 2010 Rwandan agents were suspected of attacking an exiled journalist in Kampala, shortly after another critical journalist had been murdered inside Rwanda. This violence followed a failed assassination against former army chief of staff, Faustin Kayumba Nyamwasa – the intended target of the recent attack in South Africa, and a survivor of two previous assassination attempts. Other attacks linked to Kigali include the 1998 murder of a former Interior Minister and the disappearance of a senior judge in 2003.
Not even the long shadow of Rwanda’s genocide can conceal President Kagame’s dictatorial instincts, his obsession with exterminating Hutu forces in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and his unwillingness to countenance credible political opposition at home. Once seen as an heroic military leader who stopped the 1994 genocide almost singlehandedly, Kagame has proved to be a classic strongman with the customary disdain for democratic politics. When asked about the murder of his former spy chief Patrick Karegeya, who was found strangled in a Johannesburg hotel room two months ago, Kagame denied involvement but told his interviewer that he wished he had been responsible the killing. He has also warned that “Anyone who betrays our cause or wishes our people ill will fall victim” –– presumably to a similar sort of plausibly deniable violence.
What has happened in Rwanda bodes ill for several other parts of the world. Not only because of Kagame’s misrule but because of the many warning signs that were ignored before the genocide. In 1990, following an attack from the Rwandan Patriotic Front (Kagame’s rebels, then based in Uganda) the Rwandan government responded, according to the American historian Alison Des Forges, “with the first of a series of massacres of Tutsi civilians, killing hundreds at the commune of Kibilira. Over the next three years, there would be another 15 such massacres before the genocide of 1994 began.” The international community’s failure to learn from this is painfully evident in the current mayhem in the Central African Republic where roving Christian mobs, eerily similar to the Interahamwe, have reportedly killed as many as 2,000 Muslim civilians in Bangui since December.
After the horrors in Kigali, senior international diplomats devised a thoughtful strategy for early interventions in similar conflicts, and called the ensuing doctrine the Responsibility to Protect. Sadly, this has proved almost useless in the face of the complex military and political calculations which subsequent civil conflicts have demanded. Syria’s Byzantine factional struggles, for example, are further complicated by the fear that President Assad’s defeat will likely result in a genocide against the Alawite community which has supported his family for decades. In most of these situations it has proved more expedient for the West to put up with dictators rather than gamble on the chaos that might result from their sudden removal.
In 2001, after examining the limits of the humanitarian response to the Rwandan genocide, Alan Kuperman, an analyst for the Brookings Institution concluded that the 1994 genocide “and several other recent cases demonstrate that massive ethnic violence can be inflicted faster than the West can learn of it and deploy intervention forces to stop it. Thus if the West relies mainly on military intervention to prevent genocide and ethnic cleansing, it is doomed to failure.” Kuperman also noted, presciently, that the West’s unwillingness to deploy sufficiently robust preventive forces ought to make it wary of “coercive diplomacy against ethnically stratified states intended to compel rulers to surrender power overnight.” He warned that “ill-conceived Western diplomacy based mainly on the threat of economic sanctions or bombing” had often provoked local rulers to “inflict massive violence rather than hand over power or territory to lifelong enemies.” Brought to power by the terrible events born of these miscalculations, President Kagame has repeatedly shown the limits of a comprehensive military solution to the problems of genocide and ethnic cleansing, and his longstanding intolerance for political critics shows how far Rwanda still has to travel, with or without Western assistance, on the long road to democracy.
