His grip on energy is almost unassailable. Since changing into president over 20 years in the past, he has prolonged constitutional time period limits, shut down the free press and clamped down on dissent. Reporters have been pushed into exile, even killed; opposition figures have been imprisoned or discovered useless. His nation has been diminished to tyranny.
However this dictator isn’t a pariah, like Vladimir Putin of Russia or Bashar al-Assad of Syria. As an alternative, he’s one of many West’s finest and most dependable mates: Paul Kagame, president of Rwanda. Since coming to energy in 1994, Mr. Kagame has received his method into the West’s good graces. He’s been invited to talk — on human rights, no much less — at universities equivalent to Harvard, Yale and Oxford, and praised by distinguished political leaders together with Invoice Clinton, Tony Blair and the previous U.N. common secretary Ban Ki-moon.
It doesn’t finish there. Mr. Kagame’s Western mates embody FIFA, which held its annual congress at a shiny sports activities complicated in Kigali in March, and the N.B.A., whose African Basketball League performs in Rwanda. Europe’s largest carmaker, Volkswagen, runs an meeting plant in Rwanda, and main worldwide organizations such because the Gates Basis and the World Financial Discussion board are shut companions. Western donors finance a whopping 70 % of Rwanda’s nationwide price range.
However maybe Mr. Kagame’s biggest endorsement is a take care of the British authorities to obtain asylum seekers deported from Britain. This controversial cut price, which can contravene worldwide regulation, has cemented Rwanda’s repute as a steadfast companion of Western nations. Removed from the authoritarian holdout it’s, Mr. Kagame’s Rwanda is now hailed as a haven for folks fleeing dictatorship.
Mr. Kagame owes a lot of his success to his expert political rhetoric, an artwork type Rwandans name “ubwenge.” In information conferences the place Rwandan journalists, conscious of the dangers confronted by much less pliant colleagues, throw him softball questions, Mr. Kagame shines. Usually, his goal is the West. He persistently voices an anti-imperialist message about how Europe is “violating folks’s rights” and berates the West’s “superiority complicated.”
This posture makes him a number one avatar of a brand new sort of postcolonial ruler. Different populist nationalist presidents equivalent to Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico and Narendra Modi of India additionally rally their populations behind related sentiments, elevating themselves as world leaders now not beholden to the West. Usually on the coronary heart of their defiant speeches are references to previous crimes — massacres, genocides and expropriations dedicated by European empires that date again so far as the sixteenth century.
Such appeals work as a result of Western leaders nonetheless provide solely grudging “regrets” for such atrocities and infrequently apologize, partly out of concern that their nations must cough up big sums in reparations. This permits the grievances to reside on. Many in former colonies nonetheless really feel these previous humiliations as viscerally current, manifest at present in establishments which can be dominated by Western pursuits, such because the World Financial institution and the Worldwide Financial Fund, or in worldwide commerce and assist negotiations. Postcolonial leaders equivalent to Mr. Kagame discover a lot recognition of their insistence that the West ought to atone for its historical past, nevertheless unbelievable that may be.
The value of avoiding apologies, although, is that Western leaders discover their ethical authority diminished. As an alternative, they interact in placatory behaviors — providing reward and partnership, moderately than condemnation. Maybe nowhere is that this dynamic clearer than in Rwanda, the place Mr. Kagame’s leverage with Western leaders is especially robust as a result of the nation’s grievances are latest. He’s very adept at guilt-tripping the West, and his jabs hit house laborious.
Rwanda’s 1994 genocide — throughout which practically a million Rwandans, a lot of them ethnic Tutsis, had been killed — was perpetrated below the noses of United Nations peacekeepers, who diligently filed experiences on the killings whereas seemingly impotent to forestall them. Though Mr. Kagame’s former ambassador to the USA and different political allies have accused him of “sparking” Rwanda’s genocide and doing little to forestall it, he has solid himself because the hero who ended it.
Within the occasion of criticism, Mr. Kagame’s tried-and-tested tactic is to rebut any Western chief who has the temerity to sermonize to poorer nations about democracy, human rights and the rule of regulation. His rhetoric resonates in a world determined for African success tales, not least within the West. Again in 2011, the journalist Tristan McConnell described how Western help for Mr. Kagame was pushed by “a genuinely felt want to combat the picture of a basket-case continent.” The 12 months after, Time journal referred to as Mr. Kagame “the embodiment of a brand new Africa.”
Behind the lionization lies a darker reality. Since taking energy in 1994 as commander in chief of the Rwandan navy, and later as president, Mr. Kagame has all however rigged elections, taking virtually 99 % of the vote in 2017. Lots of his opponents have disappeared, in some instances discovered murdered, in a single case just about beheaded. The self-styled hero who supposedly ended the Rwandan genocide was additionally answerable for a military that the U.N. has alleged was accountable for killing tens, maybe a whole bunch of hundreds of Hutus and for potential acts of “genocide” after twice invading the Democratic Republic of Congo.
But irrespective of the historic file, Mr. Kagame creates an alternate actuality wherein the West is accountable for his nation’s ills and he’s its courageous champion. This anti-imperialist narrative trumps experiences of dissidents and journalists being harassed, imprisoned or pressured into exile. It doesn’t assist that correct details about the nation is difficult to come back by: Mr. Kagame bans crucial overseas reporters, making certain that the worldwide media typically repeats authorities propaganda.
The starvation for postcolonial leaders who stand as much as the West is completely comprehensible, rooted within the ways in which imperialism continues to construction relations between former colonies and former colonial powers. Justice for colonial-era crimes can be welcome to many on this planet, too, even whether it is unlikely to come back anytime quickly. On the very least, Western leaders — starting in Britain — ought to do one thing easy and cease rewarding authoritarians like Mr. Kagame.
