Early results show Kagame headed for landslide win

KIGALI, August 10, 2010 - Rwandan President Paul Kagame headed for a landslide victory Tuesday after early results of a presidential election gave him a seemingly unassailable lead, sparking wild celebrations in the capital.

Tens of thousands of Kagame supporters packed Kigali's main football stadium for raucous festivities combining fireworks with reggae after Monday's polls, which followed weeks of political tension marked by arrests and killings.

At daybreak revellers from Kagame's Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) were still making their way home on foot, and later there was little movement in the streets as the mountainous central African country observed a second successive public holiday.

Kagame won 92.9 percent of the votes cast in 11 out of Rwanda's 30 polling districts counted so far, Rwanda's poll chief Chrysologue Karangwa said.

His nearest challenger, Jean Damascene Ntawukuriryayo of the Social Democratic Party (PSD), was running a distant second with 4.9 percent. The other two candidates had 1.5 and 0.7 percent respectively.

A triumphant Kagame thanked the crowd for "making the right choice" after the announcement was made at the stadium.

"We will continue to work for our country to be always first," he said. "This is your victory and the victory of all Rwandan people."

Earlier in the rally officials announced Kagame had won 96.7 percent of the votes of Rwandans living abroad, sending the crowd into a frenzy.

"It feels like victory!" shouted one of the singers from the stage at the crowd packing the stands and the pitch.

Singers chanted the anthem "Victory" coined for Kagame's win in 2003 elections, when he won 95 percent of the vote.

The former rebel's supporters credit him with ending Rwanda's 1994 genocide, which claimed some 800,000 lives, and ushering in stability and growth, but critics accuse him of undermining democracy and cracking down on opponents.

Kagame insisted Monday that the election had been democratic and dismissed allegations the real opposition was de facto excluded from the vote.

There was never much doubt however that the lanky 52-year-old would be overwhelmingly re-elected, given his three challengers all came from parties close to his RPF.

Meanwhile three new parties set up to challenge his rule were excluded from the election. They denounced the poll as a sham, and his challengers as stooge candidates.

Kagame has been the de facto leader of this central African nation since his Tutsi-dominated rebel group turned political party, the RPF, routed Hutu extremists after the genocide.

"The nation he leads with Western assistance has become more efficient and neatly run than other central African countries. But we must not suppose that it is a free society," former US ambassador to Burundi Robert Krueger wrote in Foreign Policy review just ahead of the election.

Kagame's government, thanks partly to generous international funding, has turned around an economy despite few natural resources, focusing on services and new technology as well as modernising agriculture.

But critics say that is just a facade for a repressive regime.

Human Rights Watch noted that in the six months ahead of the election campaign "a worrying pattern of intimidation, harassment and other abuses" emerged.

Several senior army officers have been arrested in recent months and one general, Faustin Kayumba Nyamwasa, narrowly survived an assassination attempt in exile in South Africa.

An opposition journalist who claimed to have uncovered evidence of the regime's involvement in the attempted murder was shot dead days later.