Please give Kagame a break, Rwanda is no ‘normal’ country

There was nothing to be surprised about by Rwandan President Paul Kagame’s crushing re-election victory last week, nor the wave of Western media coverage that suggested the 90 per cent-plus margin of victory was somehow suspect.

There has been a string of critical reports implying that Kagame is a typical African dictator. His decision to bar a Hutu presidential aspirant, Victoire Ingabire, and an earlier move to shut down two vernacular newspapers have been cited as proof.

I know a bit about Rwanda and, in these two cases, I think the Western “liberal” commentators are wrong. To put it simply, Rwanda is not a normal country. The spectacular economic achievements Kagame has scored have been the easy part.

The real problem that he must grapple with is entirely different. In 1994, 800,000 Rwandans (mainly Tutsi) were murdered in modern Africa’s most horrific genocide. It happened in only three months.

Losing roughly a tenth of the population in so short a period is a trauma hardly any other country has experienced in recent centuries. Russia rightfully can never forget the 20 million lives lost during World War II. Yet the proportion of the dead to that country’s population was much less than in Rwanda’s case.

Again, Russia was in war with a foreign enemy. In Rwanda’s case the demons were within.

The first utterance of Ms Ingabire when she returned from overseas to contest the presidency was that her Hutu people had been unjustly burdened with the guilt for the genocide. The banned vernacular newspapers had been insinuating the same.

I suppose Ms Ingabire is not a committed genocidaire at heart. But her none-too-subtle attempts to play the Hutu card could very well be the beginning of something more slippery and dangerous.

Rwanda’s tragic history means the Hutu-versus-Tutsi politics of old cannot be an option.

The tricky part for Kagame has been to engineer a new country and a new politics where this divide and its terrifying consequences are buried forever.

The problem is that there is no knowing whether this political engineering is working or will succeed. Chances are that the demons are still lurking there somewhere, waiting for a careless rabble-rouser to unleash them.

It would be irresponsible of Kagame or anybody in his position to allow a situation which brings back this awful past.

Allowing an ethnic-based campaign as other “normal” countries are comfortable with is not a luxury Rwanda can afford, even if this means Kagame disregarding the “democratic” niceties his critics are trumpeting. The wounds are too raw.

Sixty-five years after the end of World War II, the victors have never quite allowed Germany to become a normal country. And here we are, talking about Rwanda like it is a normal country a mere 16 years after the genocide.

Try and imagine a contemporary German politician campaigning on a platform that the Nazis have been wrongly vilified all these years. What would our Western commentators say?

Though the margin of Kagame’s electoral victory was almost certainly not cooked up (independent monitors affirm the vote was clean), I suspect the Hutu majority did not vote for him because they particularly like him.

They did so either for appearances’ sake, or because they knew going the tempting way pointed by the likes of Ingabire would open a gulf into the unknown.

They looked into this unknown and stepped back. In short, the Hutus found themselves – for their own sakes – with no option but to vote Kagame back.

Something, in the end, will have to give, whether Kagame likes it or not.

Foreign minister Louise Mushikiwabo recently made a remarkable admission: that Rwanda will not remain imprisoned by the genocide forever. But, for the country to be freed, the Hutu leadership must play its part. That role must be a constructive one.