Argue with the President of Rwanda

[Tale]

He's here: http://twitter.com/PaulKagame

He monitors Twitter for smacktalk about Rwanda and he'll tell u 2 stfu bc ur wrong. Story: http://bit.ly/kTltRJ

[Sheepherder]

The guy in charge of the UN mission in Rwanda wrote a book in 2004 about the massacre.  Kagame (then the rebel commander) comes across as a pretty fucking ruthless dude.

[Teleku]

Kagame is interesting.  He's effectively a dictator (they have elections, he just wins them all every time with all the votes), but by and large a benevolent dictator.  He's done a lot for Rwandas development since he took over, taking it from a war torn genocidal mess to one of the top success stories in Africa.  I can confirm that the vast majority of people I met love him as well (business's have his picture hanging over the front desk everywhere...).

But yeah, he was rather hardcore, but that shouldn't be surprising from a guy who was leading an African rebel movement.  I can also kind of forgive actions he took during the genocide.  A fanatical Hutu militia seized control of the government and started mass murdering hundreds of thousands of his people.  He lead the invasion of the country that fought them and eventually drove them out, stopping the genocide.  Killing the fuck out of people who were in the middle of committing mass slaughter (and chasing them into the jungles of the Congo) is kind of an understandable reaction, even if many other innocents where probably killed in the process.  Doesn't justify innocents getting killed, but in the context of the situation, its not hard to understand why.

[Sheepherder]

I was referring more to the fact that he admitted to General Daillaire that he was writing off the population of Kigali after the genocide began because a major push in that sector didn't fit with his strategic plan of hammering the fuck out of the hardliner's home towns in the hopes that they would rush in to save their loot and get fucking wrecked by the RPF laying in ambush.

[Teleku]

Err, that's what I was talking about as well.  Concentrating on killing assholes first, saving people second.

[Tale]

I think you should argue with him about it on Twitter.

[Teleku]

If only we can get Kagame to tweet "I'm n your base, killing ur dudes."   

[lamaros]

Dude who wrote we wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families made him seem pretty switched on.

[Khaldun]

I like the book, but Gourevitch has long been accused of being a dupe (or knowing publicist) of Kagame.

Leaving aside the pretty much undebatable fact that Kagame ordered a counter-genocide in Congo and that he and Museveni (president of Uganda) played a pretty crucial role in fueling the long-running civil war in Eastern Congo, the guy is really pretty much an authoritarian in the standard postcolonial mode with the exception that he seems to care more than usual about making the trains run on time. Lately the Rwandan government has very much stepped up the persecution of dissidents and political opponents, some of whom were just as strongly opponents of the previous genocidal regime. Kagame's government is certainly better in many respects than the Habyarimana regime pre-genocide, but this is not a high bar to clear. And yes, governing Rwanda after the genocide would have been difficult for anybody under any circumstances, and yes, chasing the genocidaires into Congo was always going to involve difficult moral choices. But well after Kagame's troops rooted out the worst Interahamwe elements in the refugee camps, they continued to kill Hutus (and other eastern Congolese communities) that got in their way.

[lamaros]

Aye, I used "made him seem" deliberately there.