From: lessgovt@gmail.com   
      
   He’s a Brutal Dictator, and One of the West’s Best Friends   
   By Anjan Sundaram, April 11, 2023, NY Times   
   His grip on power is nearly unassailable. Since becoming president over two   
   decades ago, he has extended constitutional term limits, shut down the free   
   press and clamped down on dissent. Reporters have been driven into exile, even   
   killed; opposition    
   figures have been imprisoned or found dead. His country has been reduced to   
   tyranny.   
      
   But this dictator isn’t a pariah, like Putin of Russia or Bashar al-Assad of   
   Syria. Instead, he’s one of the West’s best and most reliable friends:   
   Paul Kagame, president of Rwanda. Since coming to power in 1994, Kagame has   
   won his way into the    
   West’s good graces. He’s been invited to speak — on human rights, no   
   less — at universities such as Harvard, Yale and Oxford, and praised by   
   prominent political leaders including Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and the former   
   U.N. general secretary Ban    
   Ki-moon.   
      
   It doesn’t end there. Kagame’s Western friends include FIFA, which held   
   its annual congress at a shiny sports complex in Kigali in March, and the   
   N.B.A., whose African Basketball League plays in Rwanda. Europe’s largest   
   carmaker, Volkswagen, runs    
   an assembly plant in Rwanda, and major international organizations such as the   
   Gates Foundation and the World Economic Forum are close partners. Western   
   donors finance a whopping 70 percent of Rwanda’s national budget.   
      
   But perhaps Kagame’s greatest endorsement is a deal with the British   
   government to receive asylum seekers deported from Britain. This controversial   
   bargain, which may contravene international law, has cemented Rwanda’s   
   reputation as a steadfast    
   partner of Western countries. Far from the authoritarian holdout it is,   
   Kagame’s Rwanda is now hailed as a haven for people fleeing dictatorship.   
      
   Kagame owes much of his success to his skilled political rhetoric, an art form   
   Rwandans call “ubwenge.” In news conferences where Rwandan journalists,   
   aware of the risks faced by less pliant colleagues, throw him softball   
   questions, Kagame shines.    
   Often, his target is the West. He consistently voices an anti-imperialist   
   message about how Europe is “violating people’s rights” and berates the   
   West’s “superiority complex.”   
      
   This posture makes him a leading avatar of a new type of postcolonial ruler.   
   Other populist nationalist presidents such as Erdogan of Turkey, López   
   Obrador of Mexico and Modi of India also rally their populations behind   
   similar sentiments, elevating    
   themselves as world leaders no longer beholden to the West. Often at the heart   
   of their defiant speeches are references to old crimes — massacres,   
   genocides and expropriations committed by European empires that date back as   
   far as the 16th century.   
      
   Such appeals work because Western leaders still offer only grudging   
   “regrets” for such atrocities and rarely apologize, partly out of fear   
   that their nations will have to cough up huge sums in reparations. This allows   
   the grievances to live on. Many    
   in former colonies still feel those past humiliations as viscerally present,   
   manifest today in institutions that are dominated by Western interests, such   
   as the World Bank and the IMF, or in international trade and aid negotiations.   
   Postcolonial leaders    
   such as Kagame find much popularity in their insistence that the West should   
   atone for its history, however improbable that might be.   
      
   The price of avoiding apologies, though, is that Western leaders find their   
   moral authority diminished. Instead, they engage in placatory behaviors —   
   offering praise and partnership, rather than condemnation. Perhaps nowhere is   
   this dynamic clearer    
   than in Rwanda, where Kagame’s leverage with Western leaders is particularly   
   strong because the country’s grievances are recent. He is very adept at   
   guilt-tripping the West, and his jabs hit home hard.   
      
   Rwanda’s 1994 genocide — during which nearly one million Rwandans, many of   
   them ethnic Tutsis, were killed — was perpetrated under the noses of United   
   Nations peacekeepers, who diligently filed reports on the killings while   
   seemingly impotent to    
   prevent them. Although Kagame’s former ambassador to the US and other   
   political allies have accused him of “sparking” Rwanda’s genocide and   
   doing little to prevent it, he has cast himself as the hero who ended it.   
      
   In the event of criticism, Kagame’s tried-and-tested tactic is to rebut any   
   Western leader who has the temerity to sermonize to poorer nations about   
   democracy, human rights and the rule of law. His rhetoric resonates in a world   
   desperate for African    
   success stories, not least in the West. Back in 2011, the journalist Tristan   
   McConnell described how Western support for Kagame was driven by “a   
   genuinely felt desire to fight the image of a basket-case continent.” The   
   year after, Time magazine    
   called Kagame “the embodiment of a new Africa.”   
      
   Behind the lionization lies a darker truth. Since taking power in 1994 as   
   commander in chief of the Rwandan military, and later as president, Kagame has   
   all but rigged elections, taking almost 99% of the vote in 2017. Many of his   
   opponents have    
   disappeared, in some cases found murdered, in one case virtually beheaded. The   
   self-styled hero who supposedly ended the Rwandan genocide was also in command   
   of an army that the U.N. has alleged was responsible for killing tens, perhaps   
   hundreds of    
   thousands of Hutus and for potential acts of “genocide” after twice   
   invading the Democratic Republic of Congo.   
      
   Yet no matter the historical record, Kagame creates an alternate reality in   
   which the West is to blame for his country’s ills and he is its brave   
   champion. This anti-imperialist narrative trumps reports of dissidents and   
   journalists being harassed,    
   imprisoned or forced into exile. It doesn’t help that accurate information   
   about the country is hard to come by: Kagame bans critical foreign reporters,   
   ensuring that the international media often repeats government propaganda.   
      
      
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   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)