There is something ironic in the way that Rwanda, that small and mountainous country in the center of the African continent, is understood by those in the West. Despite having a population smaller than that of Guinea and a land mass no larger than that of Lesotho, Rwanda occupies an outsized position not only in the bureaucratic hive-mind consciousness of development agencies and international aid offices across the West, but also in the thoughts of the ordinary Americans and Europeans whose taxes fund those agencies and offices. The reason for this should be obvious to anyone familiar with the basics of international politics since the end of the Cold War. The horror and infamy of the 1994 genocide earned for Rwanda a peripheral but lasting place in Western popular culture—a culture which values notoriety, is fascinated by the grotesque, and understands genocide to be an evil beyond comparison, a crime far worse than war or even mass murder via nuclear annihilation.
Yet there is more to Rwanda’s outsized international importance than the fact that the horror of genocide is not easily forgotten within Western societies (excepting, of course, the centuries-long genocide of indigenous people throughout the Americas and particularly within the United States). In the years since the tragedies of 1994, Rwanda has experienced a remarkable run of economic growth and development, exceeding Western expectations by leaps and bounds and nullifying predictions which anticipated that the legacy of the conflict would depress growth in the country for decades to come. In terms of GDP per capita, Rwanda recovered from the devastation of the genocide within a decade, then went on to double this figure from $1,000 to $2,000 over the following fifteen years (see Appendix, Figure 1). Likewise, Rwanda’s improvements in terms of its primary school completion and child mortality rates have been particularly notable; in 2000, Rwanda’s primary completion rate was 25%, but by 2019 this had increased to 97% (see Appendix, Figure 2), while Rwanda’s child mortality rate fully halved from 2000 to 2015. Across a variety of economic and developmental measures, then, the story of Rwanda in the twenty-first century appears to be one of unprecedented success, heretofore unparalleled within sub-Saharan Africa. Some observers have even gone so far as to describe the country as “the Switzerland of Africa,” emphasizing Rwanda’s apparently peaceful and insulated yet industrious and prosperous nature as a nation shaped around and contained within the mountains and valleys at the heart of the continent.
As far as comparisons with European states go, however, it may be more accurate to understand Rwanda as a country more akin to Bosnia and Herzegovina than to Switzerland, in terms of both its recent past as well as many of its basic characteristics. The two countries have parallel histories of ethno-nationalism in that both were marred by internal conflicts which quickly escalated into simultaneous genocides, though the Bosnian genocide of 1992-95 was admittedly much less extensive, and therefore far less deadly, than its Rwandan counterpart. As in Rwanda, the simmering ethno-nationalism built up between Bosnia’s mountains led the country to become the staging ground for a massive international conflict; just as the 1914 assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by the Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo precipitated the outbreak of World War I, the Rwandan genocide initiated a series of events that culminated in the Second Congo War, a conflict which involved the military forces of nine African countries and resulted, directly and indirectly, in the deaths of several million people—thereby making it the deadliest conflict of the twenty-first century so far. Following the end of hostilities in Bosnia in 1995, both countries have also experienced significant improvements in their economic fortunes, as evidenced by strong and steady increases in their respective per-capita GDPs from year to year (see Appendix, Figure 1).
Where the two countries differ most significantly, however, is in the matter of their governance. While Bosnia has maintained itself since 1995 as a sort of hybrid regime, with both democratic and authoritarian institutions and tendencies, Rwanda has taken a much more pronounced turn towards authoritarianism over the course of the last three decades. The Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF; the militant Tutsi rebel organization which ousted the Hutu government responsible for instigating the genocide) has maintained its absolute control over the Rwandan state as a political party ever since taking power in 1994. The RPF, in turn, is dominated by its leader Paul Kagame, who became president of Rwanda in 2000 and continues to exercise strict control over the party and country through that office to this day.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Kagame’s consolidation of authoritarian power has been accompanied by a series of human rights violations, in addition to the more typical restrictions on political and civil rights that have traditionally been part and parcel of the process of autocratization. For instance, the extent to which the RPF has sought to eliminate or neutralize all electoral competition, both against rival political parties and within the RPF itself, is particularly egregious; the Tutsi-dominated Kagame regime has not only eradicated any semblance of Hutu political opposition, it has also turned on its internal Tutsi critics, silencing any who dare to criticize the regime regardless of their ethnicity.
Over the years, the RPF’s obvious and often brutal intolerance of dissent has manifested itself in various forms. Take, for example, the Rwandan government’s criminalization of both “divisionism,” which enables the regime to imprison those who defame the government, as well as of “genocide ideology”, which is so broad a term as used by the Kagame regime as to be completely devoid of any real meaning. These laws were passed primarily to disincentivize journalists and other citizens from speaking out against the regime, but their chilling effects on the freedoms of speech and of the press pale in comparison to the terror inspired by the espionage, intimidation, disappearances, and assassinations that the Kagame regime regularly carries out against outspoken dissenters both at home and abroad. Since 1994, more than 12 prominent Rwandan journalists and politicians have either disappeared, been murdered under mysterious circumstances, or been assassinated by confirmed agents of the Kagame regime, while countless others have faced intimidation from Rwandan security forces or been spied on while claiming political asylum in other countries.
In spite of these repeated and at times brazen human rights violations perpetrated by the present Rwandan government—each of which constitutes a serious breach of democratic and international norms—the international community has done very little in the way of responding to Kagame’s persistent weaponization of state power against Rwanda’s own citizens. Of course, prominent international NGOs such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have regularly published reports detailing the abuses of the Rwandan government, and Western governments have occasionally issued condemnations of Kagame’s repression, particularly when that repression is transnational and involves intelligence-gathering and covert operations carried out on their own soil. For the most part, however, members of international community (and in particular, countries such as the United States) have seemed content to acquiesce in Kagame’s violent pursuit of repression and power, which is clearly intended to bolster and strengthen the RPF’s controlling position within Rwandan society, without protest or interference from abroad.
The reasons behind the international community’s apparent dereliction of its responsibility to promote human rights are partially contained within the same explanation as for why Western policymakers tend to give more attention to Rwanda than is proportionate to its actual economic weight. Rwanda’s ongoing success streak in the realm of economic growth and development, which has been relatively unique among the countries of sub-Saharan Africa, has appeared to have entitled it to unabashedly permissive treatment from Western governments and international development agencies, which otherwise tend to be (mostly) reliable opponents of human rights abuses committed abroad. In this sense, the ideal of Rwanda as an economic success story which ought to be supported, and the portrayal of Rwanda as simply another brutal and repressive (and therefore unsupportable) regime in a long line of brutal and repressive sub-Saharan African regimes, tend to be somewhat divorced from one another.
Additionally, the impunity with which the Rwandan government carries out its human rights abuses stems in part from Rwanda’s newly acquired strategic importance in the context of twenty-first century international politics. The Kagame regime has positioned itself as a defender of stability and the status quo in sub-Saharan Africa, endearing it to powers such as the United States which have two critical strategic interests in the region: 1) suppressing terrorist organizations which could threaten US citizens abroad and/or the US homeland, and 2) ensuring continued Western access to the rare earth minerals which will be essential to fueling a modern tech-based economy in such a way as to not cook the planet via greenhouse gas emissions. Rwanda, through its participation in international peacekeeping missions and its interventions to combat terrorism and put down rebellions in neighboring countries, has signaled to the US that it is a willing and capable partner in ensuring stability throughout the region. Furthermore, Rwanda has become a key player in the market for rare earth minerals given its decades-long predation of mineral resources within the DRC. In this way, Kagame has joined the ranks of authoritarian leaders in countries like Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and India, who have largely escaped Western criticism on account of their strategic importance to US interests.
Given these factors, there seems to be little hope for a reversal in US policy towards Rwanda. In the context of these serious limitations, however, there is one area in which proponents of human rights and realpolitik foreign policy-makers can agree: Western governments should make it a priority to strongly disincentivize further attempts at transnational repression by the Kagame regime. The growing incidence of transnational repression by authoritarian governments, such as those of Rwanda, China, and Saudi Arabia, is a disturbing trend that clearly represents a direct threat to the sovereignty of every nation in the present-day international system. Such discouragement could easily be affected by reductions in foreign aid to Rwanda from Western donors, given that the Rwandan government remains reliant, to a significant extent, on foreign aid inflows into its treasuryAt the same time, it may be useful to recognize that transnational repression in countries like the United States ironically represents an instance of chickens coming home to roost, so to speak—after all, it was only 60 years ago that the CIA was plotting assassinations against a left-leaning government in the DRC—and that going forward, a more productive policy for Western countries may be to 1) refrain from acting on their historical predilections towards repression and intervention, and 2) align their foreign policies more completely with the principles of self-determination, human rights, and democracy as espoused by the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Only then will the West have the moral clarity, authority, and backbone to legitimately condemn human rights violations abroad, regardless of the strategic value of the oppressors.
Appendix of Figures
Graphs courtesy of Our World in Data.
Be First to Comment