Reihan: Why Paul Kagame is Important

Many years ago, Fareed Zakaria began a fascinating with Lee Kuan Yew, one of my personal heroes, with the following:

"ONE OF THE ASYMMETRIES of history," wrote Henry Kissinger of Singapore's patriarch Lee Kuan Yew, "is the lack of correspondence between the abilities of some leaders and the power of their countries." Kissinger's one time boss, Richard Nixon, was even more flattering. He speculated that, had Lee lived in another time and another place, he might have "attained the world stature of a Churchill, a Disraeli, or a Gladstone."

If anything, I think this is an understatement. And I wonder if we'll soon be saying the same thing about Paul Kagame, the president of Rwanda. Read this very short op-ed to see what I mean.

I realize that there is a pattern of Westerners fawning over this or that African leader, and the romance usually ends badly. Lest we forget, Robert Mugabe was once celebrated throughout the world. Yet it's precisely the bourgeois banality of Kagame's ambitions that I find so encouraging. He's not tugging at heartstrings, but rather setting achievable ambitions and building the institutional capacity he needs, with considerable help from friendly outsiders, to achieve them.

Comments

On the other hand, Kagame has been known to threaten outspoken critics. It was because of political criticism that he turned viciously on no less than Rusesabagina himself, seeing him as a potential political threat. The latter now lives in Belgium, I believe, since he could not be sure of his safety in his own country. Not exactly the picture of the heroic national leader. He may be competent enough as an administrator and an improvement on the past (who wouldn't be?), but let's no get carried away.

Posted by Daniel Larison | October 4, 2007 1:27 AM

Kagame opposed outside intervention to stop the Rwanda massacre in 1994 for fear that it would prevent him from coming to complete power in the country on the back of his invasion of Rwanda from out Uganda. And what exactly has Kagame's role been in the horrific nightmare in the Congo?

Posted by Steve Sailer | October 4, 2007 3:32 AM

"Opposed outside intervention"? Don't you mean that Kagame and his troops went in and did what needed to be done while the UN dithered atrociously and the rest of the world stood gaping paralysed at their tv screens? The kind of revisionism Mr Sailer is perpuating will never prevail. Shame on you.

Posted by Shema Mukandoli | October 4, 2007 9:09 AM

uh...

I'd be very interested to hear an account of why you find LKY worthy of that degree of admiration! Surely his (very real) accomplishments have been accompanied by some much-less-than-admirable traits that should leave any admiration heavily qualified?

Even if Singapore's distinctive circumstances really required his brand of authoritarian rule, which I doubt, he's also more responsible than anyone for the spread of the pernicious doctrine that Asian countries as such ought to be governed without dissent, debate, or diversity.

Posted by Jacob T. Levy | October 4, 2007 11:22 AM

Steve Sailer doesn't know what he's talking about -- Kagame opposed the eventual intervention that did occur at the tail end of the genocide (Operation Turquoise). It was a French mission authorized by the UN, and Kagame opposed it for a very obvious reason -- the French had been the primary backers of the genocidal Hutu regime, and the French ended up protecting the retreating Hutu forces, allowing them to escape into Congo and cause all sorts of problems in both the DRC and Rwanda for years to come.

OTOH, Kagame and the RPF regime has committed some awful atrocities of its own in both Congo and Rwanda following the civil war. The regime is quite authoritarian, to say the least (much more so than Kew, obviously), but has been better than most African authoritarian states because of Kagame's leadership and the fact it is more of a party-based oligarchy than a one-person strongman regime. Of course, we'll see how long that lasts.

Posted by Constantine | October 4, 2007 11:23 AM

I never thought I would say this, but someone needs to dig up William Safire's old columns on Lee Kwan Yew. The fact is, he was and is one of the greatest enemies of free expression in the history of the world. Because of his position as dictator of Singapore, he was able to set up Kangaroo courts where he sued anyone who criticized him for libel.

Some hero.

Posted by Dilan Esper | October 4, 2007 3:27 PM

Kagame didn't want outside intervention to end the genocide because outsiders would have frozen the lines of the civil war as they were when they arrived, leaving him and his Tutsi invaders with only part of the country. He preferred it go on longer so he could conquer the whole country, which he soon did. He'd been invading Rwanda from Uganda for the four previous years with his Tutsi refugees who were the sons of the Tutsis who fled Rwanda because the majority Hutu had won the first election after independence. Kagame's invasion was a major cause of the Hutus going nuts and slaughtering the Tutsi, just as the Great Powers attack on Revolutionary France helped set off the Terror of 1793.

He then had his Tutsi army pursue the Hutu killers/refugees into the Congo, where they discovered, to their surprise, that nobody was in charge enough to stop them, so they penetrated far into the Congo, which alerted the other countries in the region that the Congo was a power vacuum, setting off the Congo nightmare that has apparently killed millions.

So, Rwanda and Burundi are back where they started before the white man ever arrived -- the Tutsi minority rules the Hutu majority.

Yet, it's easy to imagine things turning out even worse with a man of lesser competence than Kagame in charge, so maybe he is a hero by Central African standards, just as Kagame's old boss Muzeweni, the dictator of Uganda for the last 20 years, is a hero compared to Amin and Obote.

Posted by Steve Sailer | October 5, 2007 5:05 AM

i think after all there is no any other choice than him. And that is why the world remains with him.

Posted by lemis | October 15, 2007 10:32 AM

Paul Kagame just happens to be in the right place at the right time and iam speaking this from the perspective of A Rwandan National.Considering what Rwanda has passed through and where it is now, one cant help but marvel at the leadership capabilities of the Man his Human Weaknesses not withstanding.Atlast Africa has got a Decisive Strong Leader eager to live his Country a Better place than He found it.

Posted by Mukiza Edwin | May 6, 2008 1:29 PM