It is an all too familiar story. The leaders of liberation movements (usually armies) turn themselves into despots as soon as they vanquish the genocidal regimes they seek to replace. Paul Kagame followed this well-travelled path after his Uganda-based Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) drove out Rwanda’s Hutu-dominated regime, which had presided over the horrendous massacre of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus. By the end of July 1994, the former government and Hutu militias retreated across Rwanda’s western border into what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).
The Hutu/Tutsi conflict has a long history, often aggravated by colonial and neocolonial powers seeking to maintain control or influence. It has killed more than a million people touching most of the Great Lakes Region: from Burundi to the Congo and Uganda as well as Rwanda. Kagame, although Rwandan by birth, spent most of his youth in Uganda, gaining military experience when he fought with Yoweri Museveni’s forces against Milton Obote’s government in the 1980s.
