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Can censorship help heal Rwanda?

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February 05, 2012|By Peter S. Canellos

(The Heads of the State for…)

KIGALI, Rwanda -- The architect’s model, sprawling across a table the size of a swimming pool, shows gleaming towers, highways, and monuments, even a river where none now exists. If Pierre L’Enfant, the designer of Washington, D.C., had come back to life in the 21st century, this might be what he produced: a global capital for a small nation that imagines itself quite large in the world — as the Switzerland-like banking center of the 120 million-person East African Community.

Just 18 years removed from one of the bloodiest atrocities in African history — the murders of 800,000 people, mostly members of the minority Tutsi tribe at the hands of rival Hutus — Rwanda seems to be doing everything right. Its economy is growing faster than almost any on the continent. Its public health improves every year.

For American diplomats and aid workers who long despaired of ever seeing an African nation free of corruption, encouraging of women’s aspirations, and embracing of global financial norms, today’s Rwanda is a model for the continent and beyond. Its president, Paul Kagame, understands what so many African rulers do not: that a world of expertise awaits a leader who can engage with Western nations while protecting his own vision for the country. American diplomats and aid workers who have worked with Rwandan leaders are enthusiastic. “They’re great partners, very progressive, incredibly effective,” says Peter Drobac, a Brigham and Women’s Hospital physician who is the Rwandan country director for aid group Partners in Health.

However, another reality of today’s Rwanda is visible in a courthouse in central Kigali, where an opposition leader named Victoire Ingabire is on trial on multiple charges. The most problematic — including preaching a “genocide ideology” — stem from her declaration, after visiting the country’s genocide memorial, that it doesn’t properly acknowledge Hutu deaths along with the larger number of Tutsi victims.

This was an inflammatory sentiment, certainly — somewhat, though not entirely, akin to asking that German civilian casualties be accorded equal status to Holocaust victims. But it was simply a statement, nonetheless. And Ingabire could face up to 25 years in prison just for expressing it.