[Ugnet] *DHR* KAGAME SEEKS PEACE IGNORING ETHNIC DIFFERENCES(Toronto Star)

Mon, 10 Jul 2006 02:19:21 -0700

 

Sun. Jul. 9, 2006. | Updated at 05:57 PM
 
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Kagame seeks peace
Ignoring ethnic differences will reconcile country, he says

African leader seeks educational aid on first visit to Canada
Apr. 25, 2006. 01:00 AM
OLIVIA WARD
FEATURE WRITER

A dozen years after the genocide that ended the lives of almost 800,000 people, Rwandan President Paul Kagame says the only way to reconcile his country is a policy of ignoring ethnic differences between the Tutsi and Hutu people.
"You have to mobilize Rwandans who have lost their families, and those who have killed their neighbours and friends," he said in an interview at University of Western Ontario yesterday.
"It's a very difficult thing to cope with, but people are ready to pay the price for a better future."
Kagame's visit is the first he has made to Canada, and yesterday he toured the medical faculties of the university, which is involved in a project called Rebuilding Health in Rwanda.
He received praise from Western's president Paul Davenport as "a great African leader," and is to be presented with a peace medal this week from University of Sherbrooke.
But he faces protests from human rights activists who allege he played a role in the 1994 genocide, in which hundreds of thousands of mainly Tutsi people, a minority in Rwanda, died during a massacre led by Hutu extremists.
The charge comes from allegations that Kagame, then a senior militia commander, set the bloody event in motion by ordering a missile attack on a plane carrying Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana and Burundian president Cyprien Ntaryamira.
Kagame denies the allegations, labelling them propaganda circulated by people who themselves "have blood on their hands."
Amnesty International's Canadian office said Kagame should not be barred from the country, but "his visit is an opportunity to raise serious human rights issues."
The tall, lean, softly spoken leader, who resembles a professor more than the guerrilla fighter and soldier he has been for much of his career, has been surrounded by controversy since the genocide took place.
To some, he is a saviour who put an end to the bloodiest episode in modern African history when he drove Hutu extremists from power.
But he is also accused of allowing the revenge killings of at least 30,000 Hutu civilians.
More recently, he has been criticized for helping to destabilize neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo by sending troops into the volatile eastern part of the country.
"There is no question we were there between 1996 and 2002," he said.
"But nobody was concerned with asking what brought us there in the first place."
Kagame has said he tried to prevent Hutu perpetrators of the genocide, who had fled to the DRC, from coming back across the border and continuing the killings.
Now, he said, "there are problems, but they are less than they used to be. I see an improvement of the whole situation in the Great Lakes region (of Africa). So much effort has been put into settlement by the United Nations, regional governments and the European Union. They may not have always done the right things, but they have stepped up their efforts."
Attempts by exiled Hutu supporters to undermine his government have also lessened recently, Kagame said. But the murder of genocide fugitive Juvenal Uwilingiyimana, a high-level former government minister, in Belgium last December, was a sign they are still active.
Uwilingiyimana was reportedly planning to turn himself over to the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda and testify against his former colleagues.
But, Kagame said, "there are people who are willing to kill" to protect themselves from justice.
"They have found shelter in different parts of the world where there are still people sympathetic to them."
The Supreme Court of Canada last year said there was evidence Canadian resident Leon Mugesera, a former official in a hardline Hutu party, incited genocide by fanning the flames of hatred against Tutsis.
He is awaiting a pre-removal risk assessment to determine whether he is at risk if he is returned to Rwanda.
"He is without doubt one of the masterminds, one of the ideologues at the time. There is no doubt that he was directly implicated," Kagame said, urging that Mugesera be deported.
The Rwandan leader's relationship with the international tribunal has been an uneasy one, and he has established gacaca courts that are a cross between reconciliation commissions and criminal courts.
When the tribunal winds up in 2008, he said, "we are capable of dealing with cases in Rwandan courts. Community-centred justice is the most effective way.
It allows healing and reconciliation, involving communities so that they, in the end, are the ones who forgive each other. That is what I have urged."
Rwandan genocide victims have paid a huge price for peace, Kagame admitted.
"As a leader, you are asking a great deal, but you also pay a price.
"Imagine telling people who have lost their families, their mothers and fathers, to forgive. It is painful to accept, and just as difficult to ask it of them."
Additional articles by Olivia Ward


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