Twenty years ago the genocide that took the lives of up to one million of Rwanda’s 12 million people saw the benighted country reduced to among the poorest of the world’s poor, its people among the sickest. For those who survived the butchery, life was barely an existence, under-five mortality among the worst in the world, life expectancy at birth the lowest. An estimated 250,000 women had been raped and many had become infected with HIV. Hundreds of thousands had fled into exile and were fearful of returning to live among the neighbours who appeared to have so willingly taken part in their torment.
Rwanda still inhabits an unstable neighbourhood, next to war-ravaged east Congo and politically troubled Burundi. Nearby are South Sudan and the Central African Republic, both torn by conflict. But the commemorations yesterday to mark two decades since the genocide tell an extraordinary story of Rwandan recovery and revival, all the more remarkable for its regional context.
Strong growth in recent times, close to 8 per cent a year, has seen Rwanda, one of east Africa's success stories, cut the percentage of those living below the poverty line to 45 per cent from 59 percent between 2001 and 2011. Life expectancy has doubled and it is on course to be the first in Africa to meet the UN millennium development goals' health targets.
For many, credit is due largely to the admired but increasingly controversial President Paul Kagame, the Tutsi former rebel leader who has ruled since he led an army into Kigali in 1994 to halt the killings. Kagame, who was re-elected in 2010 with 93 percent of the vote, has attracted investment into a modernising Rwanda and done much to build model health and education systems. But the stability that businesses are so glad to invest in has been bought by an increasing authoritarianism – described by those sympathetic simply as "assertiveness" – that is worrying human rights groups, not least because of speculation he intends to amend the constitution to let himself run again.
Most controversial is the government’s, albeit commendable, determination to eradicate ethnic tensions between Tutsi and Hutu, but by enforcing a national, state narrative that suppresses and denies both ethnicities in favour of the slogan “I am a Rwandan”. Hutus, many of whom also died at the hands of extremists in their own communities, are denied the opportunity to commemorate their own losses and forced to accept collective guilt for the genocide they had no part in. Some have been jailed for minimising the genocide by even suggesting moderate Hutus died too. But although forced reconciliation, as the Yugoslavs discovered, can put a temporary lid on communal tensions, in the long run there is a danger that it simply bottles up explosive tensions.