Andrew Kenny: Why Rwanda’s Kagame is the most dangerous man in the world

Key topics.Kagame's M23 rebels killed 13 South African peacekeepers.Rwanda's leader is accused of looting DRC's minerals.Tribal conflict fuels violence in Central Africa for centuries..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here..The seventh BizNews Conference, BNC#7, is to be held in Hermanus from March 11 to 13, 2025. The 2025 BizNews Conference is designed to provide an excellent opportunity for members of the BizNews community to interact directly with the keynote speakers, old (and new) friends from previous BNC events – and to interact with members of the BizNews team. Register for BNC#7 here..If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up for the BizNews channel here..By Andrew Kenny*.Thirteen South Africans were killed last month by the most dangerous man in the world. Paul Kagame, the racist dictator of the super-apartheid state, Rwanda, is responsible for millions of violent deaths in Rwanda and the DRC, and a number of murders in other countries, including South Africa. More than anybody else, he was responsible for the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, where about 800,000 Tutsis were killed..Kagame, a Tutsi himself, was the deep cause of the genocide, although he now poses as a victim and a saviour – and much of the gullible world believes him. His racist Tutsi terrorist group, M23, has been rampaging through the eastern DRC, murdering, raping, looting, and laying waste. (The title M23 is short for March 23rd,when in 2009 the Tutsis signed a peace deal with the DRC government, which failed.) Now it has killed thirteen members of the South African National Defence Force (SANDF) on a peacekeeping mission in Goma, DRC, near the Rwandan border. The SANDF group might have been ill-equipped, badly prepared and incompetent but it was fighting for a just cause. For once I agree with President Ramaphosa, in his terse statement about the deaths of our soldiers. I find Kagame's response dishonest, disturbing and repellant..The deep causes of this conflict and the greater conflicts that have devastated Rwanda, Burundi and the DRC go back centuries. They concern unpleasant truths about human behaviour and human society that we prefer not to talk about, but must face up to if we are to understand them and overcome them. The fundamental truth is that tribalism has existed in every society that has ever lived and has been all important to people, often defining their identity and feeling of belonging. I use the terms tribe, nation and ethnic group interchangeably, regardless of whether the people are black, white or any other colour. A good description of European tribalism is given in a book, The Conquest of Gaul, written 2,075 years ago by a coloniser and soldier, Julius Caesar..It is woke to blame all the woes of Africa on European colonialism. I believe colonialism is always wrong but it does sometimes bring benefits, which the colonised people tacitly acknowledge by keeping so much colonial culture and technology when they become independent – for example, the English language in South Africa. However, in the Congo, the Belgian colonists did awful harm to the people of central Africa. .Read more: NSN: Reports of mass surrender to Rwandan-backed rebels of SA troops in DRC.The worst was to group all the people there, about 450 tribes, into one gigantic, completely artificial country of over 2.2 million square kilometres, almost twice the size of South Africa. Most of the tribes had nothing in common with the others. The borders of the Congo were drawn with no consideration for the African people but only with a competitive eye upon other European powers..The horror! The horror!.The worst African coloniser of all was King Leopold who ruled the Congo as a private estate from 1885 to 1908 with atrocious cruelty and ruthless exploitation of its natural riches. Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness gives graphic descriptions of the awfulness. ("The horror! The horror!"). The Belgian government took over the Congo in 1908 and ruled it much better and more humanely. The Congo became independent in 1960 and almost immediately fell apart under bloody inter-tribal wars, aided by the ignorance and avarice of outside powers. The corrupt Mobutu Sese Seko took over in 1965 and ruled until 1997, adding greatly to the misery and suffering of the people of a country with fabulous mineral wealth. The DRC not only has enormous quantities of gold, copper and diamonds, which have been in demand since ancient times, but minerals recently in demand for green technologies such as electronics and batteries, minerals such as cobalt, tantalum, coltan and niobium. Unfortunately, many of these minerals are mined in appalling condition, often by children. Green technology is often filthy..On the eastern border of the Congo are two little countries, Burundi and Rwanda, each about the size of Lesotho. Each has about the same demographics, with the Hutu about 85% of the population and the Tutsi about 14%. The Hutu are Bantu, the most important grouping of humanity and the most genetically diverse. Bantu just means people and is an accurate and honourable term. The Tutsi are Nilotic people who seem to have entered the two countries from the north east in about the 16th Century..In both countries, the Tutsis lorded it over the Hutu, whom they regarded as servants and underlings, often just serfs, which is Kagame's attitude today. Both countries were colonised by the Germans and then in 1916 by the Belgians. The colonisers kept the African ruling structure: Tutsis at the top, Hutus at the bottom. But then the Belgians did something that outraged the Tutsis: they started preparing the countries for democracy – majority rule – before independence..Burundi gained independence in 1962 and was ruled as a constitutional monarchy with a parliament. This was unacceptable to the Tutsi minority. In 1966 they seized power in a coup, abolished parliament and set up a Tutsi dictatorship. The Hutu tried a feeble uprising, which was crushed quickly. In 1972, the Tutsis then staged the event that changed my political thinking forever. It was the worst racial atrocity since Hitler's Holocaust. Quite deliberately, carefully, systematically, they set about the slaughter of every Hutu with more than primary school education and every Hutu in any occupation higher than labourer. It was the final solution to the Hutu problem. Here is a description of the event by Leonce Ndarubagiye (a Tutsi)."In 1972, about 300,000 educated or semi-educated Hutu were savagely massacred. The Tutsi apartheid strengthened itself. This Hutu genocide was organised and executed by Tutsi politicians and army officers"."Hundreds of thousands of innocent Hutus were ruthlessly massacred. Tutsi soldiers went to secondary schools to arrest Hutu children in their classes and to drive them to death."."Massacred Hutu were piled up in mass graves known by many people even today. From that time, since no one among the responsible persons for the genocide was prosecuted, certain Tutsi believe that they can kill Hutu as they wish and enjoy impunity so long as they will be in power"..I can give more graphic, more terrible descriptions. The world's reaction was as terrible as the genocide itself. It was silent – not with the silence of horror but with the silence of boredom. Nobody cared. Not a peep of protest from the UN, the Anti-Apartheid Movement, the BBC or the OAU, the same people who had screamed and lamented about the 69 people killed at Sharpeville, 12 years before. Not a drop of sympathy for the fallen Hutu. So the Hutu knew they were on their own. They would never get help from anyone..Dictatorship.In Rwanda in 1959, the oppressed Hutu majority rose up and overthrew their Tutsi masters. Many Tutsis fled to neighbouring Uganda. In 1961, the Belgians held a referendum, which naturally the Hutu won. On 1 July 1962, Rwanda became independent, with a Hutu government. The Tutsis regarded this as contrary to nature. How could the serfs rule over the barons! The exiled Tutsis formed a guerilla army, the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF). In 1990 it invaded Rwanda, set on overthrowing the Hutu majority government and establishing a Tutsi dictatorship. Within two days, the leader of the RPF died in mysterious circumstances and was replaced by Paul Kagame, a highly intelligent and disciplined man, cruel and vengeful, with a violent temper, probably a psychopath. The invaders marauded through Rwanda, causing fear and hatred, and eventually panic. The Hutu knew that the Tutsi offered them only two choices: serfdom or death, as in the horrible events of 1972..As soldiers, the Hutus were no match for the Tutsis; negotiating with them would be like a slave trying to negotiate with a slave-master; and they knew that nobody outside would lift a finger to help them. Terrified, they urged their fellows to take action against "the cockroaches" but they were too scared to try. The country was a tinderbox waiting for a spark. That spark came on 6 April 1994 (three weeks before South Africa's first democratic election). The plane carrying President Habyarimana of Rwanda was shot down by two ground-to-air missiles as it was approaching Kigali airport, almost certainly on Kagame's orders. Parts of Habyarimana's brain and body were found splattered on the ground. The Hutus exploded into a killing frenzy..This was quite unlike the careful, deliberate slaughter of the Hutu by the Tutsi in 1972. This was wild, demented, spontaneous slaughter. With machetes, spears, clubs and hammers, Hutus butchered men, women and children in a sadistic ecstasy, enjoying being splashed in Tutsi blood and seeing Tutsi bodies torn apart. But gradually Kagame's Tutsi army beat the Hutu government's army and began a counter-slaughter. Many Hutus fled west into the Congo, where in time they set up their own liberation armies, such as the Forces démocratiques de libération du Rwanda, (FDLR), which were all ineffectual.The Tutsis took control of Rwanda, and soon, inevitably, Paul Kagame became the president..Brutal.He set up a brutal racial dictatorship, rather like apartheid but incomparably worse. The Tutsis ran everything. The Hutus had to serve them. Like so many dictators in Africa, Kagame set up sham elections, where no party was allowed to discuss race, by far the most pressing issue in the country, and where any real opposition was banned. So naturally he won elections with 99%. He used terror to bring order and tidiness to the country. Kigali, the capital, is clean and safe, and gives an impression of prosperity. He claims great economic success, although many of the statistics he gives are dubious..He is the darling of the West and gets a lot of aid from it. Kagame is superb at PR as well as mass murder, and has been successful in setting himself up as the saviour who rescued his country from Hutu genocide. Westerners believe him. He shows them skulls of Tutsis killed in 1994. Westerners bow their heads with pity and horror. Of course, he never shows them the skulls of Hutus killed by Tutsis. His narrative is simple: the Hutu committed genocide against the Tutsi and he saved the people. There is no mention of what caused the Hutus to fall upon the Tutsi; no mention of the purpose of his invading army in 1990..A Tutsi army will beat any other black African army. In 1997, the Rwandan Tutsi army, helped by Uganda, overthrew with ease Mobutu Sese Seko, who had misruled the Congo (which he had renamed Zaire) for 32 years. They replaced him with Laurent Kabila. In Cabo Delgado in northern Mozambique, they succeeded much better than any other African army, including South Africa's, in subduing the Islamic terrorist groups such as al-Shabaab. In the Congo they smashed a Zimbabwean army group that Mugabe had sent up to join the plunder. The South African army of 1986 could have dealt with them; the South African army of 2025 doesn't stand a chance. Why are the Tutsis such good soldiers? I don't know. Why was the German army the best fighting force in World War Two? Why did the Germans so easily beat and conquer the French, who had better weapons, more men, and terrain advantages? I don't know..M23 is just an extension of Kagame's Tutsi armed forces, bent on looting the Congo, plundering its immense mineral wealth, and extending a Tutsi empire far and wide. Millions of people have died in the Congo in recent decades and Kagame's killers account for a large portion of their deaths. Kagame's excuse that they are only in the Congo to ward off Hutu genocidaires is nonsense; the FDLR presents no threat to Rwanda and Kagame knows it. He just wants to steal the Congo's mineral wealth and then transport it through Rwanda, claiming it as his own. Actually Rwanda has no mineral wealth..Peace-keeping mission.SADC's peace-keeping mission was honourable and needed. It was to stop Kagame and his thugs from killing and raping Congolese people and plundering their wealth. Unfortunately it was weak, incompetent and vulnerable. I'm afraid South Africa's armed forces, once the best in Africa, are now just a sick joke. The ANC spent a fortune of our money on the 1990's arms deal, which delivered us some shiny new weapons and lots of big bribes for the comrades. The shiny weapons are now rusting and broken. There seems absolutely no coordinated idea of how our armed forces should work together or even what they are there for. Military leadership is poor, and political leadership of the military is even worse. Just look at the fumbling public statements on the deaths of the thirteen soldiers by Defence Minister Motshekga and Deputy Defence Minister Holomisa. We are simply unable to do any good in the DRC. We should withdraw entirely. A betrayal of the people of the Congo? I'm afraid so, but South Africa is not able to help them. We've become too useless..Read more: 🔒 The Economist: SA's floundering army in the DRC a parable of the rainbow nation.Kagame regards South Africa with contempt. Patrick Karegeya had been a Tutsi ally of Kagame with the RPF but became an opponent. He fled Rwanda into exile in South Africa. On 1 January 2014 he was found strangled to death in his hotel room at the Michelangelo Towers in Johannesburg. He had obviously been murdered by Kagame's assassins, as Kagame's Foreign Minister admitted with delight. What of South Africa's sovereignty? Don't be silly. That matters nothing to Kagame. He mocks South Africa..In reply to Ramaphosa's brief and dignified state on the thirteen soldiers, Kagame replied with a contemptuous tweet, accusing Ramaphosa of lying and then lying himself by saying that the SADC peace-keeping force was actually helping the DRC Government to fight against its own people and working alongside "genocidal armed groups". Complete nonsense. His final words were, "if South Africa prefers confrontation, Rwanda will deal with the matter in that context any day." This could only mean, if you want war with us you'll get it. It might also mean, "We'll murder you as we murdered Patrick Karegeya – right under your nose.".It goes without saying that not all Tutsis are bad and not all Hutu are good. Some of Kagame's strongest foes are Tutsis, and he will kill them as readily as he will kill Hutus – or anybody else for that matter..The best investigation of Kagame is the book Do Not Disturb by Michela Wrong. I cannot recommend it too highly. It is wonderful piece of research, highly detailed, very thoughtful and accurate, with a shrewd analysis of Kagame and his history. Michela Wrong is an English woman; her surname is a traditional English name from East Anglia..The title of the book comes from the notice pinned outside Karegeya's hotel room when he was murdered..Read also:.The high human cost of DRC's war for richesImages of unspeakable horror from the DRCUnderstanding the DRC conflict where SANDF soldiers are dying.*Andrew Kenny is a writer, an engineer and a classical liberal..This article was first published by Daily Friend and is republished with permission

Andrew Kenny: Why Rwanda’s Kagame is the most dangerous man in the world

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