Lionel Barber and David Pilling – Financial Time
Financial Times: I’m interested in how you’ve approached the monumental task of the “rebirth of a nation”. And in that context, the way the west sometimes looks at what has happened in Rwanda and looks at your own presidency, and is sometimes critical, perhaps it would also be good to hear in what way you think that Rwanda is misunderstood.
PK: In the case of the whole history of what has happened here, our involvement in it and what we did and . . . at a personal level, I wouldn’t say there was a process to prepare me as a person to deal with the situation we had to deal with at a later stage, other than the conditions we lived under. From childhood. My family fled this country in 1961 when I was four years old. I grew up in Uganda in a refugee camp, a couple of decades, and so it was when I was about 19 or 20 that I actually started getting involved with the . . . maybe I call it politics. Something to do with asking ourselves, what is this, what is this situation we are in, why and what can we do about it, and so the main activity started among the people in exile and different places, especially the region, whether it was Burundi, Tanzania, Uganda and so on.
So that’s until we came to the mid-1980s when the Rwandan Patriotic Front was formed, but there had been other attempts before that trying to organise, but concealing it because of the problems they attracted. Then later on we joined, a couple of us, [Yoweri Museveni’s National Resistance] army in Uganda when there was this armed struggle in Uganda, and that’s how we prepared ourselves.
We were not getting involved because we believed we were Ugandans or because we thought we really needed to be made Ugandans, but we participated because, one, we were being affected even as refugees. In fact, there were people who were forced out of Uganda and thrown back into Rwanda who were refugees because of the politics in Uganda at the time. Some of them even when they came back they were killed, and others survived and became refugees twice.
I’m just throwing a little bit of background where we originate from.
It is not that we developed or grew up under normal conditions. Some of it just happened, and we found ourselves under these conditions and yes, some of us didn’t accept that. Of course, many succumbed or gave up, and in fact many lost their lives because they had also lost hope, but a number of people stood up to deal with these challenges, and that’s how . . . that’s the origin of the struggle for us. In fact, when it all started in October 1990, I was at a military college in the states.
FT: Right, in Kansas.
PK: In Kansas, the US Army Command and General Staff College, and I was there as a Ugandan. So, when it came to the time when the invasion happened, October 1, that is the right time we need to do whatever it was and whatever risks it carried, but we needed to do something.
We weren’t sure how it would turn out. And, of course, as I mentioned to you, things that followed, things that happened indeed would point to the unpredictability of that kind of situation. So even when I went to the commanders of the college and told them I had to cut short my college stay, they got confused. They said, what does that have to do with you, what’s happening in Rwanda? You are a Ugandan. And I told him, I said, not exactly. For the purpose of being here I was Ugandan, but something else has happened and that now brings me out to be who I actually have been all along.
So that’s how I left. I came back. Already the overall commander had been killed the next day. Fred Rwigyema was killed. So when I arrived, I found everything in disarray.
I told him [the commander in Kansas] that something else has happened and that now brings me out to be who I actually have been all along
I literally didn’t know where to start from. Nothing had fully, if at all, prepared me for dealing with such a mess. I had no reference to anything to say this is how you do it, but we had to pick up the pieces and then find some way to start rebuilding. In fact, I remember some of the commanders . . . You will bear with me — I am going into this length of explanation to just come to the point you were asking.
I start to meet the commanders who were there, and gauge how prepared they are to deal with the next phase that was so challenging, and I remember a number of them saying, “I think we go back to Uganda and ask President Museveni . . .”. This was to give us another place where you can go and stay as refugees. So here the choices were clear. You go back and become refugees [or] continue the struggle, and the possibility was also that we will be annihilated.
So we chose the more difficult thing, which was face annihilation or be able to really reorganise and survive and then fight back. So I’m saying this because these are conditions that you have not thought about before or something we expected to be of such a magnitude, but when it happens and you are confronting it, it arms you with certain abilities or capacities, both of the heart and the mind, to confront it, especially knowing the alternative is unthinkable.
For some of us, the alternative of going back to Uganda as a defeated group and asking for another opportunity to be refugees was unthinkable. So we had to deal with this difficult path, so we tried to organise. That’s how we shifted the forces and moved them across the border, close with the border within Uganda up to the mountains.
People used to die. We used to find some of our fighters frozen to death. Yes, we barely survived — freezing and under such conditions when you even have no food, or very little, but we survived it, but it also gave us an opportunity to reorganise.
So, yes, to come now to the leadership question. I think there is a lot you learn from what has happened to you, what you have had to confront, not how many books you have read about leadership, not how peaceful the environment you have grown up in. Those difficulties, that kind of a situation I think explains the conditions you are operating under or things you face, if you have made the choice to deal with it, because during this struggle there were probably as many people who gave up as those who stood up.
FT: Do you think you have now successfully created a new Rwandan identity?
PK: Without a doubt.
FT: In which people now no longer think about Hutu or Tutsi?
PK: Without a doubt. There is nothing that is 100%, maybe except this vote.
FT: So you don’t need to stay in power to keep a lid on that?
PK: Absolutely. I don’t need, and I’m not there because I needed it, absolutely. This is the first point. I know it causes confusion, and that’s what I see written all over the place.
FT: I’m interested in these misunderstandings.
PK: It’s as if I had some plot, but let me tell you a bit of history as well so it is clear from fact. One, even when we had just taken over, I don’t know what story you know about it, I’m the one who refused to be president in 1994, absolutely. There is this man called [Faustin] Twagiramungu, he’s in Brussels, who was in the opposition at that time. He was part of the Arusha agreement [in 1993], he was prime minister. He came to see me. They had taken it for granted that I was going to be president [Pasteur Bizimungu was appointed president in 1994].
Then I said no, there’s nothing for granted. I’m actually not intending to be president.
FT: And the reason you gave?
PK: Well, several reasons. I first of all told the party that the highest position goes to the chairman, not me. So we agreed. We sent in the name. They said, what about you? I said, in actual fact, I don’t want to be the chairman . . . the deputy prime minister. I don’t want to be the deputy minister of defence. I will choose to be the deputy chief of staff, and I told them the reason. I said, I think I want to be close to this army that we have fought alongside. I want to remain close to our fighters, so that when things happen there is still an insurance that we can pull back and fight back and secure ourselves. That’s one.
I said, I don’t want to be president. The president will be there, will be bogged down by some other things, but look, we have millions of people across the border [Hutus in Zaire] who are still armed and have tanks, they have war weapons and they’re organising, they’re attacking us already, and I’m not going to be president [and] at the same time seek there and start fighting.
Second, I told them, you know what, let’s choose somebody who grew up here, who knows people, who knows all the aspects of this environment of Rwanda. I don’t feel I’m prepared enough. And I told them, another danger is there is this thing we still have to deal with where we were being referred to as foreigners.
So that was my reasoning. We still have security to create. Second, I’m not comfortable with my background and identity, and I said, I’m not creating a good image for these ordinary people who are still confused. They will confuse the whole thing. So I said, I need to stay out.
I’m just trying to tell you. It’s important for me. I never wanted even to become president. It’s not something I worked for, because I was not even sure for my five years in Uganda in the war, four, four and half years in Rwanda here, every single day of that time I was not sure I was going to survive to the next day.
FT: History has a funny way of repeating itself because a couple of years ago, according to what we’ve heard and been told, the party [Rwandan Patriotic Front] came to you and said, we want you to serve a third term.
PK: This is what they did.
FT: And you didn’t want to?
PK: I didn’t want to. We had a long argument. You need to understand these facts. We started it in 2012 or 2013. We had a two-year period, and because I had already had these sentiments, people saying, you know, come 2017 . . . Some people wrote letters to me. There’s a man from Rusizi [in Rwanda’s Western Province]. A local person, but a businessman. They wrote, but several of them, they wrote to me a letter and said, President, we have never had what we have in our lives [now]. It’s only because of you that the country has come together and we have these things.
And then he said, a level of trust has developed among Rwandans because of you. He said, if you go too early, I’m afraid things will fall apart.
FT: But that was my point in a sense. Is that fear justified?
PK: You can ask him. I don’t know, because I’m not the one saying that.
FT: Well, and recent history — for example, Iraq, Afghanistan — is not a happy one in terms of exporting a . . .
PK: Libya. This Libya thing. Syria. You think these countries will be countries again? Not maybe in our lifetime. But these things have happened under the package of wanting to democratise. Colonel Gaddafi was a bad man. I actually had more quarrels with him than anybody.
FT: Is that right? What was your big quarrel about?
PK: It was about him wanting to be seen as the king of Africa and dictating to people and telling people. One time I really lost my cool because of this.
He said, you know, Kagame, you are an agent of western powers, that I am friends with America, I’m friends with the British. I couldn’t help it. I told him, in my personality, in my life, in my upbringing, I would never be anybody’s agent, meaning you are serving somebody else’s interest, you are not serving you. And I said, look back in my history. When I have spent at that time, more than half of my age, I spent it in the trenches. I could not have done that on somebody else’s behalf, never. I said, never, ever, ever point a finger to me and abuse me like that.
It’s like things here must change, this Kagame must go, because that’s what the west is saying. It has come; it’s like, oh, the human rights groups, the champions of democracy of the west are saying . . . the only thing they are saying is, this Kagame hasn’t been doing so badly, but he’s there beyond what we think is the right time for him to stay.
It also reminds me of another conversation. I have many friends in the West. One of them — no, two of them, at different times — they told me, no, but you can do something like has happened in other places; why don’t you groom somebody to take over from you?
Western democracy answers to certain societies who are coming from a certain place. There are elements, good elements of democracy in what we are doing, but [it] doesn’t immediately fit into the western democracy
They went beyond, and they were telling me even some names of our people here. A woman like that, can she be a president? I said, maybe she can. About this, so and so, I said, yes, it’s possible. But then so I turned around and asked him, you’re already suggesting to me those who can actually replace me; that’s fine, so you are determining who replaces me. The other is — it’s really funny — the other is: you are telling me, why don’t you decide who stays in your place so that you remain in control.
Then I said, so there are only these choices you are giving me. You are telling me to go because this is what western democracy wants or thinks, but is that democracy?
Yes, telling me either they choose or I choose. Those are the choices they gave me. They are saying, either you choose who replaces you, or we can choose for you. Then I asked them, I said, there is one constituency you have forgotten. Where are the Rwandan people?
You can see an air of farce about this whole thing, an air of falsehood of . . . let me tell you something else because it applies to me and I think it may be applying to Rwandans: the moment anybody comes to me and thinks he has authority over me and the right to tell me what to do, that’s the time I’m going to do the opposite.
Source: https://amp.ft.com/content/0ec9dc4e-8976-11e7-8bb1-5ba57d47eff7