The league had provided Kagame with tickets in thanks for his efforts developing the game of basketball in Africa. “President Kagame and his family are very knowledgeable N.B.A. fans,” league commissioner Adam Silver noted, “and we appreciate his support and that of other African leaders to grow the game across the continent.”
In some ways Kagame—who has ruled over Rwanda since the rebel Rwandan Patriotic Front (R.P.F.), which he commanded, won a civil war against the genocidal Hutu regime, twenty-five years ago this month—seems an unlikely candidate for such treatment. For a quarter century, he has maintained power through familiar authoritarian means—rewriting constitutions to establish one-party rule and extend term limits, administering elections in which he received up to 99 percent of the vote. His reign has also been marked by widespread human-rights abuses, likely including the assassination of political opponents.
Yet he remains widely popular in the international community, celebrated not just courtside at Oracle Arena but by Western leaders, such as Bill Clinton, who called Kagame a “brilliant man” who has “freed the heart and the mind of his people,” and awarded him with the Clinton Global Initiative’s Global Citizen Award. As recently as 2009, Philip Gourevitch hailed him in the pages of The New Yorker as “one of the most formidable political figures of our age.” Many of these international supporters acknowledge that he has become increasingly autocratic over the years, but for them Kagame remains above all the hero who stopped a genocide and, in the process, saved perhaps hundreds of thousands of lives.
A close examination of Kagame’s personal and political life reveals a more complicated story. In many ways, Kagame can be counted among those responsible for the genocide’s start, and bringing the killing to an end was less a humanitarian priority than a natural consequence of his coming to power. Meanwhile, everything Kagame has done in office suggests that he was not corrupted by that power but that he was brutal from the very beginning. FULL STORY
https://harpers.org/archive/2019/08/brutal-from-the-beginning-paul-kagame-rwanda/