Soldier of good fortune: rebel leader Paul Kagame ended the Rwandan genocide. Has he also made that country a model for the rest of Africa?

• Author: Hammer, Joshua
• Position: A Thousand Hills: Rwanda's Rebirth and the Man Who Dreamed It - Book review

A Thousand Hills: Rwanda's Rebirth and the Man Who Dreamed It

by Stephen Kinzer

Wiley, 400 pp.

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In early May 1994, one month into the Rwandan genocide, I was driving down a mountain road in northern Rwanda when my car was overtaken by a speeding convoy. Curious, I followed the vehicles into a nearby compound, where I found myself the only correspondent at a meeting between Paul Kagame, chief of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, and General Romeo Dallaire, commander of the United Nations forces. At the time, the mass murder of the Tutsi population, carried out mostly by Hutu interahamwe militias in league with their military sponsors, was in full swing: eight thousand civilians were dying every day, hacked to death at road blocks, blown to pieces by grenades as they sought refuge inside churches. Kagame's RPF was advancing across the country in one of the greatest military campaigns of recent times, and would eventually send the genocidaires fleeing into Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo). I vividly recall Kagame--pipe-cleaner thin, bespectacled, looking more like a gangly graduate student than the leader of a guerrilla army--emerging stone-faced from his encounter with Dallaire, during which, I was later told, he had scoffed at a UN pledge to send in more troops and vowed that the RPF would pursue total victory. There was a grim determination, a contained ferocity to Kagame that I would never forget; I would encounter it again months later, in the ruins of Kigali, when I interviewed him for Newsweek and listened to him--in his thin, reedy voice--cast scorn on the outside world for its abandonment of Rwanda. His country was determined to make it on its own, he said, without the help of the United Nations or international aid agencies. "Rwanda can go it alone," he assured me.

In the decade and half since then, Kagame has been both canonized and vilified by the outside world. To some, he represents a model African leader--a heroic figure who has brought Rwanda back from the dead and achieved a degree of ethnic reconciliation and economic self-sufficiency that few could have imagined possible in the genocide's aftermath. To his opponents--and there are many of them--he's a ruthless autocrat who tolerates no dissent, oppresses the country's Hutu majority, and has turned a blind eye to the murder and mayhem carried out by his Tutsi brethren. Now comes Stephen Kinzer's A Thousand Hills: Rwanda's Rebirth and the Man Who Dreamed It, one of the first full-length biographies of the rebel commander-turned-Rwandan president. The title suggests a hagiography, and Kinzer makes no secret of his admiration for Kagame as both a...