New book tells Museveni’s role in Kagame rise to power
By Sunday Vision
Sunday, 14 June 2009
Kampala, Uganda: EVERYTHING important in Rwanda happens on a hill, so it was logical for Paul Kagame’s mother to take him onto a hillside to be murdered.” This is the stunning opening sentence of the book A Thousand Hills, Rwanda’s Rebirth and the Man Who Dreamed it, written by American bestselling author Stephen Kinzer, a former New York Times journalist.
The just released book tells the dramatic story of Kagame, a wretched refugee in Uganda who shaped one of the most audacious covert operations in the history of guerrilla warfare and emerged as a strong leader who managed to rebuild his country from the ruins of genocide and devastation.
Drawing on extensive interviews with Kagame himself and with people who knew him at every stage of his life, Kinzer recounts what he describes as one of the great untold stories of modern revolution.
“It has recovered from civil war and genocide more fully than anyone imagined possible and is united, stable and at peace. Its leaders are boundlessly ambitious. Rwandans are bubbling over with a sense of unlimited possibility.” The author traces Kagame through his years as an angry student in Uganda and recounts his early fascination with revolutionaries like Che Guevara.
He describes how Kagame built a secret army, the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF), from his host county and took over the command of the scattered RPF after their initial defeat and the killing of Fred Rwigyema in 1990. He traces the four-year war Kagame waged in the Rwandan bush, a war that effectively stopped the genocide but led to the exodus of hundreds of thousands of Hutu refugees.
The book, extracts of which will be published by Sunday Vision, gives an interesting and hitherto little known insight in the role Uganda and President Yoweri Museveni played in the entire story.
For many Tutsi refugees who had fled to Uganda in the 1960s to escape killings by Hutu gangs, Museveni was to become ‘a combination of hero, protector, and role model’. “Museveni had already helped overthrow one Ugandan leader, Idi Amin. Pushed out of the new region and ablaze with ambition and revolutionary zeal, he was convinced he could overthrow another”, Kinzer writes.
The Ugandans in the National Resistance Army and the two Rwandans who joined them, Kagame and Rwigyema, shared the same goal: “to replace a detested regime with one of their own”.
“Both admired Museveni and… shared with him the same left-leaning nationalist views, distrust of the West, hatred of dictatorship and belief in the redemptive powers of popular warfare.”
The book describes how Museveni came under increasing pressure to get rid of the Rwandans in the NRM after he had taken power. It also recounts Museveni’s fury when he was told about the RPF’s attack on October 1, 1990, while he was attending a UN summit in New York.
“In the months before, they (Ugandans) had suspected that their Rwandan comrades were planning something,” Kinzer writes.
Only after it began, however, did they realise how fully Rwandans had penetrated the Ugandan army and used it for their own purposes. This realisation infuriated Museveni. He became even angrier when he realised how much weaponry defecting soldiers had stolen from his army.”
After the initial anger, however, Ugandan leaders began to see how an RPF victory might help them. “It would not only rid Uganda of a long-festering refugee crisis but also bring a friendly regime to power in Rwanda.”
They then quietly started supporting the RPF during its years at war. “They were natural allies. Senior RPF commanders had fought alongside President Museveni when he was a rebel and served in his army after he took power,” the book says.
“Like him, they were products of an Anglophone tradition, revolutionary passion, and the utopian ideal of African socialism.”
While the book gives detailed accounts of the RPF’s fight to power, it glosses over other events, such as Rwanda’s invasion and occupation of neighbouring Congo and the clashes with Ugandan forces in Kisangani, which left hundreds of people dead.
