His grip on power is nearly unwavering. Since becoming president more than two decades ago, he has extended constitutional term limits, clamped down on freedom of the press and curtailed dissent. Journalists have been exiled, even killed; Opposition figures have been jailed or found dead. His country has been reduced to tyranny.
But these dictators are not pariahs, like Russia's Vladimir Putin or Syria's Bashar al-Assad. On the contrary, he is one of the best and most reliable friends in the West: Paul Kagame, the president of Rwanda. Since coming to power in 1994, Mr. Kagame has won his way to the West's generosity. He was invited to speak—no less than that on human rights—at universities such as harvardsYale and Oxford, and was praised by prominent political leaders including Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and former United Nations secretary-general Ban Ki-moon.
It doesn't end there. Western Friends of Mr. Kagame includes FIFA, which held its annual congress at a shiny sports complex in Kigali in March, and the NBA, whose African Basketball League plays in Rwanda. Europe's largest automaker, Volkswagen, runs an assembly plant in Rwanda, and major international organizations such as the Gates Foundation and the World Economic Forum are close partners. Western donors finance a whopping 70 percent of Rwanda's national budget.
But perhaps Mr Kagame's biggest backing is a deal with the British government to take in asylum seekers who are deported from Britain. This controversial bargain, which may contradict international law, has cemented Rwanda's reputation as a loyal partner of the West. Far from authoritarian infighting, Rwanda Mr. Kagame is now hailed as a haven for people fleeing dictatorships.
Mr. Kagame owes much of his success to his skilful political rhetoric, an art form the Rwandans call “ubwenge”. In a press conference where a Rwandan journalist, aware of the risks faced by his less flexible colleagues, hurled softball questions at him, Mr Kagame shined. Often, the target is the West. He sound consistently an anti-imperialist message about how Europe is “violating the rights of the people” and berating the West's “superiority complex”.
This posture made him the leading avatar of a new type of postcolonial ruler. Other populist nationalist presidents such as Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Mexico's Andrés Manuel López Obrador and India's Narendra Modi have also rallied their people behind the same sentiment, establishing themselves as world leaders who are no longer beholden to the West. Often at the heart of their defiant speeches were references to old crimes – the massacres, genocide and usurpations perpetrated by European empires since the 16th century.
Such pleas work because Western leaders still offer grumbling “regret” for such atrocities and rarely apologize, partly out of fear that their countries will have to pay big bucks in reparations. This allows complaints to continue. Many people in the former colony still feel that past contempt is present in a tangible way, evident today in institutions dominated by Western interests, such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, or in international trade and aid negotiations. Postcolonial leaders like Mr. Kagame found much popularity in their insistence that the West must redeem its history, however improbable that may be.
However, the price of avoiding an apology is that Western leaders find their moral authority diminishing. Instead, they engage in conciliatory behavior — offering praise and partnership, not curses. Perhaps nowhere is the dynamic more evident than in Rwanda, where Mr. Kagame with Western leaders is very strong because of recent state grievances. He is very proficient guilt-tripped West, and his punch hit home hard.
The Rwandan genocide of 1994 — in which nearly a million Rwandans, many of them ethnic Tutsi, were killed — was carried out under the noses of UN peacekeepers, who diligently filed reports of the killings while apparently powerless to prevent them. Even though Mr. Kagame's former ambassador to the United States and other political allies have accused him from “triggering” the Rwandan genocide and doing little to prevent it, he has positioned himself as the hero who ended it.
If there is any criticism, Mr. Kagame's tried and tested tactic is to refute any Western leader who has the audacity to preach to impoverished countries democracy, human rights and the rule of law. His rhetoric resonates in a world that desperately needs African success stories, and the West is no exception. Back in 2011, journalist Tristan McConnell explained how Western support for Mr. Kagame was driven by a “genuine desire to fight against the basket continent's image”. A year later, Time magazine named Mr. Kagame as the “embodiment of the new Africa”.
Behind the synopsis lies a darker truth. Since taking power in 1994 as commander-in-chief of Rwanda's military, and then as president, Kagame has conducted rigged elections, taking nearly 99 percent of the vote in 2017. Many of his opponents have vanishedin several cases found murdered, in one case virtually beheaded. The self-styled hero who is said to have ended the Rwandan genocide also leads the force allegedly in charge of the United Nations. murder tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of Hutus and potential acts of “genocide” after the two invasions of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
But despite historical records, Mr. Kagame creates an alternate reality where the West is to blame for his country's ills and he is a brave champion. This anti-imperialist narrative trumps reports by dissidents and journalists who are abused, imprisoned, or forced into exile. It doesn't help that accurate information about the country is hard to come by: Mr. Kagame bans critical foreign journalists, ensuring that international media frequently repeat government propaganda.
The hunger for post-colonial leaders who oppose the West is understandably rooted in the way imperialism continues to structure relations between former colonies and former colonial powers. Justice for colonial-era crimes would also be welcomed by many around the world, even if it's unlikely to happen any time soon. At the very least, Western leaders—starting in England—should do something simple and stop rewarding authoritarians like Mr Kagame.