Paul Kagame
There is an excellent article by Philip Gourevitch in the May 4 edition of The New Yorker. Click here for the abstract and a link to the full text. It takes the reader from a micro view of life in Rwanda to a macro view of the politics and wars involving Rwanda. Basically, it's about the strides that Rwanda has made since the genocide in 1994.
At first, I thought the article was just going to be about individual lives of people and the after effects of the genocide. In regards to the genocide, justice, if it can be called that, has been in the form of truth commissions (a system called Gacaca) where the guilty parties in the genocide confess their crimes and are given relatively light prison sentences. It just seems too overwhelming to try and sentence all the guilty to lengthy prison sentences.
Gourevitch interviews both the Tutsi survivors and the Hutu killers who live amongst each other once the killers are released from prison. It's a weird comingling. The interesting part is reading the reactions of the survivors to this living situation and the openness of the killers in describing the crimes that they committed.
The article then moves to a more regional focus where Gourevitch recounts the ongoing battles of the past 15 years among the national armies of Rwanda and Congo and the rebel Tutsi and Hutu armies within the nations. Allegiances shift as the years go by. But common in all of it are the endless massacres and rapes suffered by the civilian populations. The history though sad is epic.
The common thread through the article is the tireless efforts of the Rwandan leader and Tutsi Paul Kagame (shown above). Rwanda has a long way to go to alleviate its poverty, but it has made great strides in getting its economy going. (an interesting tidbit: its parliament is mostly made up of women). Kagame seems to have been instrumental in keeping Rwanda together. He has done it with a lot of compromise, painful compromise at times.
I couldn't help sensing a lesson in Rwanda's experience (the compromising) and maybe a comparison with Barack Obama, another skinny leader with roots from nearby Kenya.
UPDATE: The Wikipedia page for Kagame is much less flattering of the man than Gourevitch's article. A number of human rights organizations have criticized the Kagame-led government and armed forces for civil rights abuses, press restrictions, and mass killings. Perhaps some of the accusations towards Kagame are unjustified, but there is too much smoke around him to believe that he's not guilty of some abuses and/or crimes.
