Op-Ed | Why did Tufts give a platform to a dictator?
By Alex Gladstein
Published: Thursday, April 24, 2014
Updated: Thursday, April 24, 2014
On Tuesday April 22, Tufts University gave a very warm welcome to
Rwandan President Paul Kagame. Fletcher Dean Stavridis and President
Monaco told a packed Cabot Auditorium audience that they were
"thrilled" and "honored" to have His Excellency on campus to discuss
Rwanda's road to recovery 20 years after the horrific Tutsi genocide.
On an official event webpage, Kagame was described as Rwanda's first
democratically-elected president, a United Nations leader and a
statesman setting his country on a course of "reconciliation, nation
building and socioeconomic development."
After a 20-minute lecture by Kagame, Tufts officials posed three
pre-selected questions, and he was able to answer four more from the
audience. It was, by any measure, a wonderful event for the Rwandan
leader, who had ample time to tout his achievements with regard to
economic growth, private investment, ethnic harmony and the
cleanliness, efficiency and stability of his country's cities. When
finished, he received a standing ovation, and Dean Stavridis thanked
him amid photo-ops for a "candid and wonderful" conversation. Tufts'
public relations office released a statement saying that the
university was "pleased that the event was well-attended and the
audience fully engaged."
The question is: how many of the organizers or audience members knew
that Paul Kagame is a murderous dictator? Before you turn away in
disbelief, consider the following facts.
Despite Tufts officials' claims, Kagame is no democrat. He won his
first election in 2003 with 95 percent of the vote, in a contest where
critics said the opposition was "virtually excluded from campaigning."
During his second election in 2010, Kagame jailed political rivals and
shuttered critical newspapers en route to winning 93 percent of the
vote. As The Guardian observed, "opposition groups have been excluded,
journalists have been intimidated and dissenting voices have been
silenced, sometimes violently." A former party official in exile was
shot in the stomach after voicing criticism of Kagame. Meanwhile, a
critical journalist was killed, and a deputy leader of an opposition
party was found beheaded. One opponent, Victoire Ingabire, was
arrested soon after launching her campaign. She is still in prison
today.
Once Rwanda's liberator, Kagame has spent two decades building a harsh
authoritarian regime, working hard to consolidate power and extinguish
dissenting voices. He operates a police state using the national army
and his political party, the Rwandan Patriotic Front. According to
Susan Thomson, a Rwanda expert at Colgate University, "The RPF
saturates every aspect of life in Rwanda ... they know everything: if
you've been drinking, if you've had an affair, if you've paid your
taxes." Reporters Without Borders calls Kagame a "predator of the
press," while Human Rights Watch has observed "a long-established
pattern of assassination and attempted assassination of Rwandan
government critics." Freedom House designates Rwanda with its lowest
freedom ranking, on par with Iran and Zimbabwe and worse than Burma
and Russia.
After taking power, Kagame orchestrated massacres of Hutus in Rwanda
and in neighboring countries. In a vivid recent report The Wall Street
Journal describes how, in the chaos after the 1994 genocide, Kagame's
army "conducted its own mass slaughters across Rwanda, rounding up
unarmed Hutu civilians by the thousands and machine-gunning them." In
1996, Kagame started a war with neighboring Zaire, now the Democratic
Republic of the Congo. The International Rescue Committee estimates
that more than five million people have died as a result of this
military campaign. I'll repeat: five million people.
Remember Tufts' official campus statement about Kagame being a U.N.
leader? Well, a U.N. investigation found that his army and allies
"killed tens of thousands of innocent refugees" in the Congolese
jungles, while pillaging a fortune in gold and other precious metals.
According to a 545-page report, "the majority of the victims were
children, women, elderly people and the sick, who were often
undernourished and posed no threat to the attacking forces." Columbia
University professor Howard French claims that Kagame's campaigns
against Rwandan and Congolese Hutu have killed as many as 300,000
people.
In 2012 the head of the U.S. war crimes office warned Kagame that he
could face prosecution at the International Criminal Court for arming
rebel groups in the Congo. Again, an official in the Obama
administration has suggested that Kagame has committed war crimes. The
U.N. has also presented detailed evidence that Kagame was financing
M23, a particularly notorious death squad founded by Bosco Ntaganda.
Nicknamed "The Terminator", Ntaganda is a warlord on trial in The
Hague, where witnesses testified that he personally used child
soldiers and ordered troops to rape and kill civilians.
Despite all of the widely-available evidence, President Kagame did not
have to face a single question at Tufts' April 22 event about human
rights, attacks on dissidents, massacres or his support for armed
groups. To the great disgrace of Tufts alumni, parents, donors and
current students, the administration chose to genuflect before a man
who should have been taken to task.
When Columbia University hosted Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the school as an
institution made it categorically clear that the Iranian leader was
there to be heard in the spirit of a lively debate that did not exist
inside the dictatorship of Iran, and the school's president sharply
challenged Ahmadinejad on the controversial human rights issues.
Despite the fact that Kagame stands accused of a much larger number of
deaths than Ahmadinejad, Tufts made no such statement. Instead, anyone
in the audience at Cabot would have had to figure out Kagame's crimes
on their own, given that pre-event materials portrayed him as a
democratic hero.
The burden for holding Kagame accountable was to be shouldered by two
students, both who had the courage to criticize a powerful world
leader, face to face. One, a Tufts undergraduate, challenged Kagame on
the Rwandan educational system, where teachers have been arrested for
not following the "official" government version of the genocide which
downplays the deaths of tens of thousands of Hutus. Another, a
Fletcher student, asked what Kagame had to say about rumors of him
running for a third term, which would violate the Rwandan
constitution. Kagame quickly brushed off the first accusation as a
media fabrication, and charmed the audience by laughing off the second
question, along with the moderators and everyone else in the room.
Of course, it is likely that Kagame would have never agreed to come to
Tufts if the agreement had included focused criticism on his human
rights abuses. In an attempt to bring big issues and big global
players to campus, Tufts officials instead made an intellectual
sacrifice and allowed a dictator to be whitewashed. The result was a
terrific opportunity for Kagame to gain international credibility at a
highly-respected institution in a format he knew he could control and
spin for a positive outcome.
Filip Reyntjens, a Rwanda expert and professor of African Law and
Politics at the University of Antwerp, has stated that "there is
overwhelming evidence of responsibility for war crimes and crimes
against humanity" against Kagame. In a 2013 interview, Reyntjens said
that Kagame's crimes "rank with those perpetrated by former Iraqi
president Saddam Hussein or Sudanese leader Omar al-Bashir." For all
his "vision and ambition," he said, Kagame is "probably the worst war
criminal in office today."
And yet, this man was presented to the Tufts student body as a role
model. For that, the president and trustees of Tufts owe the campus
community a detailed explanation.
http://www.tuftsdaily.com/mobile/op-ed/op-ed-why-did-tufts-give-a-platform-to-a-dictator-1.2865990
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