Word: rwanda
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Coffee is far from Rwanda's only success. Its roads are some of the best in Africa, and the entire country will be wireless by the end of the year. Rwanda is also clean, thanks to a ban on plastic bags since 2005 and a mandatory national "tidy up" one afternoon each month, in which even government ministers clean the streets. Partly as a result, and partly because of careful rain-forest management and a mountain gorilla baby boom, Rwanda is also a growing eco-tourism destination. The government says the economy as a whole will grow 6.5% this year...
...Rwanda also scores well on some perennial African problems. It is one of the safest countries on the continent. It boasts the highest percentage of women in parliament anywhere in the world - 49%. Its rate of HIV infection is at 3% - tiny compared to the figure in other small sub-Saharan African development stars, such as Botswana and Namibia - and all its 35,000 aids sufferers are on antiretroviral drugs. It is investing heavily in education. The government is also tackling overpopulation, which - in that it describes a situation of too many people on not enough land - was an underlying...
...first place." They are driven by the imperative of never returning to genocide: make people prosperous enough and build business relations between them, says Kagame, and "they value each other, rather than kill each other." Nevertheless, simply by doing what should be done, but generally isn't, Rwanda makes itself unique. "We all know the list," says Ruxin. "Law and order, electricity, water, sanitation, communications, education and health. But Kagame is the one African leader who gets the basics right...
...critics - gets some of them wrong. Amnesty International says several thousand detainees are being held in long-term detention without trial. Human Rights Watch says Kagame has "equated 'genocidal ideology' with dissent from government policy." Paul Rusesabagina, the central character in the film Hotel Rwanda - in which he shelters Tutsis in Kigali's Mille Collines Hotel - accuses Kagame, a Tutsi, of pursuing vengeance. "Everything has been taken over by the Tutsi. The Hutu ... are intimidated." And it was two Rwandan army invasions in the late 1990s into the Democratic Republic of Congo, in pursuit of fugitive Rwandan génocidaires...
...continent full of distrust for the West, Kagame has more reasons than most for ambivalence. It was Rwanda's second colonial rulers, the Belgians, who formalized the division between Tutsis and Hutus in 1932 by issuing identity cards that specified ethnicity. That divide festered through two Hutu supremacist regimes, which were latterly supported by France. Then it erupted in genocide and the world was nowhere to be seen...