(3 of 3)
TIME: Is there a sense in which, if you're trying to avoid a genocide, then there has to be some sacrifices in freedom? For instance, not allowing people to incite ethnic hatred. Is Rwanda free, or free within limits right now?
Kagame: I think there is a lot of freedom, and with time, it is only increasing. But if people expected us to start from 100%, and I don't know where that exists anyway, even in the countries that come to give us lessons. But for us, first of all we have to create institutions, laws, we have to educate people and move forward and see these freedoms constantly increase, to the highest level we can take them.
As early as 1994, immediately after the genocide, some people came here from Europe and they were asking us: 'When are you going to have elections?' And I thought these people were crazy. Elections by who? In what situation? We were busy battling all sorts of problems. Displaced people, inside and outside. The dead were still lying on the streets. I could see from this statement from these people that maybe they weren't ill-intentioned, but they were absolutely ignorant.
We are very mindful of our history. For instance, in our past, power has created problems in Rwanda. People used to think it was just a problem between Hutus and Tutsis. But when they came to power, even Hutus had their own conflicts. There was a power struggle between Hutus from the south and Hutus from the north. This had nothing to do with the Tutsis. So we looked at this and said there are many things that can create problems. First: ethnicities. Second: power. We need to put institutions and structures in place that we avoid exclusion of any kind. So power-sharing became one of the pillars of our constitution. And that's how we came to embrace things like consensus-building. We want people to buy into what is being done in the country and feel they are part of it. And we say you have to play the politics of inclusion. These became our guiding principles.
TIME: How do you explain the 2003 election figure, recording that you won 95% of the vote? A lot of people look at that and say: 'That's just not credible.'
Kagame: Why? The burden is on them to prove their case. But I can prove my case. It all depends on the context in the country. In our case, what were the circumstances? People coming out of a genocide. A lot of chaos. So people wanted peace and security, to break away from the past. And they really focused on what could bring that. And what was it? People said the Rwandan Patriotic Front were the ones who stopped the genocide. They have worked very hard to return security to the country. We reassured everyone even those who took part in the genocide, apart from the masterminds, we gave them hope. So the all the minds of the country were tuned to this.
And when they looked at the candidates, they saw people who had been in politics for so many years who could give them nothing. They saw people who had been in exile and who came back for the elections and thought they could build on ethnic sentiments. It didn't work. They also thought that foreigners would prop them up and make them President. But that kind of politics doesn't work any more here. And they lost miserably. You know what the turnout was? 96%. Everybody turned out to vote. People were simply united in voting for what might bring peace. Maybe in 2010, it will different, because there will be different circumstances, because progress will have been made.
TIME: There this enduring mystery over how the genocide could ever have happened. What made people behave like that?
Kagame: It's not easy to explain. Some of the things that were done, I still cannot speak about. We have to do research into it, we have to look into ourselves and work out why it happened in Rwanda. People were killing members of their own family. Fathers were killing their own children because some of them resembled their wife, who was a Tutsi. How do you explain that?