Paul Kagame, (born October 1957, Rwanda), Rwandan military leader and politician, who, as leader of the Rwandan Patriot Front, defeated Hutu extremist forces to end the 1994 Rwandan genocide. In 2000 he became president of Rwanda.
Kagame grew up in exile in Uganda, where his parents had taken him as a young child when Hutu violence toward the Tutsi flared in 1959 during the buildup to Rwandan independence from Belgium. In Uganda he studied at Makerere University in Kampala, before joining the forces of Yoweri Museveni, who overthrew Ugandan Pres. Milton Obote in 1986. Kagame became Museveni’s chief of intelligence and gained a reputation for incorruptibility and severity by enforcing a stringent code of behaviour. Many Ugandans resented the Rwandan presence in their country, however, and, as the 1980s closed, Kagame and three other expatriate Rwandan military leaders formed the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriot Front (Front Patriotique Rwandais; FPR) and plotted an invasion of their homeland. In 1990, while Kagame was studying at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, that invasion—mostly involving Tutsi veterans of the Ugandan army—was undertaken and repulsed. In the process the other three members of the FPR command were killed. Kagame assumed direction of the civil war, which was suspended in August 1993 by a peace agreement that promised—but never delivered—real power sharing.
Early in April 1994 Rwandan Pres. Juvénal Habyarimana, a Hutu, was killed when his plane was shot down over Kigali; this sparked a campaign of genocide against the Tutsi and their moderate Hutu allies. In response, Kagame led a force of 10,000–14,000 FPR soldiers against the Hutu forces perpetrating the genocide. By eschewing direct assaults and utilizing protracted artillery attacks on enemy strongholds, Kagame’s forces were able to minimize casualties and retake the capital, Kigali, in early July. By that time, however, more than 800,000 people had been killed in the genocide. The FPR set up a new government that had for its president a Hutu, Pasteur Bizimungu, but the real power appeared to rest with Kagame, who, at the age of 37, assumed the titles of vice president and minister of defense. In 2000 he was elected president of Rwanda’s transitional government by the National Assembly.
After the genocide, many Hutu forces had fled to neighbouring Zaire (after May 1997, the Democratic Republic of the Congo) and used the country as a base from which to attack Rwanda. Frustrated that Zaire’s government was not taking enough action to stop the attacks, Kagame sent Rwandan troops into the country in late 1996 to battle the Hutu forces. While there, the troops also intervened in the rebellion taking place, supporting Laurent Kabila in his successful quest to depose Zairean president Mobutu Sese Seko. In 1998, after Kabila had been in power for a little more than a year, Kagame shifted support to rebels who sought to oust Kabila. Kagame was one of several African leaders operating military forces in Congo during that country’s civil war—dubbed Africa’s “first world war” for this reason—and he was the subject of much international criticism for Rwanda’s involvement. He supported rebel forces until 2002, when he signed a peace accord and agreed to remove Rwandan troops in exchange for the disarmament and repatriation of Hutu forces in Congo.
During the 2003 presidential campaign, Kagame portrayed himself as a Rwandan rather than a Tutsi and attempted to downplay the existence of ethnic strife in the country. Kagame—who engaged in aggressive campaign tactics against his Hutu rivals, going so far as to arrest opponents’ supporters and forcing some candidates to withdraw from the race—won a landslide victory in the country’s first multiparty elections. He was sworn into office on Sept. 12, 2003, ending the nine-year transitional government. A major focus of his presidency was building national unity and the country’s economy.
In 2006 Rwanda broke diplomatic ties with France after a French judge issued international arrest warrants for several of Kagame’s close associates and called for Kagame to face trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (established by the United Nations Security Council to try those involved in the 1994 genocide), alleging that Kagame and other FPR leaders had ordered the rocket attack that caused the 1994 plane crash that killed Habyarimana. Kagame vehemently denied the accusation and in turn claimed that France had armed and advised the rebels responsible for the genocide. In 2007 the Rwandan government launched a formal investigation into the 1994 plane crash. The results, released in 2010, indicated that Hutu extremist soldiers were responsible for shooting down the plane, in an effort to derail Habyarimana’s peace negotiations with the Tutsi rebels.
In 2010 Kagame sought reelection. In the run-up to the August presidential election, some opposition media outlets were repressed, and several individuals, including an independent journalist and an opposition party leader, were murdered—although Kagame vowed that neither he nor his regime were involved in the killings. Because of this environment, several opposition parties were unable to field candidates; some candidates faced arrest, others fled, and some were excluded from participation. The three candidates who eventually stood against Kagame posed little challenge. Official results indicated that Kagame had been reelected with 93 percent of the vote, and voter turnout was reported as more than 95 percent.