Rwanda - Paul Kagame and the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF)

The man is a Rwandan Tutsi, born in Rwanda, and residing there today. Although Kagame is technically Rwanda's vice president, he is the most powerful man in the Tutsi homelands of Rwanda and Burundi and probably the most powerful man that either of those two precarious states have known since they both became independent in 1962. But most of his life he lived in Uganda, during that country's most wretched years-and there's the twist. The very wretchedness of that period helped bring the Watutsi and their son Kagame back to Rwanda.

The Uganda in which Kagame matured was a nether world, a place of attenuated pain, both psychological and physical. This, the Watutsi shared with their Ugandan hosts and helped them bear, first the nightmare of Amin, then two more nightmares. With little more outside help than refugee Watutsi could provide, the people of Uganda finally ended those nightmare years, and when they did, the Watutsi were not without influence.

First among these influentials was young Paul Kagame, Rwandan refugee, intelligence chief for all of Uganda . . . and a key organizer of the RPF. The Tutsi front was formed by the guerrilla years its leadership had spent with Yoweri Museveni's National Resistance Army, which drew its strength from popular support. This meant, above all, discipline. Rape was punishable by death, and a summary execution for just such an offense was meted out to a Tutsi fighter in the midst of 1994's 14-week war for Rwanda. The front demanded no privileges for the Watutsi, though there was little rhetorical nonsense, either: It was clear that majority rule would be balanced by minority rights. And there was clearly a danger that with meager resources, it could not control the climate of terror.

As a member of Uganda's military, Kagame was able to apply for a course in tactics given by the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. In fact (and reflecting in part Tutsi chutzpah), Kagame was in Kansas in October 1990, the very month he and a close comrade-in-arms, Fred Rwigyema, had planned to invade Rwanda. The invasion went ahead anyway, and it went well, until France put together a combined force of French troops, Zairois troops, Belgian troops and French-trained Hutu paras. In 1991, his movement launched its last frustrated invasion. Again, it went well, but with the prospect of intervention again hanging on the horizon, he stopped short in the north and agreed to talks. These were to drag on for two years in the Tanzanian town of Arusha at the foot of Mt. Kilimanjaro. At last, late in 1993, Rwanda's hard-line president agreed in priniciple to terms that called for a moderate Hutu to be installed as president and another as prime minister. The hard-line president signed a formal cease-fire, Rwanda's even harder-line military was enraged, and a large question began to loom as to whether Rwanda's government would or could fulfill the terms to which it had agreed. As he watched from his camps along the Biumba road, this was the chessboard upon which Kagame had to focus all his strategic faculties: French armor in Hutu hands, French heavy weapons, a Hutu military for which France and Belgium had successfully bought time for a huge buildup-Hutu airborne troops and 30,000 regulars, all trained by the French. Against this, he had no armor and no heavy weapons, just mortars and rocket-propelled grenades that Uganda had to pretend it didn't supply. As for training, it's basically the homegrown discipline of Museveni's children's crusade, plus Kagame's course, which was in tactics, not strategy, as American reporters were wont to boast.