My book review in The Australian:
Rwandan President Paul Kagame is feted across the world, celebrated for rescuing his country after the 1994 genocide and bringing stability to a devastated nation. Kagame’s government has received billions of dollars in aid and weapons for more than 20 years from the US, Israel, Britain and the EU, not to mention the Clinton Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Tony Blair Africa Governance Initiative and many others. Just this year Kagame was invited to speak at the Harvard Business School, and feted in Toronto by its cultural and business elites.
Kagame rules over a country of spectacular beauty, rare mountain gorillas and streets of deceptive cleanliness. He feels protected, confident that his foreign donors will keep the money flowing while internal dissent is extinguished. Few questions are asked about his military forces killing tens — or perhaps hundreds — of thousands of people in the Congo after 1994. Nobody wants to hear about journalists and writers critical of the Kagame government, or military leaders, disappearing or being murdered in the capital Kigali and elsewhere. Grenade attacks against civilian targets are dismissed and rarely reported.
The revelations in this book, one of the finest works of reportage in living memory, reveal the depravity at the heart of modern Rwanda, backed and defended by guilt-ridden Western states. Author Anjan Sundaram, who lived in Kigali for years teaching journalism, funded by the EU and Britain, confronts an EU ambassador about his backing for state terror. “Aren’t you worried about giving money to a dictator?” Sundaram asks. “I have no problem with giving money to a director,” the man replies. “He runs one of the most efficient governments in Africa. I’m proud to be giving him money. By giving him money we influence their policies. We are for freedom of speech. We will influence the government in the right direction.”
Bad News… dismisses this notion as wilful fantasy. Sundaram explains how Kagame and his cronies institute an “army of flatterers” to ask the President only softball questions at press conferences: “Your Excellency, I was asking myself the other day why our government is so capable and professional.” Loyalty is rewarded with favours, money and promotion.
Sundaram, whose fine first book,… Stringer,… reported on the largely ignored Congo conflict from the perspective of a young foreign correspondent, befriends Rwandan journalists in an attempt to understand why the country became an autocracy. He is told about how every part of the country is organised into administrative units to allow monitoring of citizens. There is no privacy. His friend Moses tells him that people want to please the state, fearing punishment if they do not, and will happily report anything suspicious to higher authorities.
Rwandans live in an atmosphere of fear and intimidation. Gibson, a friend of Sundaram, says: “We hide from the government, which wants to see us all the time. So you now see the truth in our country is hidden, you need to look not for what is there, but for what they hide. You cannot pay attention to what they show you, but need to listen to those who are kept quiet. You need to look differently in a dictatorship, you need to think about how to listen to people who live in fear.”
This book’s strength lies in its ability to convey the nightmare of today’s Rwanda and the international community’s complicity in it. Sundaram cites the UN’s choice of Kagame as head of a high-profile committee on improving the welfare of citizens around the world. The group included Bill Gates, Nobel prize-winner Muhammad Yunus and CNN founder Ted Turner. “[UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon] said the committee would be a collection of development ”˜superheroes’. A number of messages of congratulations for Kagame came in from foreign leaders and dignitaries. The President said in response that he was honoured. The more the President’s statements went unchallenged by Rwandan journalists and citizens, the more the world believed in their truth.”
The 1994 genocide permeates the book: for survivors, for outsiders who didn’t help, and for donors looking away once more in the face of repression. “Never again” in the case of Rwanda appears to mean tolerating a dictatorship because, were they to halt aid, donors fear being accused of ignoring a nation in need. Unquestioning Western aid is a justifiable target because Sundaram shows that building roads, schools and infrastructure is only one part of a nation’s rebirth. Without freedom of speech or movement, and civic life, Rwanda is almost guaranteed to face further serious violence.
Bad News… offers no simple solutions to Rwanda’s descent into autocracy. Western states that offer almost uncritical backing of Kagame bear partial responsibility for creating millions of fearful citizens who know that obedience to the leader is essential for survival.Antony Loewenstein is a Middle East-based independent journalist and author of Disaster Capitalism: Making a Killing Out of Catastrophe.
Bad News: Last Journalists in a Dictatorship
By Anjan Sundaram
Allen and Unwin, 240pp, $29.99