Paul Kagame

Paul Kagame, born in 1957, president of Rwanda (2000- ) and rebel leader in the 1994 overthrow of the Rwandan government. Kagame was born in southern Rwanda. A Tutsi, he grew up in refugee camps in Uganda after his family fled Rwanda’s 1959 anti-Tutsi revolution. After some schooling in the camps, he became a fighter in the Ugandan rebel National Resistance Army in the 1980s and rose to head its military intelligence. Kagame helped create the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) in 1987, made up mostly of Tutsi refugees in Uganda and some moderate Hutu, which planned the overthrow of Rwanda’s Hutu government. When the RPF invaded Rwanda from Uganda in 1990, sparking a civil war between the Hutu and Tutsi, Kagame was taking an officers’ training course at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. After RPF commander Major General Fred Rwigyema was killed and the invasion began to flounder, Kagame returned to take command. He was regarded as a brilliant guerrilla tactician, a strict disciplinarian, and a proud but reserved leader committed to democratic principles. Ethnic violence escalated after Rwanda’s Hutu president, Juvénal Habyarimana, was killed in a plane crash in April 1994. Over the next several months it is estimated that between 500,000 and 1 million Rwandans were massacred and 1.2 million others fled the country. By mid-July, the RPF forces made a final, victorious assault. An RPF-backed government was established with Pasteur Bizimungu as president and Kagame as vice president and defense minister, although Kagame was considered the country’s true leader. Bizimungu resigned the presidency in March 2000 after clashing with the RPF, and Kagame became Rwanda’s new president. He oversaw the adoption of a new constitution and was elected to a seven-year term as president in August 2003.