Rwanda makes great progress 20 years after genocide

[unhappycamper]

http://www.latimes.com/world/africa/la-fg-rwanda-genocide-20140407,0,326593.story



Life expectancy has doubled, and Rwanda has wowed donors and investors with its economic gains despite President Paul Kagame's increasingly authoritarian ways.

Rwanda makes great progress 20 years after genocide
By Robyn Dixon
April 7, 2014, 4:00 a.m.

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa — In scattered villages on steep green hillsides, many who killed their neighbors in Rwanda's genocide 20 years ago now live side by side with relatives of the dead.

Speech that creates ethnic divisions has been outlawed. Local tribunals called gacaca courts have allowed many offenders to be released from prison in return for confessions and expressions of remorse. And a generation of young people who grew up after the mass killings embody the hope of a new breed of Rwandans who identify not by ethnicity but by nationality.

Rwanda has made stunning progress since what was one of the 20th century's greatest tragedies, when more than 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were slaughtered by Hutu extremists. Life expectancy has doubled since 1994 to more than 60 years. Economic growth consistently reaches 8% annually. And the number of deaths of children under age 5 has plummeted in the last two decades from 230 per 1,000 to 55.

In the years since the hundred days of bloodletting, in which as many as a million people were killed, the small Central African country has wowed donors and investors, though lately human rights advocates have criticized President Paul Kagame for displaying an increasingly authoritarian approach.

[Fred Sanders]

1. Because if you are an authoritarian favouring the rich you must look away, but if you favour the

poor you are deserving of derision, the clear message of the mass media in America.