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NewsDay

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Kagame warned against ‘Mugabe way’

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Rwandan leader Paul Kagame was warned eight years ago not to be like President Robert Mugabe when he won his second term of office as the country’s president, but last year he contested the elections and won another seven-year term, according to a latest WikiLeaks cable. In an editorial soon after his 2003 election victory, […]

Rwandan leader Paul Kagame was warned eight years ago not to be like President Robert Mugabe when he won his second term of office as the country’s president, but last year he contested the elections and won another seven-year term, according to a latest WikiLeaks cable.

In an editorial soon after his 2003 election victory, Canada’s Globe and Mail newspaper said though Kagame had managed to transform the economy and promoted reconciliation largely because of the large amounts of aid he was getting, Western governments should move beyond genocide-related guilt and begin to measure Kagame by the standards they applied to others.

“They and he need look no further than Zimbabwe, a few borderlines to the south, to see what happens when power goes to a strongman’s head,” the paper is quoted as saying in a diplomatic cable just released by WikiLeaks.

Kagame became the country’s leader in 1994 when his Rwandan Patriotic Front overthrew the government and ended the genocide in the country that had killed 800 000 people.

Like Kagame, President Mugabe was seen as a promising leader by the West which supported him in the early 1980s.

But the powerful countries turned against him accusing him of undermining democracy in Zimbabwe and not respecting human and property rights.

President Mugabe, however, accuses the West of attempting to effect a regime change in Harare in a bid to reverse the land reform programme and also thwart the black economic empowerment crusade.