Yesterday's elections in Rwanda appear set to herald a landslide return to power of President Paul Kagame, a Tutsi in a land that is 85 per cent Hutu, nine years after the country was convulsed by the genocidal murders of more than half a million Tutsis and moderate Hutus.
Some 3.9 million voters were eligible to vote across the tiny, crowded central African country of rolling green hills and extinct volcanoes where more than 60 per cent of its 8.2 million people live on less than $1 a day. From independence in 1962 until the genocide, they had been ruled exclusively by two single-party Hutu regimes.
Mr Kagame, the former rebel leader of the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF), became president in 2000 as head of a government of national reconciliation, and is widely admired at home and abroad as an important moderating voice of national forgiveness, a bulwark against a renewal of communal butchery. He has set out to eradicate tribal differences - no longer do Rwandans carry cards that identify them as Hutu or Tutsi and the new constitution makes it a crime to preach ethnic hatred. His government has also embarked on a delicate programme of reintegrating former low-level Hutu militiamen, many guilty of the most appalling crimes, back into their old communities. After voting yesterday he called the election "a big democratic step", proof that "ethnicity is on the way to being a thing of the past".
That Mr Kagame is also seen by human rights organisations and the democratic opposition as manifesting dictatorial tendencies may seem paradoxical. Yet both realities are true. Amnesty and Human Rights Watch complain that election workers have been intimidated and some have mysteriously disappeared. Key opposition parties have been banned. A report by the International Crisis Group bluntly concluded that "the RPF wields almost exclusive military, political and economic control and tolerates no criticism or challenge to its authority".
Mr Kagame is opposed by Mr Faustin Twagiramungu, a moderate Hutu who lost 32 members of his own family in the carnage launched by his own community. He is a former prime minister who served in the Kagame cabinet along with a number of other "disappeared" leaders of his banned party, the Democratic Republican Movement (MDR). But, despite his opposition to ethnic politics, he is being unfairly demonised by the RPF as a "divisionist" whose policies will lay the basis for a return of genocide.Increasing concern is rightly being voiced by European governments and NGOs. Mr Kagame is not the first honourable leader to believe that democracy can be curtailed to stem volatile communal tensions and to try to forge national unity at the point of a gun. But, as Europeans will remind him, he should look hard at the experience of Yugoslavia under Tito. Suppressed, ethnic tensions will eventually out at a terrible price. The democratic road is perhaps more difficult and precarious, but it is surer, and Mr Kagame should use the authority and security provided by his renewed mandate to think again.