Rwanda's new Government is committed to building a multiparty democracy in which ethnic origin is no longer an issue, according to Paul Kagame, the country's new Vice President and the man who led a rebel army to victory in the civil war here.
Five months after the most recent burst of heavy fighting, which killed countless thousands and forced thousands of others to flee, international human rights organizations are present, and Mr. Kagame said in an interview that others were welcome to join them and the United Nations observers posted here to help protect returning refugees.
The country is destitute, buildings are in rubble and everything from the military to the judicial system must be rebuilt. As a first step, a Parliament will convene within two weeks, its members chosen by the country's political parties, Mr. Kagame said, but elections will not be held for five years.
While history is replete with third-world revolutionary leaders who fought for democracy only to become dictators, Rwanda does not have the feel of a military dictatorship at the moment. Soldiers are omnipresent, patrolling the streets of the capital in mismatched uniforms, but that is not surprising, given that the country has no police force and the former army is reorganizing just across the border in Zaire. Political Pluralism
While the Rwandan Patriotic Front is certainly the largest and most powerful organization in the country, it has not sought to impose a one-party state.
Officials even object to the portrayal of the new Government as being dominated by the Patriotic Front or by the Tutsi ethnic group, which is how they say it is continually characterized by the Western press.
"It is unfair," said Alphonse Nkubito, the new Minister of Justice and a former human rights campaigner. He is Hutu and not a member of any political party; he said he had no intention of joining one, because a judicial official should not be political.
Sitting among the rubble on the fourth floor of the Ministry of Justice building, of which just about every window is shattered, Mr. Nkubito said that of the more than 800 judges in the country before war broke out in 1990, he believes that all but a few were killed or have fled to Zaire. Bringing Refugees Home
To draw back the refugees, most of whom are members of the Hutu ethnic group, Mr. Kagame said the Government wants to send officials to the camps in Zaire to talk with them. The only obstacle, he said, is concern about the officials' safety. He said that the Government had asked the United Nations forces here to provide security but that they indicated it was beyond their mandate.
In an effort to reduce the ethnic divisiveness that has plagued Rwanda, Mr. Kagame said, personal identification cards will no longer indicate the holder's ethnicity. Any reference to ethnic origin will be eliminated from all official documents, which are prolific in this bureaucracy-laden state.
Questions have been raised about how committed the new Government is to bringing the refugees home.
But Charles Murigande, adviser for foreign affairs to President Pasteur Bizimungu, said the Government definitely wants the refugees to come home. "They are all Rwandese, and they deserve the right to live here, " said Mr. Murigande, 36 years old, who grew up in a refugee camp in Burundi, and has just returned to Rwanda after teaching at Howard University in Washington for the last five years. "That is what we fought for. We know what it is like to be refugees." Ethnic Designations Dropped
Doing away with ethnic classification on Government documents will go far toward bringing peace and stability to Rwanda, Mr. Murigande said. "It was the only way they could maintain their discriminatory system," he said about the former Government. "Otherwise, you could not easily tell who was a Hutu and who was a Tutsi."
After many generations of intermarriage, he said, if you try to tell whether someone is Hutu or Tutsi by looking at him, you will be wrong more than half the time.
"If someone wants to call himself Hutu or Tutsi, that is his business," Vice President Kagame said. "He is not going to go to prison for that. But it can no longer be used to infringe on somebody's rights."
Many refugees have said they would feel more confident about returning if the former Government soldiers were part of the new army. Getting the former soldiers back is seen as critical for the new Government, because the longer they remain in Zaire, the more time they have to let their anger grow and to develop into a guerrilla army in exile. Camps for Former Soldiers
Mr. Kagame, who is also Minister of Defense, said that more than a thousand former Government soldiers had already returned and he was encouraging more to do so. But he said that before they would be integrated into the new army, they would be taken to camps.
"We need to talk to them, to educate them about our programs, and even remind them of their responsibilities, that they are supposed to protect civilians, not be involved in killing them." He said that given the country's current plight, the former Government soldiers would also have to get used to not being paid.
