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Rwanda's Leaders Vow to Build a Multiparty State for Both Hutu and Tutsi

Rwanda's Leaders Vow to Build a Multiparty State for Both Hutu and Tutsi
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September 7, 1994, Section A, Page 10Buy Reprints
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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.

The new Government was formed in July, during two days of meetings of the country's political parties. Only the formal ruling party, the National Republican Movement for Democracy and Development, and the Coalition for the Defense of the Republic have been excluded from participating in the new Government. It was the armed youth wings of these parties that were responsible for most of the massacres of members of the minority Tutsi when fighting broke out in April.

The massacres began after the President, Juvenal Habyarimana, was killed on April 6 in a mysterious plane crash along with the President of neighboring Burundi, which is peopled by the same ethnic groups. The Rwandan Patriotic Front, led by Mr. Kagame, who was a general, fought the Government forces and militias and ultimately defeated them. Differences on Some Issues

Under the terms of a peace agreement signed at one stage during the civil war, in August 1993, elections were to be held in 1996. The agreements, known as the Arusha Accords, for the Tanzania town where they were signed, also called for integration of the rebel and Government armies and, in general, governance by the rule of law and respect for human rights. The new Government will adhere to the agreement in principle, Mr. Kagame said, but it does not feel bound by all of the details.

One issue on which there was disagreement between the Patriotic Front and the other parties at the July meetings was over how to deal with public officials who served in the former Government. The Front wanted to exclude all former officials from holding any position in the new Government, Mr. Nkubito said. The other parties argued this was too severe. Eventually, a compromise was reached -- only those who served in the highest levels of a ministry would be barred.

There was also disagreement over the timetable for elections. The country's Prime Minister Faustin Twagiramungu, who is a member of the Movement for a Democratic Republic Party, the largest after the Patriotic Front, wanted to follow the Arusha Accords, but on this, the Front prevailed.

Mr. Kagame said it was not unreasonable to delay elections for five years given what the country has gone through.

Of the 22 Cabinet positions, nine are held by members of the Patriotic Front.

The integration of the former Rwandan soldiers into the army that is now made up exclusively of Patriotic Front soldiers is another matter on which the new Government will not necessarily follow the Arusha Accords. That agreement, signed when the Front was the rebel army, provided that it would have 40 percent of the places in the army. General Kagame said he was not beholden to any formula. Every Rwandan was eligible to join the army, he said, as long as he was qualified, and whether he was Hutu or Tutsi would not be a factor.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 10 of the National edition with the headline: Rwanda's Leaders Vow to Build a Multiparty State for Both Hutu and Tutsi. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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