If We Can Let Syria Burn, Have We Learned Anything at All from Rwanda?

When we think about Rwanda today, it is not the genocide that began 20 years ago that we are likely to recall, but the much more recent incidents of repression which President Paul Kagame is alleged to have perpetrated against opponents at home and abroad, and his exploitation of the chaos in next-door Congo. Kagame has undermined Rwanda's reputation, and its victim status.

We should not, however, allow Kagame's misdeeds to obscure the extraordinary achievement of the Rwandan people over the last two decades -- thanks in part to Kagame himself. At an event at Yale University commemorating the mass killing, I had a long conversation with Yvette Rugasaguhunga, a Rwandan diplomat who as a Tutsi teenager had survived the killings by hiding with a succession of Hutu families, almost all of whom were at the same time actively slaughtering her own people. Her father, her brother, and her grandparents were murdered. (CONTINUED)

FULL ARTICLE HERE: If We Can Let Syria Burn, Have We Learned Anything at All from Rwanda?