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Can censorship help heal Rwanda?

Just eighteen years after genocide, this tiny East African nation is an international success story. Just don’t mention ethnic groups or criticize the government.

Paul Kagame’s Rwanda is booming, with impressive economic development and strides in public health, since the genocide that killed hundreds of thousands in 1994. But that success comes at a price: speech about ethnic groups and the government is now extremely restricted. How this traumatized country’s history may challenge absolute American faith in free expression.

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Comments

The issue is not censorship but dictatorship itself. A regime dependent on 10% of the population cannot entrust its survival to a cohesive 90% whose last political memory was trying to exterminate them. A confidant of Margaret Thatcher once said that Britain needed her to "hang on" (by lawful democratic means) until the opposition "Labour becomes sane." Similarly, I doubt if Kagame, even with good will, will make any serious effort to democratize until "democracy" in his neighborhood becomes "sane"-- fostering tolerance and good government rather than clan favoritism, corruption, and incompetence.