Thursday, May 26, 2016

Rwanda's Leader Is Both Soloman And Saddam

Rwanda’s leader is both Solomon and Saddam

Paul Kagame wants to forge a sense of national identity from the ashes of genocide

Rwanda's President Paul Kagame speaks during a press conference at IFAD (The International Fund for Agricultural Development) headquarters in Rome on February 22, 2012.AFP PHOTO/ Tiziana Fabi . — © AFP

YESTERDAY

You get the feeling that nothing moves in Kigali, Rwanda’s prim and tidy capital, without Paul Kagame’s say-so. On the drive in from the airport, not a leaf on the palm trees, nor a flower on the intricate floral arrangements, is out of place. There are no slums on the hills, no litter on the pavements and no hawkers on the streets. The traffic is orderly, the police officers polite and, even in the searing heat, motorcyclists wear crash helmets.

Like Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore, Rwanda is being remade in Mr Kagame’s image. A former guerrilla who led an invading force to quell the genocide in 1994, he has presided over his tiny nation like a stern headmaster ever since. Like Singapore in the early years, Rwanda is an intriguing experiment. Like the late Lee, Mr Kagame is one of world’s most intriguing leaders. Stick thin, cerebral and quietly spoken (usually), he is cast as a man with Solomon-like wisdom and Saddam-like ruthlessness.

Anjan Sundaram, an author who is no fan of what he sees as a repressive, almost Orwellian, regime, wrote: “The thing to know about Rwandan President Paul Kagame is not just that he is a dictator responsible for human rights abuses but that, despite this, he has a great many friends.” Indeed, Rwanda is the favourite of an international community desperate for an African success. Mr Kagame has won the syrupy admiration of friends from Tony Blair to Bill Clinton, who called him “one of the greatest leaders of our time”.

This month, Rwanda received a further accolade when the World Economic Forum held its regional event in Kigali. Organisers said that, in east Africa, only tiny Rwanda had the facilities and organisational capacity to host Davos-in-Africa. That is no small thing to say of a country that, just two decades ago, went through one of the most horrifying eruptions of genocide in modern history. In a few short weeks, more than 800,000 Tutsis and their Hutu sympathisers, nearly one in 10 of the population, were clubbed or macheted to death at the government’s instigation.

These days Hutus and Tutsis live side by side in ostensible harmony. On Mr Kagame’s instructions, they rarely refer openly to their ethnicity. The president, a Tutsi, wants to forge a sense of Rwandanness from the ashes of genocide. In the new Rwanda, 1994 is year zero.

Beyond peace, there is development. The economy has grown 6-8 per cent for 15 years, although the population is growing at 2.5 per cent and some 90 per cent of Rwandans are subsistence farmers. The country has made strides in health, education and poverty reduction. It has shot up the World Bank’s ease of doing businessrankings, partly because the president set up a special unit to achieve just that. Two-thirds of its parliamentarians and more than half of Mr Kagame’s cabinet are women.

For such reasons, the aid on which Rwanda still depends keeps coming. At least, say donors, money will be wisely spent, not stolen. Wary of sullying their model pupil’s reputation, they have been loath to criticise. In 2014, the World Bank produced a draft report on private investment in Rwanda, questioning its paucity despite apparently sound policies. The report was watered down before vanishing altogether, provoking grumbling within the bank that Rwanda was being given an easy ride.

Donors did briefly suspend aid after Rwanda was accused of backing rebels in neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo responsible for raping and abducting civilians. But generally they have closed their eyes. Human rights groups have catalogued a series of kidnappings, jailings and assassinations of journalists, dissidents and political rivals both inside Rwanda and beyond. Even the economic performance on which so much of its reputation is based has been questioned. David Himbara, a former economic adviser to Mr Kagame and now in exile in Canada because, he says, he fears for his life, claims growth and poverty figures are manipulated.

There are many repressive African regimes that fiddle the data. Rwanda is given a pass because all but its most dedicated detractors concede that Mr Kagame’s vision is bearing some fruit. Apart from a bit of harrumphing in Washington, few have objected to him staying on. Already in charge for 22 years, he will run for president again next year.

Lee, Singapore’s prime minister for 31 years and a hovering presence for 20 more, played on the “existential” threat of racial tension as justification for his paternalistic stewardship. Mr Kagame, queller of genocide, hardly needs invoke the spectre of violence. Like Lee, he is bending a nation to his will. Like Lee, his obituaries will mostly judge him on results.

david.pilling@ft.com

Wednesday, May 25, 2016

Signs Point To A Catastrophic Event In EgypAir's Crash

Signs Point to a Catastrophic Event in the EgyptAir Disappearance

By Jeff Wise

FRANCE-EGYPT-AIRLINE-GREECE — An EgyptAir flight with 66 aboard vanished overnight between Greece and Egypt. Photo: Thomas Samson/AFP/Getty Images

At approximately 3:30 a.m. this morning local time in Greece — or 8:40 p.m. yesterday Eastern time — EgyptAir flight 804 vanished from air-traffic-control screens over the Mediterranean Sea. The plane, an Airbus A320 short-haul jet carrying 66 passengers and crew, was three and a half hours into a regularly scheduled flight from Paris to Cairo.

The airliner’s last known position was midway between Crete and the Egyptian mainland, ten miles past the boundary between Greek and Egyptian air-traffic-control zones. The plane’s flight crew had been in radio contact with Greek controllers half an hour before, when first entering Greek airspace, but did not acknowledge calls made three minutes before the disappearance.

Flight data automatically transmitted by the aircraft’s GPS locator — officially known as an ADS-B system — was recorded by the flight-tracking site FlightAware and showed that the plane was flying normally at 37,000 feet and 613 mph when transmissions suddenly ceased at 3:29:21 a.m. This type of data is considered highly unreliable, however, and Greek authorities have reported that during the period from 3:27 to 3:29 a.m. that the plane was detected on military radar as it “made a 90 degree swerve left and dropped from 37,000 feet to 15,000 feet before swerving 60 degrees right and vanishing at 10,000 feet.”

The plane’s abrupt loss of contact and apparently steep rate of descent suggest a catastrophic event — something abrupt and highly destructive — took place onboard. But that could mean a number of things:

A bomb attack is one possibility. Two months ago, a man wearing a fake suicide belt hijacked an EgyptAir flight from Alexandria to Cairo and was arrested after the plane landed in Cyprus. And last October a Russian airliner crashed shortly after takeoff from Cairo when a bomb exploded. But Stratfor analyst Fred Burton notes: “EgyptAir Flight 804 originated in Paris. Security measures at Charles de Gaulle Airport are stringent compared with those of many other airports, and security has been raised since the recent attacks in Paris and Brussels.”

A surface-to-air missile attack cannot be ruled out yet, according to Burton. "Though militants in Egypt and surrounding areas are not believed to have access to missiles capable of hitting an aircraft at that altitude," he says.

Murder-suicide is also on the table. In air-crash circles, the name EgyptAir is synonymous with EgyptAir 900, which crashed off Nantucket in 1999 when one of the junior pilots deliberately steered into the ocean.

Spontaneous mechanical failure is also a possibility. In 2002, a 747 flying a China Airlines Flight 611 experienced catastrophic decompression at 35,000 feet when an old repair to its pressure hull suddenly failed; the airframe came apart so quickly that the flight crew had no time to issue a distress call.

Given that the plane’s final moments were captured on military radar, the weather was fair, and the Mediterranean is highly trafficked by both ships and aircraft, it stands to reason that the wreckage would be found pretty quickly. But as of Thursday afternoon, sources are giving conflicting reports about whether debris has been recovered.

Egyptian officials have claimed that debris from the missing aircraft has been found floating in the ocean. Shortly after 1 p.m. Eastern time EgyptAir tweeted that “the Egyptian Ministry of Civil Aviation has just received an official letter from the Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs declaring the finding of wreckage of the missing aircraft No. MS 804.near Karpathos Island.”

But Greek officials are denying that account, saying the wreckage doesn't belong to the missing jet — or maybe to any plane at all. Athanasios Binis, the head of Greece's Air Accident Investigation and Aviation Safety Board,told reporters "the analysis of the debris indicates that it does not come from a plane." He added that his "Egyptian counterpart also confirmed to me that it was not yet proven that the debris came from the EgyptAir flight when we were last in contact."

The New York Times, meanwhile, is reporting that the debris was found more than 200 miles to the south, just off the Egyptian coast.

If either of those locations prove correct, they are more than 100 miles from the last known position of the missing airliner, suggesting that the plane could not have been immediately destroyed, as initial reports suggested, but must have flown on for several minutes before hitting the sea.