President Paul Kagame has stated that outsiders have repeatedly sought to promote divisive politics as a means of eroding the unity Rwandans have built over the years, but such efforts have not succeeded. He made the remarks while addressing the 17th Congress of the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF), where he serves as party chairman. “The first place where outsiders who seek to destroy us have failed is with our citizens,” he told members of the RPF Congress on December 19 at the party’s headquarters. “They tried to divide Rwandans again, to create conflict among them, but our people resisted—and those efforts failed,” he added. Kagame noted that the inability to divide Rwandans stems from the enduring unity forged in the aftermath of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi, where more than a million lives were lost. “I do not know of any nation with citizens better than ours,” he noted. “I say this because of where we have come from: divisionist politics, genocide. And yet we have reached a point where our people stand together, even as the world keeps trying to take them back to that history.”
