Paul Kagame - Vice President and Minister of Defence

Vice President and Minister of Defence

The post-Genocide Rwandan government took office in Kigali in July 1994; it was based loosely on the Arusha accords, but Habyarimana's party was outlawed and the RPF took over the positions it had been assigned. The military wing of the RPF was renamed to the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) and became the national army. Paul Kagame assumed the dual roles of Vice President and Minister of Defence while Pasteur Bizimungu, a Hutu who had been a civil servant under Habyarimana before fleeing to join the RPF, was appointed President. Bizimungu and his Cabinet had some control over domestic affairs, but Kagame remained commander-in-chief of the army and was the de facto ruler of the country.

Read more about this topic:  Paul Kagame

Famous quotes containing the words vice president, vice, president, minister and/or defence:

    Consider the vice president, George Bush, a man so bedeviled by bladder problems that he managed, for the last eight years, to be in the men’s room whenever an important illegal decision was made.
    Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)

    Virtue sometimes pretends. Vice is always sincere.
    Mason Cooley (b. 1927)

    A President must call on many persons—some to man the ramparts and to watch the far away, distant posts; others to lead us in science, medicine, education and social progress here at home.
    Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)

    But, my dear, you cannot live in isolation from the human race, you know.
    John Clifford, U.S. screenwriter, and Herk Harvey. Minister (Stan Levitt)

    They aroused me to a determination to understand more fully the position of women, and the character of those men who talk so much of the need of our being “protected”Mremoving from us, meanwhile, what are often the very weapons of our defence [sic], occupations, and proper and encouraging remuneration.
    Harriot K. Hunt (1805–1875)