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)

    When law becomes despotic, morals are relaxed, and vice versa.
    Honoré De Balzac (1799–1850)

    When the President does it, that means that it is not illegal.
    Richard M. Nixon (1913–1992)

    [T]he dignity of parliament it seems can brook no opposition to it’s power. Strange that a set of men who have made sale of their virtue to the minister should yet talk of retaining dignity!
    Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)

    Education must have two foundations—morality as a support for virtue, prudence as a defence for self against the vices of others. By letting the balance incline to the side of morality, you only make dupes or martyrs; by letting it incline to the other, you make calculating egoists.
    —Sébastien-Roch Nicolas De Chamfort (1741–1794)