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, minister and/or defence:

    By rendering the labor of one, the property of the other, they cherish pride, luxury, and vanity on one side; on the other, vice and servility, or hatred and revolt.
    James Madison (1751–1836)

    I don’t know a great deal about life in Washington for women—I spent a summer there once working in the White House, and my main memories of the experience have to do with a very bad permanent wave I have always been convinced kept me from having a meaningful relationship with President Kennedy ...
    Nora Ephron (b. 1941)

    [T]he minister preached a sermon on Jonah and the whale, at the end of which an old chief arose and declared, “We have heard several of the white people talk and lie; we know they will lie, but this is the biggest lie we ever heard.”
    —Administration in the State of Miss, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)

    What cannot stand must fall; and the measure of our sincerity and therefore of the respect of men, is the amount of health and wealth we will hazard in the defence of our right. An old farmer, my neighbor across the fence, when I ask him if he is not going to town-meeting, says: “No, ‘t is no use balloting, for it will not stay; but what you do with the gun will stay so.”
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)