Rwanda rewired

SPECIAL REPORT: “Rwanda Reborn,” by Kevin Whitelaw, U.S. News & World Report, 23 April 2007, p. 43.

The Balkans fires would never dim, we were told.

And yet somehow they did, and integration begun with the world at large. Not perfect, plenty slow, but few American casualties, yes?

We deserve no similar good news on Rwanda. There was a genocide completely preventable, with a presence only necessary for the madness to subside.

Ten years later, the madness seems completely gone, and the government successfully deep in a national re-education and re-unification process:

While Rwanda might not yet be the Switzerland of East Africa, its government has charted a surprisingly ambitious course for this tiny and startlingly green country known as the Land of a Thousand Hills. The goal is to become a regional stronghold for communications and computing, a place where ethnic divisions are a thing of the past. Fiber-optic cable is being laid throughout the country, and Rwanda soon will have perhaps the most advanced broadband wireless Internet network on the continent. “We will be the nervous system for the region,” says Romain Murenzi, the country’s minister for science and technology. While it still has a very long way to go, Rwanda’s broad-based government is winning praise from foreign governments and aid groups alike for its good intentions and surprising lack of corruption. It has doubled primary-school enrollment in the past decade and has established a national health insurance system. “They are,” says [U.S. ambassader Michael] Arietti, “doing all the right things.”

No, no, the Gap cannot be shrunk. Connectivity is not the answer.

I am only a dreamer, indeed--the only one.