Kagame blasts colonialists for conflicts

Rwandan President Paul Kagame said on Monday that European colonial powers had sown the seeds of violent conflicts now happening in the Great Lakes region of Africa.

Kagame, delivering the inaugural lecture of the National War College in the Nigerian capital, Abuja, said the European powers had not only created artificial borders but also brought theories of racial superiority that had divided the peoples of the region.

"As a result of these theories, the indigenous societies in Rwanda and Burundi were divided and quickly became hierarchical, with the [supposedly] superior group assisting the colonialists, while the group considered inferior were segregated and dominated," Kagame said.

He said Belgian colonialists met an organised state structure in Rwanda but used divide-and-rule tactics to undermine the administration, weaken the social fabric and create social injustice and hatred.

Kagame denounced an often repeated view that the 1994 genocide in Rwanda - in which nearly a million Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed by Hutu extremists - had not been anticipated by the international community.

"The international community had no political will for a quick and effective intervention," he said.

Kagame also told reporters in Abuja his troops would pull out of DRC "as soon as feasible".

Rwanda has troops in neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and says they are there to defend its borders against incursions by Hutu militia groups involved in the genocide, who fled across the border after they were defeated in the civil war that followed.

The Rwandan president landed in Nigeria on Sunday from New York, USA, where he attended the United Nations General Assembly. He left Nigeria for home on Tuesday morning.