Associated Press - September 11, 2000
PAULINE JELINEK, Associated Press Writer

In a speech at the University of Maryland's suburban Washington campus, Kagame said his government has made "significant advances" toward its main goals of promoting ethnic unity, providing justice and building democracy since the 1994 slaughter of more than 500,000 mostly ethnic Tutsis.

"While (they) have been key policy goals ... the government recognizes that unless the standard of living of all Rwandans is improved, these objectives will remain elusive," he said.

And he closed his speech calling AIDS "the single most menacing threat to achieving meaningful improvements in human development in Rwanda."

Kagame said the international community has helped lift Rwanda's economy to an 8 percent growth rate in 1998 and 6 percent growth in 1999 compared to the staggering 50 percent decline in gross domestic product after the army and government-backed militia started a 100-day rampage of killing in April 1994.

And so too will the AIDS fight take international help to bolster Rwandan and regional African efforts, he said. An estimated 25 percent of Rwanda's urban population and 11 percent of its rural people are HIV-positive, he said.

Kagame's speech was interrupted by two hecklers who called him a "mass murder" and said he is responsible for much of the bloodshed in neighboring Congo since 1998. The protesters, removed from the room by campus police, referred to a rebellion led by Rwanda and Uganda against Congolese President Laurent Kabila in which rebels accused Kabila of corruption and of harboring ethnic Hutu militias responsible for Rwanda's genocide.

Kagame thanked university officials for a new program in which the Maryland school's 20-year-old Center for International Development and Conflict Management will help rebuild faculty and courses at the National University of Rwanda that were decimated by the genocide.

The Maryland school will help train teachers, particularly in math and science, and upgrade the Rwandan school's computer system and computer courses.

"I will be satisfied if some of this expertise ... helps president Kagame as he continues his journey towards justice and peace in his homeland," said University of Maryland President C.D. Mote Jr. told the audience in Maryland and an audience in Rwanda that was watching via the internet.

On Saturday, Kagame spoke at La Roche College north of Pittsburgh to thank that school for a scholarship program that is educating 130 Rwandan students. It is seen partly as a way to help rebuild Rwanda's middle class, also destroyed in 1994.

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