In 1994, the world stood idly by as Rwanda was devastated by the most horrifying genocide since the Holocaust. Now this tiny, land-locked nation stands poised to stun the world again—but in a very different way. Killers and survi-vors have embarked on a breathtaking path toward reconciliation, and Rwanda has become one of the most promising countries in the developing world. How did this happen?

In A Thousand Hills, bestselling author Stephen Kinzer tells the dramatic story of Paul Kagame, whose rebel army stopped the genocide and whose government has turned Rwanda into a new star of Africa. Kagame grew up as a wretched refugee, shaped one of the most audacious covert operations in the history of clandestine warfare, and then emerged as a visionary leader with radical ideas about how poor countries can climb out of their misery. Whether his experiment can succeed is a question that has begun to fascinate people across Africa and beyond.

A Thousand Hillstells Kagame's astonishing story more fully than it has ever been told before. Drawingon extensive interviews with Kagame himself and with people who knew him at every stage of his life, Kinzer recounts one of the great untold stories of modern revolution. He traces Kagame through his years as a bitterly angry student, recounts his early fascination with men of action ranging from Che Guevara to James Bond, and explains how he built a secret revolutionary army in a way no one ever had before. With the dramatic flair that has led the Washington Postto call him "among the best in foreign policy storytelling," Kinzer then traces the three-and-a-half-year war Kagame waged in the Rwandan bush—a war that stopped a genocide, changed the destiny of a nation, and set in motion one of the most exciting social and political experiments now under way anywhere in the world.

Filled with harrowing tales of guerilla warfare, heart-wrenching accounts of the genocide carried out by the government of Rwanda, and inspiring stories of how a devastated nation can reinvent itself, A Thousand Hillsis powerful, moving, and deeply compelling.

"Kinzer (All the Shah's Men) has penned a hagiographic account of Rwandan president Paul Kagame, the Tutsi refugee who organized the Rwandan Military Front in 1994 and helped halt the genocide in Rwanda. Instead of settling scores, Kagame embarked on a program of reconciliation and reconstruction; Kinzer eloquently describes a physical and psychological recovery unmatched in Africa: a Rwanda whose people are 'bubbling with a sense of unlimited possibility.' Kagame's goal, modeled on the successes of 'Asian tigers' like Singapore, aims to transform Rwanda into the continent's first middle-income country in a single generation, eschewing foreign aid in favor of reliance on business-driven development. Kinzer does not conceal the bloody realities behind Kagame's acquisition of power nor does he deny Kagame's 'rigorous, absolutist approach to governing.' Nevertheless, he is transparently trusting in Kagame's capabilities and intentions, and while his eloquent prose invites optimism, a half-century of experience urges caution. (June)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

An angry young man, driven from his country, leads a cavalry of fellow exiles on a brilliantly executed crusade to recapture their homeland. He stops the annihilation of his people and forces sworn enemies to live peacefully together in the lush hills of, yes, Rwanda. The end? Not even close. Recent history bedevils Stephen Kinzer's admiring portrait of Paul Kagame, the Tutsi military mastermind who... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) led a crack rebel army that toppled the murderous government of the majority Hutu. His guerrilla war ran parallel to the Hutu-led genocide of 800,000 members of the historically elite Tutsi.

Kinzer's upbeat subtitle is misleading. Kagame has been an authoritarian ruler for 14 years now, building his own resume of human rights abuses. Twice in the late 1990s he invaded neighboring Congo on the pretext of crushing Hutu insurgents. As Kinzer notes, these adventures destabilized central Africa and killed 3 million people. Kinzer addresses all the criticisms in detail, albeit within an overarching portrayal of Kagame as a pretty good guy with a convincing vision for a successful Africa. This balancing act makes for some frustratingly repetitive digressions and some surprisingly dry secondhand accounts of harrowing events. And Kagame always gets the last word, often in the form of long, self-serving quotations that interrupt the narrative more than they illuminate it.

But the pace picks up in the last quarter of the book, when the author heads into the countryside for an expert's look at how today's Rwanda is grappling with its unfathomably awful past. He witnesses a killer facing accusers after waiting 12 years in jail for that very moment, and he covers a government-supported attempt to reconcile a woman with the neighbor who killed her kids. Mostly, though, he melds extensive Kagame interviews with a roundup of hundreds of previously published accounts by others, framing the man's story as the silver lining in Rwanda's dark cloud of death.

Kagame, a member of the Tutsi aristocracy, was only 2 when his family fled to Uganda in 1959 after the Hutu began their first attempt to purge the Tutsi. Part of a restless and resented diaspora, the brooding youth was a diffident student with an anti-establishment bent. He was among the brainy young Tutsi who in 1981 gravitated toward the rebel movement of Yoweri Museveni in Uganda. The enigmatic Kagame had an affinity for espionage. "He was by nature quiet and introspective but also curious, observant, analytical, and conspiratorial," Kinzer writes. "It did not take long for him to become one of Museveni's close proteges and senior intelligence officers."

After helping Museveni gain power, the battle-tested Tutsi diaspora invaded Rwanda in 1990 through Uganda's southern border. They were beaten back by commandos dispatched by France to prop up their longtime stooge, Hutu President Juvenal Habyarimana. With the Soviet Union unraveling in 1991, the West pressed the superpowers' satellites, run largely by corrupt despots, to embrace democracy or risk losing aid. Habyarimana added moderate Hutus to the government and brokered peace with the Tutsi rebels hunkered down in northern Rwanda, while quietly overseeing a plan to wipe out the Tutsi population.

A genocide campaign that had been surreptitiously underway in the countryside shifted into overdrive on April 6, 1994, when Habyarimana's small jet crashed en route from peace talks in Tanzania. He and a prominent passenger, the president of neighboring Burundi, were killed. Kinzer, like others in recent years, takes it as a given that Habyarimana's plane was shot down, though by whom is grist for more conspiracy theories than the JFK assassination. Published accounts have blamed the United States, Canada, France, Belgium, Habyarimana's own officers, various mercenaries and, of course, Kagame. "No one investigated the crash," Kinzer writes. "Much evidence was lost or destroyed. The question of who fired the deadly missiles was never convincingly answered."

Kinzer mentions only in passing that the plane crashed on Habyarimana's lawn. What are the odds of catching a plane home to your sprawling city of 300,000 people and winding up dead in your own suburban back yard? I saw the wreckage. My layman's hunch was that the jet came in low and (for whatever reason) broke apart, pieces tumbling toward the kidney-shaped swimming pool. Perhaps the grizzled Hutu ruler had wanted to show off his lavish estate to his guest, the new president of Burundi.

Whatever happened, the crash accelerated Rwanda's plunge into madness. Hutu government extremists punched the button on the final solution: State radio exhorted villagers to annihilate their Tutsi neighbors. Simultaneously, Kagame's rebels attacked, infiltrated and outflanked the Hutu army until it fled the country. As new strongman, Kagame has pitched his country as a place with the potential to become akin to an Asian Pacific powerhouse. His moves to enforce peace may be brutal, but some Westerners see only a bracing atmosphere of order. The capital, Kigali, rocks with the hot-right-now buzz of a swinging metropolis.

As for Kinzer, he keeps the faith. "A rational person, coldly considering the odds, might not want to wager on (Rwanda's) success," he writes. "It would take a mean spirit, though, not to hope for it."

Reviewed by Mark Fritz, author of 'Lost on Earth: Nomads of the New World,' who won a the Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the Rwandan genocide, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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How has Rwanda emerged from war and genocide to stability and emerging prosperity in such a short period of time? Journalist Kinzer suggests that the answer to that question lies in the personage of one man: President Paul Kagame. He reconstructs the recent history of Rwanda, placing Kagame, the one-time Rwandan refugee who came to lead the Rwandan Patriotic Front against the genocidal government of Jean Kambanda and eventually rose to the presidency of his country, at the heart of the story. Annotation ©2008 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Paul Kagame grew up as a wretched refugee. He and a group of comrades, determined to force their way back home after a generation of exile, designed one of the most audacious covert operations in the history of clandestine war. Then, after taking power, they amazed the world by stabilizing and reviving their devastated country. Now, as President Kagame, he's obsessed with a single outlandish dream: to make Rwanda the first middle-income country in Africa, and to do it in the space of a single generation. A Thousand Hillstells Kagame's tumultuous life story, including his early fascination with Che Guevara and James Bond, his years as an intelligence agent, his training in Cuba and the United States, the dazzlingly original way he built his secret rebel army, his bloody rebellion, and his outsized ambitions for Rwanda. It is the adventure-filled tale of a visionary who won a war, stopped a genocide, and then set out to turn his country into the star of Africa. Like Ishmael Beah's bestselling A Long Way Goneand Greg Mortenson's Three Cups of Tea, this book recounts the thrilling and uplifting tale of a man who defied the odds to lift himself and his country out of misery toward a more promising future.

In 1994, the world stood idly by as Rwanda was devastated by the most horrifying genocide since the Holocaust. Now this tiny, land-locked nation stands poised to stun the world again—but in a very different way. Killers and survi-vors have embarked on a breathtaking path toward reconciliation, and Rwanda has become one of the most promising countries in the developing world. How did this happen?

In A Thousand Hills, bestselling author Stephen Kinzer tells the dramatic story of Paul Kagame, whose rebel army stopped the genocide and whose government has turned Rwanda into a new star of Africa. Kagame grew up as a wretched refugee, shaped one of the most audacious covert operations in the history of clandestine warfare, and then emerged as a visionary leader with radical ideas about how poor countries can climb out of their misery. Whether his experiment can succeed is a question that has begun to fascinate people across Africa and beyond.

A Thousand Hills tells Kagame's astonishing story more fully than it has ever been told before. Drawingon extensive interviews with Kagame himself and with people who knew him at every stage of his life, Kinzer recounts one of the great untold stories of modern revolution. He traces Kagame through his years as a bitterly angry student, recounts his early fascination with men of action ranging from Che Guevara to James Bond, and explains how he built a secret revolutionary army in a way no one ever had before. With the dramatic flair that has led the Washington Post to call him "among the best in foreign policy storytelling," Kinzer then traces the three-and-a-half-year war Kagame waged in the Rwandan bush—a war that stopped a genocide, changed the destiny of a nation, and set in motion one of the most exciting social and political experiments now under way anywhere in the world.

Filled with harrowing tales of guerilla warfare, heart-wrenching accounts of the genocide carried out by the government of Rwanda, and inspiring stories of how a devastated nation can reinvent itself, A Thousand Hills is powerful, moving, and deeply compelling.

Introduction.

1. You Can't Just Pretend Nothing Happened.

2. Elegant Golden-Red Beauties.

3. That's Why I Survived.

4. A Glass of Milk.

5. Devastation.

6. Creatures From Another World.

7. We Just Didn't Get It.

8. This Is a Coup.

9. Madam, They're Killing My People.

10. What a Farce.

11. Something Really Fills Up In Your Mind.

12. Rwanda Doesn't Matter.

13. The Tricky Part.

14. When You&'re Not Serious, You Can't Be Correct.

15. Breathless With Fear.

16. Famous For Just One Thing.

17. The Web Grows Big.

18. We Aspire To Be Like Others.

Acknowledgements.

Notes.

Index.