Sadly, the RPF regime has retained much of this oppressive edifice. It has created civilian militia to help patrol rural areas, continued the practice of obligatory communal labor, and forcibly relocated hundreds of thousands of peasants into prefabricated settlements instead of the dispersed homes customary in Rwanda. Justified or not, these policies do nothing to loosen the hold of the state on Rwandan society. Reforming this structure could do more to prevent organized mass violence than anything else.

The RPF regime's desire to change this tradition of centralized authority is yet to be proven. Local elections in 1999 only affected the lowest and least important levels of government. Ballots were not secret and candidates could not represent political parties. The first real test of decentralization will take place in March, when Rwandans will elect approximately 100 commune leaders, the officials who wield real power at the local level.

In anointing itself as the architect of a new society, the government has perpetuated the infantilization of the Rwandan people. Earlier this year, an RPF official raised in Uganda told a Kennedy School audience: "Our country is like a baby... We are trying to build a country that was completely destroyed."

Speaking the language of paternalism and new beginnings is the luxury of revolutionary elites. For ordinary Rwandans who witnessed, perpetrated or survived the massacres, forgetting ethnicity is much more difficult, and cannot be done on their behalf by people who did not share their experiences.

In the aftermath of the genocide, with the graves still fresh and the path ahead uncertain, benevolent authoritarianism seemed a reasonable gamble taken by leaders with conviction. And given more time, it may even work. But after seven years, asking tough questions about the present is needed far more than simply admiring visions of the future.

Darryl Li '01 is executive director of the Harvard International Monitoring and Action Group. He spent the summer in Rwanda.