Raj Rajendran has great expectations for Rwanda, a nation whose devastation would seem to invite pity and charity, not entrepreneurial exuberance. His thriving textile operation, Utexrwa, accounts for a sizeable chunk of the country's manufacturing sector. With his kindly monomania about the goodness of textile production and copious public spirit, he seems like a businessman from another age, maybe a character out of Dickens. He recently made time to meet me at his factory in Kigali's outskirts, on a Saturday morning. He was about to fly off to Switzerland to talk to a World Bank group, and the story of success he told me at breakneck speed made it clear why the World Bank would be interested in him.
Rajendran came to Kigali from India, where he had run textile factories for 25 years. In 1999, Utexrwa's owners contacted him to ask if he would take on the job of getting their company going again. The interahamwe--the militia that served as the genocide's shock troops--had looted the plant and killed almost one-third of its workers.
In a short time, Rajendran had restored the factory to full capacity, eventually taking it over himself. Then he had an epiphany: Rwanda's climate was perfect for growing mulberry trees and raising the silkworms that feed on them. At an official reception in 2000, he met Rwanda's leader, Paul Kagame, and his overflowing eagerness to be photographed with the president made the normally solemn Kagame laugh--an event so extraordinary that everyone took notice of him. Kagame liked the silk idea and encouraged Rajendran to import trees from India and plant them on government land. And, eureka! The mulberry trees thrived, the silkworms adored their leaves, Rajendran bought up an Indian silk mill to get the machinery to spin it, and Rwanda was in business. With the delighted self-regard of the happily obsessed, he told me that he intends to make Rwanda the world's leading producer of high-quality silk.
Raj Rajendran represents the future in a country that, 15 years ago, looked like it might not have one. In July 1994, at the moment the rebel Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) commanded by Kagame ended the genocide and took power, the best bet was that the country was headed for years of meltdown: cycles of ethnic terror on the order of Sierra Leone and Liberia. Nearly one million people were dead; thousands of bereft orphans were wandering around homeless. The RPF itself had blood on its hands, its soldiers responsible for thousands of deaths on their march south. An HIV/aids epidemic was simmering, brought on by the rapes that we now know were a tool of the genocidaires. The interahamwe had fled across the border to Congo (then Zaire), along with sympathizers and family members, a collection of nearly 1.5 million refugees who immediately became a humanitarian crisis. With the unwitting help of international agencies that lavished aid on the Zaire camps, the killers regrouped as a military force. They made incursions into Rwanda to remind their fellow citizens they were just across the border, waiting to "finish the job," as the sinister saying was whispered. Two terrible wars in what's now Congo--in 1996-97 and 1998-2003-- resulted from Rwanda's determination to root out the genocidaires and their allies.
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