Climbing a hill can be hard work, but the view from the top can be a stunning reward. Especially if you are in that land of a thousand hills, Rwanda, and know far too many gory details about what happened there 13 years ago.
 
In 1994, for almost two months, Agnes Mugambage lived in the dark. Her only contact with the outside world was a bucket. Every night it was lowered into her underground pit, carrying a yellow can of water and some food. She then replaced it with another, which stank.

As soon as this ritual was over, her father would slide the sheet of corrugated iron over the pit’s opening. As an added precaution, he built a pen for his chickens around the pit, regularly throwing scraps of food on the corrugated iron, hoping against hope that no one would surmise what lay below.  
 
Agnes was not a prisoner; she was a refugee. A member of the dominant Hutu ethnic majority, she was married to a man who belonged to the Tutsi ethnic minority. While she was visiting her parents in the outlying areas, a mass slaughter of Tutsis broke out. It quickly turned into genocide. In 100 days, some 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were murdered by Hutu militias and mobs. Agnes feared for her life and did not return home. Her husband attempted to flee to Uganda to join the Tutsi force known as the Front Patriotique Rwandais.
 
The brutality – all the more shocking given the overwhelmingly Christian identity of the country – also revealed some ordinary people as heroes. People like Paul Rusesabagina, whose success in saving the lives of refugees from Hutu militias was celebrated in the film Hotel Rwanda. But the genocide only stopped in the summer, when the Front defeated the Hutu regime. And very little thanks is owed to the international community, that not only literally kept its distance but even withdrew the UN troops from the country.

Today’s Head of State, Paul Kagame, is a former member of the Front, the first Tutsi to become President in some 50 years. Rwanda has come a long way, as I could see for myself when last week I arrived in the capital Kigali as a representative of the European Parliamentary delegation to take part in the 14th EU-ACP (African, Caribbean and Pacific countries) summit.
 
Life expectancy has almost doubled, to 50 years. There is an urban building boom. The city slums, so prevalent in Africa, are thankfully absent. The whole country is spotlessly clean. Plastic is forbidden and once a week the Rwandans clean up the immediate vicinity of their homes and tend to the patches of flowers which colour the sides of the road. Not one parcel of land remains uncultivated. The stepped terraces are small but neat.

Tourism figures have surpassed those of pre-1994 (surely due to the unique attraction of seeing the few surviving gorillas in their natural habitat). When I came to leave I still could not come to terms with the stunning beauty of this country.
 
President Kagame inaugurated a summit whose timing was very awkward. First, the so-called Economic Partnership Agreement between the EU and most of the ACP countries is about to expire on the 31 December 2007. The European Commissioner for Trade Peter Mandelson made it clear that unless agreement was reached, levies on many products exported to the EU would have to be imposed. The disastrous effect of such a policy on most ACP countries cannot be understated.

In my initial intervention in the summit I distinguished between the European Parliament and the European Commission. But although the EP delegation’s sympathies lay with our colleagues from Africa, Caribbean and the Pacific, the EP was still not perceived as something wholly distinct from the EC. In time we issued the Kigali Declaration, tipping the rhetoric in favour of the ACP countries, but we all knew that ultimately it was no more than a declaration.
  
Second, the conference was overshadowed by the spectre of China. The European side berated their less fortunate colleagues for squandering their natural resources through agreements drawn up with China. Chinese aid is not attached to benchmarks and is therefore more welcome; all this apart from the extra benefits China likes to give, like building a soccer stadium here or a cricket field there.

On my part, however, when referring to this issue I emphasised that it is hypocritical to criticise developing countries for courting China when European and other industrialised countries have over-invested in China knowing full well that China does not have democratic credentials.
 
I cannot help thinking that the ACP countries are being driven into China’s sphere of influence by the EC itself. The EC rams a very hard bargain; China combines extraction agreements with popular projects.

I hope that the people of Rwanda will not have to choose between Europe and China. In such a case, it will be ordinary people who suffer. People like Agnes, who today works in a hotel. Or like her husband, who has never been heard of again. 

Dr Attard Montalto is a Labour member of the European Parliament.