U.S. President George W. Bush met with Rwandan President Paul Kagame Friday for talks on African issues and to express his appreciation for Rwanda's peacekeeping role in Sudan. Bush and Kagame also discussed Rwanda's effort to overcome the 1994 genocide that left nearly one million people dead in the conflict between ethnic Hutus and Tutsis, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said. Rwanda has been playing a role in the African Union peacekeeping operation in Sudan, where major atrocities have been taking place for nearly two years. The conflict in Sudan's Darfur region between Arabs and black Africans has resulted in more than 170,000 deaths and displaced at least 2 million people. The U.S. has called the conflicty "genocide", but most other countries and the United Nations have failed to follow suit. During a speech in California on Thursday, Kagame told a crowd at Pacific University in Stockton that social and political divisions in his country that led to the genocide have subsided and Rwandans have chosen "hope over despair", according to a local newspaper. --More 0039 Local Time 2139 GMT
