Nairobi: Too many outside observers are blind to the successes of Rwanda's political evolution in a post-genocide context, Rwandan President Paul Kagame wrote in Friday's edition of the Financial Times.

"Those who look in from outside ignore the fact that competitive democracy requires sustained social cohesion," Kagame declared in an opinion piece. "... while few doubt my country?s rapid social and economic progress, too many observers are blind to the successes of our political evolution," he said.

The Rwandan president swept to victory with 93 percent of the vote in elections earlier this month but faced widespread accusations of having excluded all real opposition from the poll.

"It is important to look at the challenges my country has faced, healing the deep-seated wounds of a shattered society in need of both justice and reconciliation. No country has moved from genocide to confrontational politics overnight," he wrote.

Kagame recalled the progress the small central African country has made towards reconciliation with its home-grown community courts, the gacaca, after the 1994 genocide that left some 800,000 people, essentially Tutsis, dead.

"Many also fail to understand that it was precisely a system of pluralistic politics that played a major role in the genocide, as newly formed parties with shared extremist ideology outperformed the former one-party state in mobilising the population to commit mass murder," Kagame said.

He recalled that in 2002, during consultations on the country's new constitution, Rwandans were reluctant to endorse "any type of political activity that could renew sectarian violence. Instead, they accepted political pluralism on the condition that parties would not operate at local level".

"But, we are making progress. Stability and cohesion have since increased, so in 2007 we amended the law to allow parties to operate at grassroots level," he went on.

The three parties that ran against Kagame in the August 11 poll all had links with his ruling Rwandan Patriotic Front.

Of the three real opposition parties, two were never allowed to register and the third disintegrated, split by infighting between factions.

Kagame again criticised foreign media, accusing some news organisations and parts of the international community of being "uninterested in fact-checking" and of having "simply invented stories that play to damaging historic prejudices".