New Delhi: A ‘saviour’ during the 1994 Rwanda Genocide, leader of the Rwandan Movement for Democratic Change (RMDC) — a coalition group of those living mostly in exile and opposing the current Rwandan government — and a convicted ‘terrorist’ — Paul Rusesabagina has had a chequered life.
The man whose experiences during the genocide inspired the 2004 Oscar-nominated Hollywood hit, Hotel Rwanda, was sentenced to 25 years in prison for supporting the armed wing of the RMDC, National Liberation Front (FLN), which had claimed responsibility for attacks in 2018 and 2019 that killed nine Rwandans.
ThePrint explains how a man credited with having saved thousands of lives once, ended up in prison.
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Paul Rusesabagina and his ‘Hotel Rwanda’
In 1994, Rusesabagina, now 66, was the manager of a luxury hotel in Rwanda’s central Kigali area — Hotel Mille Collines.
On 6 April 1994, a plane carrying the then Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana was shot down and everyone on board the aircraft were killed. The country had two predominant ethnic groups — the Hutus and the Tutsis — which had traditionally been at odds. President Habyarimana had been Hutu and Hutu extremists blamed the Tutsis for the attack. This started a massacre of the Tutsis and some moderate Hutus by the extremists during an approximately three-month period that ended in July.
During the 100-day period — often referred to as one of the darkest chapters in human history — extremist Hutus, led by the Rwandan army, killed an estimated 8,00,000-10,00,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus. The massacre wiped out 70 per cent of the Tutsis, who comprised 10 per cent of the Rwandan population at the time.
It was during this period that Rusesabagina — a Hutu married to a Tutsi — managed to shelter about 1,268 Tutsis and moderate Hutus in his hotel and save their lives, reportedly by using cash, alcohol, cigars and connections to fend off the Hutu militias and generals.
The massacre finally ended when the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) — made of Tutsis living in exile and backed by Uganda forces — successfully took control of the country.
Following the release of the film Hotel Rwanda — starring Don Cheadle as Rusesabagina — the former hotel manager received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from US President George W. Bush in 2005.
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Criticism of Kagame and current conviction
In 1996, fearing threat to his life, when alleged “revenge killings” of Hutus by the Tutsi-led government became common, Rusesabagina sought political asylum in Belgium and also took Belgian citizenship.
The former hotel manager was living in comparative anonymity, working as a taxi driver in Belgium, until the release of the 2004 Hotel Rwanda, and his own 2006 autobiography An Ordinary Man, pushed him into the limelight.
The Rwanda government has since accused him of exaggerating his role in the genocide and termed him a “manufactured hero“.
According to a New York Times report, Rusesabagina claimed in the book that President Paul Kagame governed Rwanda “for the benefit of a small group of elite Tutsis,” and that the Central African nation had “a cosmetic democracy and a hollow system of justice”.
Over the year, Rusesabagina, started speaking up against the alleged targetting of Hutus by the Kagame government.
The RMDC leader, in another scathing attack against the Kagame government in 2018, had said in a virtual address to the coalition that “the time has come for us to use any means possible to bring about change in Rwanda. As all political means have been tried and failed, it is time to attempt our last resort”.
In August last year, Rusesabagina was arrested by Rwanda police. His family and friends have claimed that he was “abducted and forced to go to Rwanda” or “tricked” into going to the country.
The American and Belgium governments have since expressed concern over his “forced disappearance” but have not questioned or challenged the legality of his arrest yet.
On 20 September, a court in Rwanda found Rusesabagina guilty of terror-related offenses and sentenced him to 25 years in prison for allegedly supporting the FLN — accused of carrying out terror attacks in the country.
Before withdrawing from the trial for “not getting a fair trial’, Rusesabagina had conceded to having connections with the insurgents but dismissed the “terror” allegations claiming, “We formed [it] as an armed wing, not as a terrorist group as the prosecution keeps saying. I do not deny that the FLN committed crimes but my role was diplomacy.”
According to a Human Right Watch report, President Kagame, who has been in power since 1994 and officially became president in 2000, has a long history of silencing dissidents but gets away each time. The report said, “Rusesabagina’s prima facie illegal forced return to Rwanda takes place in the context of a well-documented pattern of repression of Rwandan government critics, both inside and outside Rwanda.”
(Edited by Poulomi Banerjee)
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