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Paul Rusesabagina was made famous by a 2004 film that tells how he saved more than 1,200 people from the genocide at the Hotel des Mille Collines in Kigali. Exiled in Belgium, he is accused of financing and leading terrorist groups.
The story of Paul Rusesabagina, a Rwandese of the Hutu ethnic group, begins with his marriage to a Tutsi. He continued his career until becoming the manager of the best hotel in the country for the Belgian group Sabena, already after Belgian officials fled the inter-ethnic conflict that made little Rwanda famous.
From the top of the hill where the Hotel des Mille Colines is located, it welcomed 1268 Tutsis and moderate Hutus persecuted by the military and Hutu militias in one of the bloodiest genocides in history, in 1994. Hollywood celebrated the hero of the film ” Hotel Rwanda “, but politics The local began to look at him as a traitor, because over the years he rose up against the president. He was arrested this Monday in Kigali. Accused of terrorism.
The case has many outlines to explain. An international order loomed over Rusesabagina, of which the justice of Belgium, the country where he was in exile, claims to know. However, the Belgian prosecutor’s office was not informed of the “details of the circumstances” of the arrest, which according to the Rwandan counterpart is the result of international cooperation.
The events will date back to 2018. The famous hotelier is accused of trying to change the Rwandan regime, “founding, leading, financing and operating violent terrorist groups, armed and extremists” in the Great Lakes region and committing terrorist acts such as fires, kidnappings and homicides. of unarmed innocents in Rwanda.
Opposition to Kagame
There is still no news of the defense of Rusesabagina, which has drawn the fury of the Rwandan regime since it began to appoint the president, the Tutsi Paul Kagame, in office since 2000, accusations of repression of the opposition. In 2010, he denounced the arrest of opposition opponent Victoire Ingabire and began to designate the Kigali government as a dictatorship against which he decided to campaign.
In Kagame’s last overwhelming re-election, he spoke of the “Stalinist” vote. And he has been warning of the “genocide” of the Hutus who fled to then Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo, a designation that Kigali, working on the arduous task of healing the scabs of 1994, repudiates.
On the political track, Rusesabagina founded the Rwandan Movement for Democratic Change, classified in Kigali as an “extremist terrorist group”, together with its armed wing, the National Liberation Front, which even called for attacks in the south of the country. And he is accused by many of exaggerating the heroic deeds of the Hotel des Mille Collines.
“Paul Rusesabagina, a hero? The military and militiamen came to drink glasses with him and he demanded that we pay for the rooms. Is it heroic to demand money, checks or debt promissory notes from refugees whose families are being massacred there?” Bernard Makuza was in the hotel in those days of 1994. Wellas Bizumuremyi too. He was an employee and he says the movie is a lie. He lost 35 members of his family, including his wife and six children. A hero? “The Hotel des Mille Collines. I owe you everything. It saved my life,” he admitted last year in “Le Monde”.
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