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It was Monday morning that the special investigation unit of the Rwandan prosecutor’s office announced that it had arrested Paul Rusesabagina, who had been detained in an unknown location abroad and taken to Rwanda.
He is accused of having ties to organizations that were branded terrorists by the Kigali regime and is at risk of being imprisoned for, among other things, terrorism, kidnapping, arson and murder.
https://twitter.com/RIB_Rw/status/1300349233397223425?s=20
These were the efforts of Paul Rusesabagina during the 1994 genocide that formed the basis for the 2005 film “Hotel Rwanda” where he was played by the main character Don Cheadle. The film received positive reviews and was the first on the subject to be released to a wider audience in the Western world. The following year, Rusesabagina received the Medal of Freedom from the then President of the United States, George W. Bush.
The events took place in the spring and early summer of 1994 at the Hôtel des Mille Collines, a central hotel in the capital Kigali, operated by the Belgian airline Sabena. After the foreign personnel were evacuated, Rusesabagina was appointed director of the hotel, where he protected more than 1,200 people from violence on the outer streets.
The memory of the genocide is very much alive in Rwanda. In many cities, such as the city of Kibuye in the western part of the country, there are monuments that remember the bloody past of the country.
Photo: Erik Esbjörnsson
At least 800,000 people died during the genocide, most of whom belonged to the Tutsi ethnic minority group persecuted by loyalist militias, and the majority Hutu dominated the then regime. Rusesabagina is of mixed descent, but was counted as a Hutu in the then town division.
The reason why now appeared in a Kigali police station is that he has long criticized the country’s dictator Paul Kagame, who has been president since 2001 but in practice ruled the country since his FPR guerrilla army took control of Kigali in July 1994.
Even when the film was released in Kigali, the gap between the two was a fact. Kagame attended a screening of 10,000 Rwandans at a football stadium in Kigali and expressed his appreciation for the film. But Rusesabagina was not in his place, fearing for his own life, according to director Terry George.
“Two days earlier, while waiting outside Brussels for the flight to Kigali, he called me and said that he had decided not to travel to Rwanda,” George wrote in the Washington Post in 2006.
On his speaking tours of the United States and Europe, he had begun to criticize the Kagame government, saying that the recent elections, in which Kagame received 90.5 percent of the vote, were not democratic and that real peace could reach Rwanda only when the country had an inclusive government. George wrote.
What Rusesabagina turned to was the fact that those who took control of the country were, in principle, exclusively from the former Tutsi minority. But since any talk about dividing people into two groups of Hutu and Tutsi is branded genocide propaganda, it was (and still is) illegal to point out this skewed distribution.
Since then, Kagame’s support has grown, at least on paper. In the 2017 elections, he received an unlikely 98.8 percent of the vote and the constitution was changed so that Kagame can rule the country at least until 2034. Basically, there is no serious person who claims that Rwanda is a democracy today.
But the crowd of critics is constantly growing and they are increasingly being persecuted mercilessly by the dictatorship, which has not hesitated to send murderous patrols in search of dissidents abroad and has killed various opposition figures in Rwanda as well.
A couple of weeks ago, Nobel laureate Denis Mukwege, a well-known critic of Rwanda, was accused by senior Rwandan military personnel of having links to the groups that carried out the genocide in the 1990s. The accusations against Mukwege, who were threatened with death during the campaign are considered completely unfounded.
Rusesabagina is not the heaviest opposition figure now captured by Kigali and few viewers remember his long name, but “the manager of the Hotel Rwanda” is one of the country’s most famous characters from the brutal 1990s drama. This can help you in the pending lawsuit.
Journalist Jeffrey Smith wrote on Twitter that Rusesabagina was arrested and initially kidnapped during a business trip to Dubai, but this has not been officially confirmed.
https://twitter.com/Smith_JeffreyT/status/1300387894901829632?s=20
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