Paul Rusesabagina
Paul Rusesabagina is a Rwandan human rights activist and former hotelier. He worked as the manager of the Hôtel des Mille Collines in Kigali, during a period in which it housed 1,268 Hutu and Tutsi refugees fleeing the Interahamwe militia during the Rwandan genocide. None of these refugees were hurt or killed during the attacks. An account of Rusesabagina's actions during the genocide was later depicted in the film Hotel Rwanda in 2004, in which he was portrayed by American actor Don Cheadle. The film has been the subject both of critical acclaim and controversy in Rwanda.
On the back of newly found international fame, Rusesabagina embarked on a successful career as a public speaker, mostly touring universities in the United States. He campaigns for the Hotel Rwanda Rusesabagina Foundation, which he founded in 2006. He holds Belgian citizenship and a U.S. green card and has homes in Brussels, Belgium and San Antonio, Texas. Since fleeing Rwanda in 1996, he has become a prominent critic of Paul Kagame and the RPF government. He founded the PDR-Ihumure political party in 2006, and is currently President of the MRCD. On 31 August 2020, believing he was taking a chartered flight to Burundi from Dubai, he arrived in Kigali, where he was arrested on nine charges of terrorism that related to his association with the FLN, the armed wing of PDR-Ihumure, who claimed responsibility for terrorist attacks in 2018 that killed at least nine people.
On 20 September 2021, he was convicted on terrorism charges and sentenced to 25 years in prison. The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention rendered its opinion on 18 March 2022 that Rusesabagina had been illegally kidnapped, tortured, and sentenced after an unfair trial. The Working Group further found that Rusesabagina has been targeted by the government on account of his work as a human rights defender, because of his criticism of the government on a broad range of issues. In 2023, after serving two years in Mageragere Prison, Rusesabagina's sentence was commuted by Rwandan president Paul Kagame.
Early life, education, and family
Rusesabagina was born in 1954. He was one of nine children born to a Hutu father, a respected community elder named Thomas Rupfure, and a Tutsi mother in Murama, Rwanda. Although stating that he grew up poor, in a "house... made of mud and sticks" and "without shoes", Rusesabagina described his upbringing as "solidly middle class by the standards of Africa in the 1950s".Rusesabagina's parents sent him to school in a town near Gitwe run by the Seventh-day Adventist Church. By the age of 13, he was fluent in English and French, as well as his native Kinyarwanda.
Because of distance and his commitment to work, he and his wife Esther legally separated in 1981. Rusesabagina was granted full custody of their three children: Diane, Lys, and Roger. In 1987, he was invited to a wedding where he met Tatiana, a nurse who lived in Ruhengeri. Tatiana and Paul married two years later and she adopted his children. She gave birth twice, but only their son, Trésor, survived infancy. Rusesabagina's father died in 1991, and his mother shortly after.
Career
Ministry
By the end of his adolescence, Rusesabagina had decided to become a minister. He studied at the Faculty of Theology in Yaoundé. In Cameroon, he soon became disillusioned with the prospect of a career as a clergyman, deciding he wanted to live an 'urban life'.Hotel des Mille Collines
In December 1978, Rusesabagina moved to Kigali. While there, an acquaintance, Isaac Mulihano, invited Rusesabagina to apply for an opening to work at the Hôtel des Mille Collines. He was offered a position and was sent to Nairobi and then to Switzerland and Brussels to study hotel management.As he rose through the ranks at the Hôtel des Mille Collines, his promotions earned him the resentment of some fellow Rwandans in the staff. Some took to calling him 'muzungu' – a Kinyarwandan word for 'white man'. In 1992, Paul Rusesabagina was promoted to assistant general manager of the Diplomates Hotel, an affiliate of the Hôtel des Mille Collines.
Rwandan genocide
Events leading to genocide
During Rusesabagina's training abroad, and his rise as a distinguished hôtelier, the Hutu-dominated government of President Juvénal Habyarimana was facing military pressure from the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front. After a ceasefire in Arusha brought the Civil War to an end in 1993, several reports of militia activity – including the stockpiling of weapons and the creation of lists of Tutsis – had been received by the UN and other authorities. Alongside this, radio stations including the infamous Radio Télévision Libre des Milles Collines were broadcasting messages about Tutsi plots to murder Hutus, and encouraging violence towards Tutsis.On 6 April 1994, a plane containing President Habyarimana was shot down as it approached the Kigali Airport for landing. Everyone on board was killed. 'Hutu Power' extremists within the government and local militias blamed this event on the Tutsi, and consequently, the Rwandan genocide started on 6 April 1994. Interahamwe militias consulted their lists and began searching the city for Tutsis and Tutsi 'sympathisers' to murder. Though Rusesabagina was Hutu, his wife Tatiana was a Tutsi and his children considered mixed – meaning that his family was under considerable threat.
Providing shelter
When the violence broke out, soldiers came to Rusesabagina's house, asking him to open the Hôtel Diplomates, which the interim Hutu government used as a headquarters. Rusesabagina bribed the soldiers with money from the hotel safe to ensure safe passage for his family. When the government evacuated the hotel, on account of RPF shelling, Rusesabagina arrived at the Hôtel des Mille Collines. Upon arrival, Rusesabagina promptly phoned the hotel's corporate owners, Sabena, imploring them to put him in charge as the acting general manager of the Mille Collines. They sent through a fax, and he assumed control of the hotel from the staff who had been running it since the killings began.Despite Rusesabagina's claims that Romeo Dallaire 'rescinded' an order for UN protection of the hotel, there was in fact, a strong UN peacekeeping presence at the Hotel, including Mbaye Diagne, a Senegalese military observer who was ferrying threatened Tutsis into the Hotel. General Dallaire – in charge of the UN deployment, and his deputy, Brent Beardsley, were also often at the hotel, ensuring its safety from killings.
Rusesabagina sheltered approximately twelve hundred people during the Rwandan Genocide of 1994. One radio reporter said: "Nobody had been killed, injured, beaten, tortured, expelled or retrieved from the hotel during the whole time we were refugees. Paul Rusesabagina managed to do the impossible to save our lives at the moment when others were massacring their own children, their own wives."
Family impact
On 3 May, Rusesabagina ensured that his wife and children fled safely in a truck past the militia's roadblocks. The truck set out for Kigali airport so they could flee to Belgium. He remained in the hotel. Tatiana and her children were specifically targeted within the convoy by radio messages on RTLM, and they returned to the hotel after being attacked.Tatiana's family faced extreme tragedy. Her mother, brother and sister-in-law, and four nieces and nephews died in the genocide. Her father paid Hutu militia to execute him so that he would not die a more painful death:
By the end of the massacre, four of Rusesabagina's eight siblings remained alive. He comments in his autobiography that "for a Rwandan family, this is a comparatively lucky outcome."
Post-genocide and politics
After staying in Rwanda for two more years after the genocide, Rusesabagina applied for asylum in Belgium and moved to Brussels with his wife, children, and two nieces in 1996, fearing for his life. There he worked as a taxi driver. They later settled in San Antonio, Texas.Hotel Rwanda
In 1999, Rusesabagina received a phone call from an American screenwriter named Keir Pearson. Pearson, along with his colleague Terry George, went on to write the script for Hotel Rwanda in consultation with Rusesabagina. The script was made into a Hollywood film, starring Don Cheadle as Rusesabagina. The film was released in 2004 to much critical acclaim. It received three Academy Award nominations, including for Best Original Screenplay and Best Actor for Don Cheadle's portrayal of Rusesabagina.Criticism
In 2008, the book Hotel Rwanda or the Tutsi Genocide as seen by Hollywood, by Alfred Ndahiro, a public relations advisor to Kagame, and journalist Privat Rutazibwa, was published. The authors conducted interviews with 74 people who had stayed in the Hotel during the genocide. Their accounts provide an alternative take to the portrayal of Rusesabagina's actions as seen in the film Hotel Rwanda: Many of the survivors criticise Rusesabagina in their interviews. This was followed by the 2011 publication of Inside the Hotel Rwanda: The Surprising True Story... And Why it Matters Today, co-written by Hotel des Mille Collines Survivor Edouard Kayihura and American writer Kerry Zukus. Both books are critical of Rusesabagina, alleging that he forced refugees to pay for their rooms and all of the food which was given to them, he cut off communication lines to the hotel which were located outside his own office, he was a prominent member of Hutu Power politics, and he handed a list of refugees over to Interahamwe forces and broadcasters at the RTLM, among other things.UN Peacekeepers who were present at the Hotel des Mille Collines during the genocide have also been critical of the film. At a conference in 2014, General Romeo Dallaire, who led the UNAMIR mission, said that the film was "not worth looking at."
In response to critics, Odette Nyiramilimo, a prominent survivor who became a senator in the new government, pushed back against Paul Ruseabagina's suspected bad-faith intentions, saying: "I never saw him threaten to expel people from the hotel if they didn't pay up — never."