Meeting with Paul Rusesabagina | When Hotel Rwanda is a prison

It was the airport tower that allowed him to understand where he was. A tower that, at one time, was the only one in all of Rwanda. A tower he did not think he would see again as long as Paul Kagame was in power in Kigali.

“When I saw her, my heart almost stopped beating,” Paul Rusesabagina told me in a Japanese restaurant in Old Montreal. “When the plane door opened, I called for help. I’m being kidnapped. They’re going to kill me. I’m Paul Rusesabagina. I’m Paul Rusesabagina,” he screamed before disappearing for four days in August 2020. Before being tortured, paraded in front of cameras and put behind bars. A nightmare that stretched over two and a half years.

Paul Rusesabagina. This name is very well known in the central African country. His story is famous throughout the world since the actor Don Cheadle slipped into his shoes in the film Hotel Rwanda.

This film tells the story of how this hotel manager protected his family and more than 1,200 women, men and children from the genocidal madness that raged in the country, taking 800,000 souls in 10 weeks between April 7 and July 15, 1994. The same hotel, the Hotel des Mille Collines, is also mentioned in the novel. A Sunday at the swimming pool in Kigali by Quebecer Gil Courtemanche.

Over the past 30 years, Mr. Rusesabagina has been recognized around the world and received a host of awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, presented by George W. Bush in 2005.

However, in his home country, he is the bête noire of President Paul Kagame, in office since 2000 and re-elected for a fourth term on July 15 with a – very dubious – electoral result that exceeded 99%.

“Paul Kagame has never accepted that I be known, that people talk about me. In his eyes, you don’t have the right to be a hero,” comments Paul Rusesabagina. Especially when you are a Hutu, he believes.

In 1994, an extremist Hutu government carried out the genocide, with the majority of victims coming from the Tutsi minority. At the head of the Rwandan Popular Front rebels, it was Paul Kagame, a Tutsi, who put an end to the killings by overthrowing the government in Kigali. He has ruled the country with an iron fist ever since.

Although he initially remained in Rwanda after the genocide with his Tutsi wife, Paul Rusesabagina says he fled in 1996 after being the target of a first assassination attempt.

Paul Rusesabagina has rebuilt his life in Belgium, where he founded a taxi company, and has since become one of the main opponents of Paul Kagame, whose dark side he denounces.

First, because of the all-out repression of political opponents in Rwanda, which, according to Amnesty International, ranges from threats to suspicious deaths, including arbitrary detention and fabricated charges.

In the case of Paul Rusesabagina, the Rwandan state acknowledged participating in his kidnapping in 2020. A fake pastor invited the former hotel manager to take a plane to Bujumbura, where he was scheduled to give speeches at churches. Instead, he woke up in front of the Kigali airport tower. “I thought I was a dead man.”

In 2021, in a trial criticized by Human Rights Watch and other human rights leaders, Mr. Rusesabagina, who founded an opposition party in 2017, was sentenced to 25 years in prison for “joining a terrorist group” and “participating in terrorist activities.”

In 2023, following pressure from the international community, his sentence was commuted and he was released.

The former hotel manager also gets agitated when he talks about Rwandan interference in neighboring countries, including Congo.

He is not the only one sounding the alarm. The UN accuses the country of supporting the rebellion of the armed group M23, responsible for multiple abuses and the theft of minerals.

Following the suspicious death of a Rwandan journalist investigating these links, the organization Forbidden Stories¹with the collaboration of 17 media outlets from 11 countries, took up the torch and published a large investigation entitled “Rwanda Classified” this summer. It notably revealed that Rwandan soldiers had died in combat in Congo, in the North Kivu region, while the Kagame administration denies playing any role.

In 2021, another major investigation allowed the British newspaper The Guardian to reveal that Rwanda was using Pegasus spyware to monitor its critics abroad, including Mr. Rusesabagina’s daughter, Carine Kanimba. A Belgian and American citizen, Kanimba fought for her father’s freedom.

Although he remained silent after being released from prison in 2023 – “I was exhausted and I took a year off” – Paul Rusesabagina decided to speak out again on the 30th^e anniversary of the Rwandan genocide and in the wake of the election of July 15.

According to Paul Rusesabagina, it is time for Rwandans to sit down together and put the whole truth on the table. About what happened during the genocide, but also about the violence that has never stopped and has even extended its grip on neighboring countries.

“If necessary, criminals on all sides should be tried and hanged,” he says, under the astonished gaze of his Quebec lawyer, Philippe Larochelle, who arranged the interview. “However, an eye for an eye will make us all blind,” he continues. “The best solution would be forgiveness, but through dialogue, not by force.”

He also believes that it is time for the international community to stop being so complacent towards Paul Kagame, who, while he has succeeded in ensuring the economic development and stabilization of his country, has also transformed part of the Hotel Rwanda into a prison.

1. Read the Forbidden Stories investigation

Paul Kagame sworn in as president for fourth term

Rwandan President Paul Kagame, 66, was sworn in for a fourth term on Sunday, saying regional peace was his “priority” in the face of ongoing conflict in neighboring DRC. Kagame won the presidential election on July 15 with a 99.18 percent vote, which human rights activists say shows the Rwandan regime’s oppression. His victory was a foregone conclusion, as he has ruled the country with an iron fist since the aftermath of the 1994 genocide. Kagame has won every presidential election he has run for, each time with more than 93 percent of the vote. Kigali is also accused of fueling instability in the mineral-rich eastern Democratic Republic of Congo by supporting M23 rebels fighting the Congolese army.

Agence France-Presse