Paul Rusesabagina in pink prison clothes, speaking with an official from the Rwandan court. Photo source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/04/world/africa/rwanda-paul-rusesabagina-sentence.html

In the beginning of the genocide, Rusesabagina was called home from work by his wife, who heard a sound that startled her (Rusesabagina 2007). Later, it would become clear that this noise was the planned plane crash that killed Rwandan president, Juvenal Habyarimana (Rusesabagina 2007). Later that same night, the Rwandan prime minister was killed near her home through a close-range shot to the head (Rusesabagina 2007). These events would mark the violence that served as the beginning of the genocide.

Rusesabagina originally worked at the Hotel Diplomates, which is the sister hotel to the Hotel Mille Collines (Rusesabagina 2007). However, when disaster struck in 1994, Rusesabagina brought himself and his family to stay at the Hotel Mille Collines and assumed control of both hotels, largely with the support of the Belgian hotel owners (Rusesabagina 2007). In retrospect, Rusesabagina would realize that his role as a hotel manager was what kept him alive throughout those first days; “I soon discovered the true reason why I had been brought to the Diplomates and not killed. It was solely because of the [hotel] keys I had been holding” (Rusesabagina 2007).

Throughout the course of his hotel leadership, Rusesabagina negotiated with killers, with foreign powers, and ultimately saved hundreds of lives. When “the killers,” as Rusesabagina regularly refers to them, cut their electricity and water supply, the pool was transformed into their sole source of water (Rusesabagina 2007). Paul Rusesabagina did his best to ration the supply of airline meal trays harbored by the Hotel Mille Collines, but when food became scarce, he sent a member of his staff to retrieve groceries for the hotel (Rusesabagina 2007). All of those taking refuge in the hotel would gather together on a daily basis and eat together (Rusesabagina 2007). Even on the brink of death, Rusesabagina acknowledged the importance of maintaining a semblance of normalcy, and did his best to provide that experience to those around him.

The hotel was regularly visited by authorities—colonels, soldiers, policemen—seeking out specific refugees to kill or torture or both. Each time, Rusesabagina approached the visitor in a calm and collected manner, attempting to persuade him against carrying out the actions that inspired his visit; each time, Rusesabagina was successful (Rusesabagina, 2007). Rusesabagina recalls the unforeseen scale of this impromptu operation with humble pride, saying:

By the end of May we had 1,268 people crammed into space that had been designed for 300 at most. There were up to 40 people living inside my own room. They were in the corridors, in the ballroom, on bathroom floors, and inside pantries. I had never planned for it to get this big. But I had made a promise to myself at some point that I would never turn anybody away. Nobody was killed. Nobody was wounded or beaten in the Mille Collines. That was an extraordinary piece of luck for us, but I do not think that there was anything extraordinary about what I did for them…” (Rusesabagina 2007).

Rusesabagina notes that, even while coordinating with foreign powers like the United States, Belgium, and so on, there was a disheartening hesitancy on the part of the international community. He calls out the U.S. in particular, writing, “Seven time zones away, in the United States, the diplomatic establishment was tying itself up in knots. Everybody wanted to avoid saying a certain word” (Rusesabagina 2007). The word that the world seemed to be tiptoeing around was genocide. In 1948, the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide deemed that genocide is characterized as:

any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group (United Nations Convention 1948).

Rusesabagina notes that, had the events taking place in Rwanda in 1994 been labeled as a genocide, there would have been an obligation for the international community to intervene; “If U.S. officials actually spoke the word out loud they might have been morally and legally compelled to act under the terms in the 1948 treaty” (Rusesabagina 2007). This was not something that foreign authorities wanted to do, especially with their own political happenings to attend to, and therefore the international media avoided using the term genocide at all costs. Romeo Dallaire, a UN peacekeeper that was present in Rwanda throughout the genocide, even took to calling the murders a form of “ethnic cleansing” (Rusesabagina 2007). At this point, it became clear to Paul Rusesabagina that there was very little hope of receiving substantial help from the international community.

Soon, the “genocidaires,” as Rusesabagina called them, began plotting attacks on the Hotel Mille Collines (Rusesabagina 2007). Rusesabagina was advised to evacuate the hotel, and in doing so, the refugees were ambushed (Rusesabagina 2007). The refugees and their UN escorts fought their way out of the attack, turning back to the hotel, risking their lives the whole way through (Rusesabagina 2007). Soon after, the Hotel Mille Collines was invaded by the militia while Paul Rusesabagina was at the Diplomates, pleading with General Augustin Ndindiliyimana for protection (Rusesabagina 2007). He and the general rushed over to the Mille Collines, where the general shut down the militia’s operation before anyone could be injured (Rusesabagina 2007).

That invasion marked the final straw for all parties, and as a result, the hotel was evacuated that same day (Rusesabagina 2007). After a gruesome 76 days, Rusesabagina, his family, and all those refugees that he had come to know and love drove away from the Hotel Mille Collines for the last time (Rusesabagina 2007). As Rusesabagina notes, “The Milles Collines had been one of the very few places in Kigali where nobody was killed” (Rusesabagina 2007).

It was Paul Rusesabagina’s acts of courage and selflessness that inspired the 2004 movie Hotel Rwanda, which Rusesabagina says is relatively accurate with the exception of some Hollywood dramatizations (Rusesabagina 2007).

In early 2021, Paul Rusesabagina began to stand trial, along with 20 other individuals, against terrorism charges stemming back to his actions in the 1994 Rwandan genocide–the same actions that inspired the 2004 movie Hotel Rwanda that depicted him as a hero. At the end of 2021, Rusesabagina was found guilty of terrorism charges that included, but were not limited to: the creation of an illegal unit, being a member of a terrorist organization, sponsoring terrorism, murder as an act of terrorism, illegal human trafficking as an act of terrorism, armed robbery as an act of terrorism, raiding of buildings, transporting persons or objects to commit terrorist attacks, and beating and intentionally injuring as an act of terrorism (American Bar Association [ABA] 2021).

Photo source: https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/09/20/rwanda-paul-rusesabagina-convicted-flawed-trial

• Is Paul Rusesabagina a hero or a villain? What qualifies him as such?

• Should actions undertaken to protect people in the extraordinary context of genocide be prosecuted under ordinary statutes?

• How should the international community react to violations of due process in such high-profile cases?

• Are the charges placed against Paul Rusesabagina justified? Why or why not?

Photo source: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/hotel-rwanda-hero-paul-rusesabagina-faces-terrorism-trial-after-dubai-kidnapping-f02f8hgbf