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“Hotel Rwanda” hero fears new Hutu-Tutsi killings
By John Chiahemen
CAPE TOWN (Reuters) – The Rwandan hotel manager who inspired a Hollywood drama for heroically protecting 1,200 refugees fleeing the 1994 massacres in his country says he fears Rwanda could be headed for another round of ethnic bloodletting.
Paul Rusesabagina, whose story was depicted in the 2004 Oscar-nominated “Hotel Rwanda”, accused Kigali of laying the foundation for another genocide by punishing killers from “only one side” of the country’s deadly ethnic conflict.
“Actually we are not very far from another genocide,” Rusesabagina, a critic of the Rwandan government, told Reuters in an interview on Thursday in Cape Town.
Some 800,000 minority Tutsis and moderate Hutus were butchered in 100 days of killings from April 6, 1994. Soldiers of the then Hutu-led government and their ethnic militia allies have been accused of orchestrating the carnage.
The killings ended only after Tutsi rebels led by current President Paul Kagame seized control of the country and triggered an exodus of more than 2 million Hutus.
“Since 1994, Tutsis have been killing Hutus, and even now there are many who are being killed, or who simply disappear,” he said. “Everything has been taken over by the Tutsi. The Hutu who are 85 percent of the population are intimidated.”
In Kigali, Rwandan Foreign Minister Charles Murigande poured scorn on Rusesabagina’s comments.
“He’s just out of touch with the reality of Rwanda. A firm foundation has been built and only daydreamers like Rusesabagina can think about bloodletting atrocities again,” Murigande told Reuters. “He is a mere propagandist out of touch with reality.”
Rusesabagina, 51, and his family have lived in Belgium since 1996 with two brief trips home in that time.
SLOW WHEELS OF JUSTICE
An international court based in Arusha, Tanzania, has been trying alleged masterminds of the genocide, but Rusesabagina said justice for some 100,000 people, mostly Hutu, arrested since 1994, has been “slow and biased”.
“The government made a mistake by taking all Hutus as criminals,” said Rusesabagina, whose father was Hutu and his mother Tutsi. His wife, Tatiana, is Tutsi.
He said the government’s answer to criticism of its slow justice system was to turn over genocide trials to traditional “Gacaca” courts which historically dealt with matters like stock theft. Members of these courts were mostly illiterate and lacked the competence to deal with weighty matters like genocide.
“As long as justice is not done there will be no reconciliation,” Rusesabagina said. “The justice in place is biased. They are focusing on cases of Hutus who killed Tutsis but not Tutsis who killed Hutus,” he said.
“Given such a situation, what do you expect if the other side should get an opportunity to revenge,” Rusesabagina said.
He said a process like South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission that helped heal the trauma of apartheid rule was what Rwandans really needed.
Rusesabagina was directly responsible for saving the lives of more than 1,200 Tutsis and Hutu moderates by sheltering them in the hotel and bribing the Hutu military to spare them.
Kagame, his wife and most of his cabinet watched the Kigali premiere of “Hotel Rwanda” in February 2004, but has since dismissed the movie as an attempt to re-write Rwanda’s history.
Last year he described its portrayal of Rusesabagina, played by Don Cheadle, as false.
“It has nothing to do with Rusesabagina,” Kagame told reporters during a visit to Washington. “He just happened to be there accidentally, and he happened to be surviving because he was not in the category of those being hunted.”
Rusesabagina said Kagame has increasingly seen him as an enemy since he filed a highly critical complaint to the International Criminal Court in Arusha in 2005.
@Gyppo wrote:
“Everything has been taken over by the Tutsi. The Hutu who are 85 percent of the population are intimidated.”
I read that one of the first things that Kagame did when he seized power in 1994, was to remove the useage of Hutu/Tutsi/Twa ID cards, thus attempting to make all Rwandans common to each other.
After all, the ethinicity that constitutes Batwa, Bahutu and Batutsi stems from the transhumance that was taking place over a thousand years ago, when pastoralist folks termed as “Nilotes” and “Hima” migrated with their livestock from the East and NNE and settled in the Great Lakes, alongside the Bantu i.e the agriculturalist Bahutu and the Hunter Gatherer Batwa.
A milennium later, and with much interbreeding and dilution of bloodlines; the distinction between a Wahutu and Watutsi is little more than an idealistic census exercise, although centuries of hostility between the two makes it wrong for me to trivialise that distinction.
However, I find myself wondering how Tutsi will wage war against Hutu, or vice versa, if there is no documented ID to place a person in one group or the other, because physical apperance is nothing to go by.
Four weeks to go before I fly down there again. Wonder if I’ll be able to make sense of it all.
Cheers.
Hey there,
I’m new to the forum. I was lurking around your site, and came across the Rwandan posting. I wanted to comment.
I was living in Rwanda two summers ago, and had the chance to talk with various government officials. You’re right, they have erased, at least officially, the Twa, Hutu, and Tutsi labels. I thought it sounded like a really smart move, and I must say I have been impressed with many of Kagame’s decisions as President.
That being said, by the end of my trip, I left extremely concerned. Everyone I had spoken to in the government talked of how there are no more Tutsi, Hutu or Twa, but instead Rwandans, and therefore everyone should feel secure in their country because the government represented everyone. But, when you push them further, I discovered that every person I talked to (around 20 people from different departments – High Court, Executive, Gacaca courts, security, intelligence, and parliamentary assistants) turned out to be either exiles from Uganda (the majority) who had been displaced during the first forced Tutsi exodus in the 1950s, or where survivors of the genocide. They were reluctant to share their former labels as Tutsi, which was understandable when they are preaching and trying to create a unified Rwandan identify, but it was concerning nonetheless that I couldn’t find a single “Hutu” official in the government (especially when you consider the people who had the old Hutu label are still the majority of the population. When I asked about this, the response was always that Rwandans ran the government, and therefore there was no way to know which former group the individual government officials had come from.
I had friends who were living with some Hutu families, all of which still referred to themselves as Hutu, and I spoke at length with people I’d meet on the streets, and the unanimous opinion was that the government was anti-Hutu and would never let them be apart of the government again unless they took it by force. It just seemed like the world the government was living in was vastly different than that in the streets. (Government not in touch with the citizens, who would have ever imaged that… :? ).
I left feeling like the government really was trying to form a new identity in Rwanda – Rwandan – and that they were using the idea of “if you act as though this is the reality, reality will soon follow”. I just doubt whether this will really work, especially when it is clear that a huge portion of the population feels disenfranchised and distrusts the government.
I would be extremely interested in hearing your experience there Lee, and what you come to see and understand.
Take care,
Amanda
Oh yeah – one more thing…
I also heard many not so great things about Paul Rusesabagina, which surprised me. One woman I spoke with was trapped in the hotel with her daughter, and she said that although she harbored no direct hatred towards Mr. Rusesabagina, she thinks he is anything but a hero. She felt that the only reason he was protecting her and her family was because he was being paid, and that he demanded the families in the hotel or their relatives give him money to insure their safety. She said it was purely a money-making scheme, and not humanitarian. No idea about the factuality of this claim, but thought it was worth mentioning.
Amanda,
I am in no doubt that the makers of Hotel Rwanda made Rusesabagina into something he wasn’t. I’d just like to discover the true extent of that misinterpretation.
Also, I’m very keen to delve into the undercurrents of Rwandan society as it stands today.
I will report back with regular dispatches while I’m there, and follow up with a full article by the summer.
Cheers,
Lee.
@2Charlie wrote:
First off, they had a skinny guy play me in the movie.
Second, Paul was and is an opportunist.
Kagame has done an incredible job in 12 years to form a RWANDAN identity and try and remove the roots for another civil war and /or genocide.
Many expat Hutu’s are trying to rally support for their cause by presenting a scenario of Hutu’s being repressed by a minority Tutsi regime.
It’s a crock, Paul is being used by the Hutu’s to get THEIR message out and I am still pissed they had a skinny guy play my part.
Nolte isn’t that skinny. ;)
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