The other face of Rusesabagina: a genocide denier and revisionist

Since the arrest and trial of Paul Rusesabagina, a former hotelier, for terrorism crimes, Western   media has been awash with the portrait of a man who is a hero, a political dissident who opposes President Paul Kagame.

The terror suspect is propped up as a hero who saved 1,200 lives during the genocide against the Tutsi, and is now a dissident against President Kagame.  However, it is important to recall that he is on trial for his involvement in terrorism activities which claimed a dozen lives and caused a lot of damage to property in southwestern Rwanda.

Rusesabagina rose to fame with the Hollywood movie in 2004 and thereafter, when US President Georges Bush awarded him the Medal of Freedom in 2005.  He felt emboldened and started a crusade through American universities and colleges selling lies and truncating the truth about the genocide against the Tutsi, and making his gullible audience believe that the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) was the one to blame for the slaughter of more than one million Tutsi.

One of the features of genocide revisionism is for its propagators to deny the facts and to whitewash the perpetrators by blaming the victims for the atrocities. In the context of the 1994 genocide, Rusesabagina is unrivalled.

In his interview with a Vermont-based publication in April 2007, he came out as a staunch propagandist of the Hutu Power extremist ideology, unashamed of twisting the truth.

When asked whether President Kagame had something to do with “orchestrating what people know as “the genocide in Rwanda,” he responded: “What do you think? Who killed [President] Habyarimana? [Laughing.] Who benefited from Habyarimana’s death? It is Kagame and his people.

“And if you go back to the region, to the Great Lakes region, between 1990 and 1994, as I was describing, the rebels [RPA] on their way from Uganda-in Byumba and Ruhengeri, in northern Rwanda - they were killing civilians. Today you can go to many former communities which Kagame has completely reshuffled, and changed, every way, upside down. Today if I go to the hill where I was born, he has changed the names.”

Rusesabagina made the case that the roadblocks where the Tutsi were singled out and executed were infiltrated by the RPF. He alleged that “Kagame had infiltrated the [Habyarimana] army [FAR], and the militias, everywhere; he [Kagame] had his own militia within a militia,” and that the leader of the Interahamwe, Robert Kajuga, a Tutsi, was one of those infiltrators.

“But most of those guys who were just on the roadblocks [where so much killing was done] were Kagame people,” Rusesabagina said. Here, he is blaming the genocide against the Tutsi on the very person who stopped the genocide. He suggested that the killings of the Hutu continued even after 100 days.

This is the same Rusesabagina who went to London, UK, in 2008 to be a defence witness and urged Judge Anthony Evans not to extradite one of the genocide suspects there, Dr Vincent Bajinya, to Rwanda.

According to British investigative Journalist, Linda Melvern, “Judge Evans determined that Rusesabagina was "strongly allied to the extremist Hutu faction" and his performance in court raised questions about his direct links with Hutu Power. He concluded Rusesabagina to be a fantasist and his testimony worthless.”

He also tried to be a defence witness at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) for a well-known genocidaire, Joseph Nzirora, an ex-official of the former ruling MRND in 2010 but was snubbed by the Trial Chamber because his evidence could not be considered as independent and reasoned.

Here is the man that western media and a web of international lobbyists want everyone to believe is a hero that should be freed now and charges of terrorism against him dropped.