{"id":169822,"date":"2020-10-05T12:00:02","date_gmt":"2020-10-05T11:00:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=169822"},"modified":"2020-10-02T09:31:42","modified_gmt":"2020-10-02T08:31:42","slug":"who-is-rwandas-real-hero-paul-kagame-or-paul-rusesabagina","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2020\/10\/who-is-rwandas-real-hero-paul-kagame-or-paul-rusesabagina\/","title":{"rendered":"Who is Rwanda\u2019s Real Hero? Paul Kagame or Paul Rusesabagina?"},"content":{"rendered":"

What Kagame has done to Rusesabagina, of Hotel Rwanda fame, embarrasses the US foreign policy establishment that has lionized his brutal regime for so long.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Paul Rusesabagina (left) and Paul Kagame (right)<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cRusesabagina is a longtime critic of Kagame\u2019s regime and its catastrophic war on the Congolese people and the Rwandan refugee population.\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

30 Sep 2020 –<\/em> Paul Rusesabagina, the real-life protagonist whose heroic story is the basis of the film \u201cHotel Rwanda <\/a>,\u201d is now imprisoned and on trial in Rwanda for a long list of preposterous \u201cterrorism\u201d charges. Rwandan operatives\u00a0kidnapped <\/a>\u00a0him in Dubai at the beginning of September and forcibly extradited him to Rwanda on the orders of Rwandan President Paul Kagame, who was for many years celebrated as Rwanda\u2019s savior, the general who stopped the genocide. A long list of investigative works, most recently Judi Rever\u2019s \u201cIn Praise of Blood, Crimes of the Rwandan Patriotic Front<\/a>,\u201d and decades of UN reports detailing the Rwandan army\u2019s atrocities in both Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) have\u00a0belied that tale, but US and other NATO nations\u2019 support for the president has\u00a0remained.<\/p>\n

Rusesabagina is a longtime critic of Kagame\u2019s regime and its catastrophic war on the Congolese people and the Rwandan refugee population who crossed the Rwandan\/Congolese border to escape his advancing army in 1994. I have spoken to him several times for\u00a0Pacifica\u2019s KPFA Radio and the San Francisco Bay View <\/a>\u00a0about Rwanda and DRC, and for Counterpunch \u201cOn Invoking Rwanda to Attack Syria <\/a>.\u201d I read his book \u201cAn Ordinary Man <\/a>,\u201d and I\u2019ve followed his activism on behalf of peace in Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the wider African Great Lakes Region for over ten years. I trust and admire his commitments and hope to see him released soon.<\/p>\n

Hotel Rwanda, Saving Darfur, and Humanitarian War<\/strong><\/p>\n

That said, I reacted negatively to \u201cHotel Rwanda,\u201d the Hollywood movie based on Rusesabagina\u2019s heroism in protecting more than a thousand people who took shelter in the hotel he managed during the 100 days of massacres that began on April 6, 1994. Rusesabagina himself has said that he was happy with the movie as the story of a man, himself, taking a moral stand amidst a bloodbath and near complete collapse of social order, but that the movie is at the same time a simplification with a Hollywood ending. I recommend Dan Kovalik\u2019s\u00a0Hotel Rwanda Revisited: an Interview with Paul Rusesabagina <\/a>\u00a0for more of his thoughts on the movie and on realities in post-genocide Rwanda and DRC.<\/p>\n

I reacted negatively to the movie in part because I didn\u2019t see it until 2008, four years after its release and 14 years after the Rwandan Genocide. The copy I rented at that time opened not on scenes in Rwanda\u2019s capital, but on Don Cheadle, the actor who played Rusesabagina, proselytizing the movie audience. The tragic story we were about to see, he said, was being replayed now, north of Rwanda, in Darfur, where Arab militias commanded by then Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir were committing genocide against the native African peoples of Southern Sudan, who were neither Arab nor Muslim.<\/p>\n

It would be hard to find a more perfect marriage of Hollywood and US foreign policy propaganda talking points. The\u00a0Save Darfur <\/a>movement was then in full swing, and China, the US\u2019s competitor in Africa, was under attack for supporting the government of then Sudanese President al-Bashir.<\/p>\n

A year earlier, \u201cNot on Our Watch: The Mission to End Genocide in Darfur and Beyond <\/a>\u201d had been published with Cheadle and John Prendergast credited as co-authors. Prendergast is a career intelligence professional and humanitarian war propagandist often photographed with Cheadle and other movie stars whom he persuaded to join his campaigns, most notably George Clooney, Ben Affleck, and Mia Farrow. In the 2009 \u201cDarfur Debate <\/a>\u201d at Columbia University, Ugandan academic and author Mahmood Mamdani aptly identified him as \u201ca Zionist who wants to recolonize Africa.\u201d<\/p>\n

Students Taking Action Now: Darfur (STAND) <\/a>\u00a0was formed at Georgetown University in 2004, the same year that \u201cHotel Rwanda\u201d was released, and South Sudan was successfully separated from Sudan in 2011. Omar al-Bashir was finally taken down in a 2019 coup, and STAND at some point broadened its identity to become\u00a0\u201cthe student-led movement to end genocide mass atrocities.\u201d\u00a0It eventually merged with\u00a0Aegis Trust <\/a>, the British-based NGO umbrella group that professes the same mission.<\/p>\n

The copy of \u201cHotel Rwanda\u201d that I rented this week no longer begins with Don Cheadle\u2019s stumping for the Save Darfur movement. That\u2019s over, and the speech has been mercifully cut. However, the Rwandan Genocide continues to be a touchstone of arguments for humanitarian intervention, aka the white man\u2019s burden. The Aegis Trust promotes \u201cFrom Hate to Humanity: September webcast series <\/a>,\u201d featuring General Romeo Dallaire, Linda Melvern, and other prominent proponents of Kagame as Rwanda\u2019s savior and his regime\u2019s faux reconciliation and \u201cremarkable road to recovery.\u201d Paul Rusesabagina was not on the list of speakers for obvious reasons, although it seems unlikely that Aegis knew he\u2019d be in prison in Rwanda by the time the webinars began, and they have not released a statement on his kidnapping and imprisonment.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Rwandan Genocide continues to be a touchstone of arguments for humanitarian intervention, aka the white man\u2019s burden.\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So who is Rwanda\u2019s real hero and who will stand up for him or her?<\/p>\n

Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and billionaire businessman Howard Buffett, son of Warren, have heaped tireless praise on Paul Kagame as \u201cRwanda\u2019s savior,\u201d even as all the evidence to the contrary piled up. Rusesabagina they conveniently ignore, and none of them have spoken to his current plight. The\u00a0Hotel Rwanda\/Paul Rusesabagina Foundation <\/a>\u00a0says that neither Clinton nor Blair have returned their calls.<\/p>\n

However, longtime critics of the Kagame regime and its war and occupation of DRC are not the only ones who have come to Paul Rusesabagina\u2019s defense. So have some of the genocide prevention campaigners and instruments of American\u00a0soft power <\/a>\u00a0who cite the Rwandan Genocide as a reason for US intervention in Libya, Syria, and earlier, Sudan.<\/p>\n

The New York Times<\/em>, which typically adheres to the standard homilies about Rwanda and the\u00a0responsibility to protect <\/a>, has written a\u00a0series of sympathetic articles about Rusesabagina\u2019s plight <\/a>.<\/p>\n

The George and Amal Clooney Foundation for Justice (CFJ) has joined the\u00a0American Bar Association Center for Human Rights <\/a>\u00a0to announce that it \u201cintends to monitor the upcoming trial of Paul Rusesabagina in Rwanda as part of CFJ\u2019s TrialWatch initiative.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hillary Clinton\u2019s 2016 running mate, Virginia Senator Tim Kaine, Ranking Member of the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Africa and Global Health Policy, published a\u00a0letter <\/a>\u00a0to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo urging him to demand a fair trial for the Hotel Rwanda hero.<\/p>\n

I suspect that soft power is chiming in on Rusesabagina\u2019s behalf because what Kagame has done to him embarrasses the foreign policy establishment that has lionized and covered for him and his brutal regime for so long. The hugely successful \u201cHotel Rwanda\u201d and Rusesabagina\u2019s subsequent advocacy for human rights in Rwanda and DRC has made him world renowned, better known than, for example, embattled opposition leader\u00a0Victoire Ingabire<\/a>\u00a0or gospel singer Kizito Mihigo, who died in Rwandan police custody in 2019 and was just posthumously awarded the\u00a0V\u00e1clav Havel Prize for Creative Dissent <\/a>.<\/p>\n

Whatever the US foreign policy establishment decides to do, Paul Rusesabagina, not Paul Kagame, is Rwanda\u2019s real hero, and he\u2019s also a hero to the Congolese for speaking out against Kagame\u2019s ongoing war and occupation of DRC.<\/p>\n

_______________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Ann Garrison is an independent journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She <\/em>attended Stanford University and is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/a>. In 2014 she received the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and Peace Prize<\/em> for her reporting on conflict in the African Great Lakes region. She can be reached at <\/em>@AnnGarrison<\/em> or <\/em>ann@kpfa.org<\/em> <\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 blackagendareport.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

30 Sep 2020 – What Kagame has done to Rusesabagina, of Hotel Rwanda fame, embarrasses the US foreign policy establishment that has lionized his brutal regime for so long. \u201cRusesabagina is a longtime critic of Kagame\u2019s regime and its catastrophic war on the Congolese people and the Rwandan refugee population.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":169823,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[237,1991,1412],"class_list":["post-169822","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-transcend-members","tag-africa","tag-d-r-congo","tag-rwanda"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169822","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=169822"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169822\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/169823"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=169822"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=169822"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=169822"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}