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Rwandan President Paul Kagame on Sunday rejected widespread criticism of the terrorism trial of the polarizing hero “Hotel Rwanda”, hailed for having saved more than 1,000 lives during the 1994 genocide in the country.
He said Paul Rusesabagina, now a prominent Kagame critic whose detention and trial have raised alarm bells around the world, was not on the dock because of his fame, but because people had died as a result of his subsequent actions.
Rusesabagina, 67, faces a verdict on September 20 on charges of being a terrorist mastermind who funded a rebel group behind a series of deadly attacks in the East African country.
He and his family have long dismissed the allegations and claim that the former hotelier whose actions during the genocide inspired the 2004 Hollywood film is the victim of a politically motivated show trial.
Prosecutors are calling for a life sentence for Rusesabagina, which they accuse of supporting the rebel National Liberation Front (FLN), a group accused of attacks in Rwanda in 2018 and 2019 that left nine dead.
“He’s here being tried for it. Nothing to do with the movie. Nothing to do with celebrity status,” Kagame said in a nationwide television interview.
“It is about the lives of Rwandans who have been lost because of his actions and because of the organizations to which he belonged or which he led,” he said.
“What he is being tried and accused of is having taken part in these armed and terrorist groups … This man deserves to be tried fairly by a court and will be tried as fairly as possible.”
Rusesabagina denied any involvement in the attacks, but was one of the founders of the Rwandan Movement for Democratic Change (MRCD), an opposition group of which the FLN is considered the armed wing.
“Love to hate Rwanda”
“Hotel Rwanda” recounted how the former manager of the Hotel des Mille Collines in Kigali rescued more than 1,200 people who had taken refuge there during the genocide in which around 800,000 were massacred, most of them Tutsi ethnicity.
Rusesabagina, a Hutu, later became a vocal critic of Kagame and has lived in exile in the United States and Belgium since 1996.
He was arrested in August last year when a plane he believed was bound for Burundi landed in Kigali instead, a move his supporters describe as a kidnapping.
He faces nine charges, including terrorism, but has boycotted the proceedings since March, accusing the court of “injustice and lack of independence”.
Kagame has been in power since 1994 and is accused by critics of crushing opponents and ruling out of fear.
In Sunday’s interview, he dismissed claims that Kigali used Israeli malware Pegagus after an international media investigation revealed that more than 3,500 Rwandans – including Rusesabagina’s daughter – were potential targets of the software.
“So to the question of whether we spy with this tool, the answer is no, and a big no in all caps,” he said.
“But like any other country in the world, Rwanda collects intelligence and there are so many ways to do it,” he added.
Among the numbers that appeared on the leaked documents revealed by the media investigation in July was a cell phone belonging to Carine Kanimba, who led the campaign to free her father.
“The media is inundated with so much about Rwanda that is not true. The media, especially the Western media, love to hate Rwanda,” Kagame said.
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