After pressure from U.S. officials, San Antonio resident Paul Rusesabagina — the inspiration for the 2004 film Hotel Rwanda — is expected to be released from his years-long imprisonment on Saturday, according to Reuters.
Rusesabagina was traveling to the East African nation of Burundi for a speaking engagement in August 2020 when Rwandan security forces arrested him during a layover in Dubai. He was later handed a 25-year prison sentence for terrorism-related charges against Rwandan dictator Paul Kugame’s regime, according to the Dallas Morning News.
Some foreign policy experts have called the charges frivolous.
U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-San Antonio, and three dozen other members of congress, worked over recent months to demand Rusesabagina’s release. Castro published a 2022 Express-News op-ed to raise awareness about the plight of Rusesabagina, who reportedly helped shield residents of his former country from its brutal genocide of the 1990s.
“Paul Rusesabagina is a hero, and his unjust detention was a stain on Rwanda’s progress toward a peaceful and stable future,” Castro said in a statement. “Together with his family, friends, and supporters around the world, I am overjoyed to hear the news of his impending release and look forward to his safe return.”
In a statement published on Twitter, a spokesperson for Rwanda’s Kugame, Stephanie Nyombayire, said commuting Rusesabagina’s sentence is part of a “shared desire to reset the US-Rwanda relationship.”
Rusesabagina was celebrated internationally after Hotel Rwanda highlighted has efforts to spare people from brutal ethnic cleansing.
Rusesabagina is reported to have saved more than 1,000 Hutu and Tutsi refugees from near-certain death by hiding them in the Kigali hotel where he worked as a manager. However, some including British investigative journalist Linda Malvern — author of several books on the genocide — have questioned the former hotelier’s claims.
In 2020, Rusesabagina told the Current that Melvern and other critics in the West couldn’t know what took place at the hotel he oversaw.
“They do not know what was happening in Rwanda,” he said. “Because for Linda [Melvern], she was not there … . There was no white person — no foreign person — who was in Rwanda in 1994 between April 6 and July 4, 1994.”
Rusesabagina and his family fled to Belgium following the genocide and eventually relocated to San Antonio in 2008.
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This article appears in Mar 22 – Apr 4, 2023.
