Paul Rusesabagina (; born 15 June 1954) is a Rwandan human rights activist. He worked as the manager of the Hôtel des Mille Collines in Kigali, during a period in which it housed 1,268 Hutu and Tutsi refugees fleeing the militia during the Rwandan genocide. None of these refugees were hurt or killed during the attacks.
An account of Rusesabagina's actions during the genocide was later depicted in the film Hotel Rwanda in 2004, in which he was portrayed by American actor Don Cheadle. The film has been the subject both of critical acclaim and controversy in Rwanda.
On the back of newly-found international fame, Rusesabagina embarked on a successful career as a public speaker, mostly touring universities in the United States. He campaigns for the Hotel Rwanda Rusesabagina Foundation, which he founded in 2006. He holds Belgian citizenship, and a U.S. green card, and has homes in Brussels, Belgium and San Antonio, Texas. Since fleeing Rwanda in 1996, he has become a prominent critic of Paul Kagame and the RPF government. He founded the PDR-Ihumure political party in 2006, and is currently President of the MRCD.
On 31 August 2020, believing he was taking a chartered flight to Burundi from Dubai, he arrived in Kigali, where he was arrested on nine charges of terrorism that related to his association with the FLN (National Liberation Front), the armed wing of PDR-Ihumure, who claimed responsibility for terrorist attacks in 2018 which killed at least nine people.
On 20 September 2021, he was convicted on terrorism charges and sentenced to 25 years in prison. The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention rendered their opinion on 18 March 2022 that Rusesabagina had been illegally kidnapped, tortured, and sentenced after an unfair trial. The Working Group further found that Rusesabagina has been targeted by the Government on account of his work as a human rights defender, because of his criticism of the Government on a broad range of issues.
In 2023, after serving two years in Mageragere prison, Rusesabagina's sentence was commuted by the Rwandan president.
Early life, education, and family
Rusesabagina was born in 1954. He was one of nine children born to a Hutu father, a respected community elder named Thomas Rupfure, and a Tutsi mother in Murama, Rwanda. Although stating that he grew up poor, in a "house ... made of mud and sticks" and "without shoes", Rusesabagina described his upbringing as "solidly middle class by the standards of Africa in the 1950s". The young Rusesabagina sometimes had to sleep outside his house as his family provided shelter to refugees seeking shelter from clashes between the Hutu and Tutsi ethnic groups.
Rusesabagina's parents sent him to school in a town near Gitwe run by the Seventh-day Adventist Church. By the age of 13, he was fluent in English and French, as well as his native Kinyarwanda.
Due to distance and his commitment to work, he and Esther legally separated in 1981. Rusesabagina was granted full custody of their three children: Diane, Lys, and Roger. In 1987, he was invited to a wedding where he met Tatiana, a nurse who lived in Ruhengeri. Tatiana and Paul married two years later and she adopted his children. She gave birth twice, but only their son, Trésor, survived infancy. Rusesabagina's father died in 1991, and his mother shortly after.
Career
Ministry
By the end of his adolescence, Rusesabagina had decided to become a minister. He studied at the Faculty of Theology in Yaoundé. In Cameroon, he soon became disillusioned with the prospect of a career as a clergyman, deciding he wanted to live an 'urban life'.
Hotel des Mille Collines
In December 1978, Rusesabagina moved to Kigali. While there, an acquaintance, Isaac Mulihano, invited Rusesabagina to apply for an opening to work at the Hôtel des Mille Collines. He was offered a position and was sent to Nairobi and then to Switzerland and Brussels to study hotel management.
As he rose through the ranks at the Hôtel des Mille Collines, his promotions earned him the resentment of some fellow Rwandans in the staff. Some took to calling him 'muzungu' – a Kinyarwandan word for 'white man'. In 1992, Paul Rusesabagina was promoted to assistant general manager of the Diplomates Hotel, an affiliate of the Hôtel des Mille Collines.