THE MAN who helped save 1,268 people during the 1994 Rwandan genocide by providing shelter and safety at a Kigali hotel is in Ireland to press for peace, truth and reconciliation in conflict zones.
Paul Rusesabagina, whose story was dramatised in the acclaimed film Hotel Rwanda, will address Irish audiences this week on the lessons from conflicts in both his own country and Northern Ireland. Speaking to The Irish Times in Belfast yesterday, he said Ireland and Rwanda were similar in that conflict raged between divided communities but, he said, the two countries had handled the post-conflict situation differently.
“In Ireland Protestants and Catholics came up with an agreement that, even if they don’t reconcile necessarily, they are going to live together.”
However, he said, no such compromise had been reached yet in Rwanda. “Rwanda has a lot of lessons to learn from Ireland especially about equal justice for all and also about reconciliation for all as time goes on . . . At least here [in Ireland] people have come to an understanding that both sides made mistakes. But in Rwanda there was a winner and a loser,” said Mr Rusesabagina, who is a long-standing critic of Rwanda’s president Paul Kagame.
“The winner today is dictating his rules, his regulation, imposing his views and dictating. In Ireland you can have a Catholic and a Protestant sitting around one table and talking. We need to learn this lesson so that one day in Rwanda Hutus and Tutsis could honestly sit down around a table.”
He said there were frequent references to the 800,000 Rwandans killed during three months of 1994. “But we forget many people, according to human rights advocates, were killed before the genocide and by the people who present themselves as victims today.”
He said he was advocating “an internationally sanctioned truth and equal justice commission for Rwanda and for the Great Lakes region of Africa as a whole”.
Mr Rusesabagina travels to Dublin today for a special screening of Hotel Rwanda and a talk in Trinity College.