Hungry for Truth, Peace and Justice

'Hotel Rwanda' manager not a hero, associate tells Springfield audience

By BERNARD SCHOENBURG
THE STATE JOURNAL-REGISTER
May 12, 2010

Paul Rusesabagina, about whom the move “Hotel Rwanda” was made, doesn’t consider himself a hero, attendees at the Governor’s Prayer Breakfast in Springfield were told Wednesday.

“He simply did what any decent human being would do,” said Brian Endless, senior adviser to the Hotel Rwanda Rusesabagina Foundation and an expert on genocide issues.

The movie chronicles how Rusesabagina used the hotel he managed to shelter 1,200 people from genocide 16 years ago.

“He was surrounded by people who did not do the right thing,” Endless said of that 1994 period in which more than 800,000 people were killed over ethnic differences.

The movietook some dramatic license, Endless said, such as when it showed Rusesabagina leaving the hotel to get supplies and encountering bodies in the streets. It’s true that bodies were on roads throughout the country, he said, but Rusesabagina did not make such a trip.

‘If Paul would have left the hotel … he probably would have been stopped at a roadblock and killed,” Endless said. “Roadblocks meant death for anyone who was a Tutsi or who was accused of being a Tutsi or of collaborating with Tutsis, who if the militia just didn’t like the way you looked at the time,” he said.

Rusesabagina is the son of a Tutsi mother and a Hutu father and has a Tutsi wife, “so Paul says he’s a Rwandan.”

The violence in the movie was also “incredibly mild” compared to the reality, Endless said.

Rusesabagina made the difficult choice to try to send his family to safety, Endless said.

His wife, Endless said, “was horribly, horribly beaten by the militias while she was sheltering the body of her baby son. … If they would have found a baby boy in that truck, they would have taken him out and killed him. (She) sheltered him and could barely move for three weeks afterwards when she came out of that truck at the hotel.”

Rusesabagina was to speak at Wednesday’s event, but he has to undergo surgery and remained in Europe.

The Chicago-based foundation raises public awareness about the need for an international truth and reconciliation commission for Rwanda and the region, and also works on issues related to the ongoing conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where more than 5 million people have died.

Also speaking at the 48th annual Governor’s Prayer Breakfast was Gov. Pat Quinn, who called the events a “great tradition. He introduced some “Gold Star” families who are relatives of military personnel killed in the line of duty. Those family members were given a standing ovation.

Bernard Schoenburg can be reached at 788-1540 and at "bernard.schoenburg@sj-r.com".

Flier challenges Rusesabagina story

A flier handed out at the Crowne Plaza Wednesday questioned Paul Rusesabagina’s story.

“Hotel Rwanda remains a fiction, and Paul Rusesabagina is not the man you have seen in the movie!” it states in part.

Kitty Kurth, a spokeswoman for Rusesabagina’s foundation, said she believes the current Rwandan government is behind the leafleting.

“The Rwandan government, whenever Paul speaks out about the genocide and asks people to make sure that the genocide never happens again, is somehow threatened by someone other than (President) Paul Kagame talking about Rwanda,” Kurth said. “When we try to ask people to work for peace in Rwanda, somehow the government doesn’t like that.”

An election is coming up in Rwanda, she said, and the president has “closed all the independent newspapers in Rwanda and just really is interested in not having any democratic debate.”

A message sent to an email address on the flier was returned as undeliverable.

posted by Mamadou Kouyate @ 12:05 AM