Hotel Rwanda hero speaks at SHS

By Richard Wills, publications editor

Paul Rusesabagina, the real-life hero whose humanitarian courage was portrayed in the 2004 Academy Award nominated film Hotel Rwanda, spoke to a full house of students and guests at Selwyn House on October 23.

Rusesabagina is a Rwandan who has been internationally honoured for saving 1,268 civilians during the 1994 Rwandan genocide. As assistant manager of the Sabena Hôtel des Mille Collines in Kigali, Rusesabagina used his influence and connections to shelter 1,268 Tutsis and moderate Hutus from being slaughtered by the Interahamwe militia, who murdered 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus in 100 days.

A critic of Rwanda’s Tutsi-led regime, Rusesabagina now lives in exile in Brussels, from where he has set up the Hotel Rwanda Rusesabagina Foundation to help Rwandan women and orphans, and has been speaking to audiences across North America about his efforts to prevent future genocides.

“Hotel Rwanda should be a lesson to show us what was going on in Rwanda in 1994 and remind us that it never ended,” Rusesabagina has told Mother Jones magazine. “It is still happening in many different parts of Africa.”

Rusesabagina is critical of the effectiveness of UN peacekeepers in Rwanda, and praised the Obama administration for registering American protest against the current regime in Rwanda.

Asked by students at Selwyn House about the “Unity and Reconciliation” process underway in Rwanda, he replied, “There is no truth without equality. There must be equality and reconciliation.”

Rusesabagina has received many awards for his work, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2005.

Selwyn House Old Boy Abhinav Gupta 2009 introduced Rusesabagina to the Selwyn
House audience, praising him for having the courage to “step up” to take action to protect innocent people. Abhinav issued a call to all the young people in the audience step up and take action for humanity.

Ever since he met Rusesabagina a conference of the Hotel Rwanda Rusesabagina Foundation (HRRF) in Chicago in 2008 Abhinav has been working to bring him to SHS.

Abhinav recalls when he first met Rusesabagina at the Chicago conference. “It’s a numinous experience, meeting your hero,” he says. “[Rusesabagina] told me about his father, his hero, and in the end, why he did what he did because of him. Then he ended with why people my age, in my generation, are so important, that we can change the world. That phrase is thrown around so much these days, but he threw it with the weight it deserves.”

Guests at Selwyn House included students from H.S. Billings, ECS, McGill, Marianopolis and Dawson. The day after his appearance at Selwyn House, Rusesabagina spoke to about 100 at the Delta Hotel in downtown Montreal.

For more information, go to hrrfoundation.org.