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Are Colleges and Universities in North America Unwittingly Providing a Platform to a

Tutsi Genocide Revisionist?

Since 2004 in the United States and in Canada, Paul Rusesabagina, the man upon
whom Don Cheadle’s character in Hotel Rwanda is based, has been celebrated as the
Oskar Schindler of the Tutsi genocide. In 2002, when Terry George, the film’s producer,
sat down with him to write the script for the film, Rusesabagina was living in Belgium as
an ordinary man. Two years later when the film got three Oscar nominations, he was
catapulted into prominence. According to the film’s narrative and that of An Ordinary
Man, the autobiography he co-wrote with Tom Zoellner, Rusesabagina saved 1268 Tutsis
and moderate Hutus who had taken refuge at the hotel he managed. For that, he has
amassed prestigious awards, among them the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which put
him in the company of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Simon Wiesenthal; the National Civil
Rights Museum Freedom Award, which put him in the company of Nelson Mandela and
Elie Wiesel; and the Peace Abbey Courage of Conscience Award, which put him in the
company of Rosa Parks and Mother Theresa. Not surprisingly, he has become one of the
most sought-after speakers in colleges and universities across the United States and
Canada. According to Tom Zoellner in the March 6, 2009 issue of The Lawrentian, a
Lawrence University student newspaper, Rusesabagina had by then spoken at more than
200 colleges and universities in the United States alone. At least two of the institutions in
the United States where he has spoken (Loyola University Chicago and Gustavus
Adolphus College) and one in Canada (University of Guelph) granted him honorary
doctorates. In November 2009, Boston University installed him as a Martin Luther King,
Jr. Fellow. Indeed, to denounce Rusesabagina as a revisionist of the Tutsi genocide – the
very genocide upon which his reputation rests – would seem to be the ultimate irony. Yet
he is, unequivocally. Why college and university communities in North America have not
taken note of this is mind-boggling. Perhaps it takes a Tutsi genocide survivor or a person
who lost loved ones to the genocide simply because they happened to be Tutsi to decode
Rusesabagina’s revisionist discourse.
On November 11, 2008, at Birmingham-Southern College, I, together with
eight or so other people who, like me, had had relatives killed in the genocide simply
because they were Tutsi, listened to him for one long hour as he narrated, with many
distortions and omissions, the history that led to the genocide. In one glaring distortion of
Rwanda’s history of peonage, he said that for decades the minority Tutsi tribe did, with
the complicity of Belgian colonialists, enslave the majority Hutu tribe. In shock and
disbelief I heard him prevaricate, “Hutu in Kinyarwanda means slave,” and added that
Hutus who killed Tutsis in the genocide were striking back for the many years of their
enslavement. Throughout the entire talk, not once did he use the phrases “the Tutsi
genocide” or “the genocide against Tutsis,” preferring instead to use phrases like “the
Rwandan genocide,” “the genocide in Rwanda,” or simply “the genocide.” When he
ended his speech, the more than 1000 students and faculty members in attendance gave
him a long standing ovation while we – those of us who had lost relatives in the genocide
– sat quietly in pain, a pain wrought by the irony of the moment: students and faculty
unwittingly applauding a Tutsi genocide revisionist. When it was time for the Q&A phase
of the presentation, I tried hard to compose myself so as to sound coherent but failed
miserably. With a shaky voice I asked him if the “Rwandan genocide” he kept referring
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to in his speech meant the same thing as “the Tutsi genocide.” Instead of answering my
question, he went into a 30-minute rambling tirade against the current Rwandan
government, leaving no time for others in my group to ask their questions.
Since that night, I have reread An
Ordinary Man and have watched Hotel Rwanda again to see if they contain any hints of
his revisionism. To be sure, both the autobiography and the film call the genocide what it
was: the genocide against Tutsis. However, since becoming famous following the popular
acclaim of the film, his discourse on the genocide has changed drastically, without much
of his North American audience realizing it. He now says that because the genocide
claimed the lives of Hutus and Tutsis, it should not to be called the Tutsi genocide but
rather the Rwandan genocide. Indeed, that kind of claim is tantamount to saying that
since the German Nazi government sought to exterminate certain German groups, for
example persons with disabilities, homosexuals, and Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Jewish
genocide should be known by another name, say the German genocide. What
Rusesabagina does not take into account, and deliberately so, is the notion of intent –
“intent to destroy in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group” – as
Article 2 of the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of
Genocide states in its definition of a genocide. The killing of Tutsis that started in April
1994, Rusesabagina should be reminded, was part of a government plan to wipe them off
the face of Rwandan territory. In Hotel Rwanda, which was produced before he adopted
his revisionism, there is a scene that speaks to the premeditated nature of the killings.
Early in the film, wooden crates full of machetes are accidentally discovered – machetes
that the Hutu government had ordered from China to be used to exterminate all Tutsis in
Rwanda. What is particularly hurtful and heart-rending for
those of us who lost loved ones to the genocide is that Rusesabagina, in his speeches and
interviews, places responsibility of the genocide on Paul Kagame, the very man who led
his troops to end it. In an interview with Keith Harmon Snow, a freelance journalist who
has called the Tutsi genocide “a mythology,” Rusesabagina used the example of one
Robert Kajuga, a Tutsi who was president of the infamous interahamwe, as the Hutu
militia was called, to support his claim. Here is an excerpt from the interview, with
Snow’s editorial notes.

KHS: Was Robert Kajuga a Tutsi?

PR: Yes, Kajuga was a Tutsi.

KHS: How can that be? The Interahamwe, according to the common portrayals of
genocide in Rwanda, were a bunch of murderous Hutus with machetes…

PR: How could that be? That is a problem. Because Kagame had infiltrated the
[Habyarimana’s] army [FAR], and the militias, everywhere; he [Kagame] had his own
militia within a militia.

KHS: Are you saying that Robert Kajuga was one of those infiltrators?

PR: Among many others…

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KHS: So you then say that Kagame had something to do with orchestrating what people
know as “the genocide in Rwanda,” which was those now famous “100 days”—or three
months as you call it—of killing.

PR: What do you think?

Clearly, using Kajuga’s Tutsi identity to absolve the extremist Hutu government
of having carried out the genocide is equivalent to saying that since some of the kapos in
Jewish concentration camps were Jews, the blame for the Holocaust should not be placed
on the German Nazi government alone.
No, there is no irony in denouncing Rusesabagina as a Tutsi genocide
revisionist. What is ironical is that he has been provided a platform, of all places in
universities and colleges in the United States and Canada. What is also ironical is that
some of the universities and colleges where he has spoken have genocide studies
programs whose faculty and students have not raised a finger to protest their institutions’
invitation of him. Of course there has been an exception. Deborah E. Lipstadt, Professor
of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies at Emory University and author of
Denying the Holocaust, knows something about Rusesabagina’s revisionism. In 2007
after she had heard him speak at her school, she wrote on her blog to decry what she
called “a new form of [Tutsi] genocide denial.” She said, “What will surprise most
readers of this blog – it certainly surprised me – is that one of the people who has been
active in spreading this form of denial is Paul Rusesabagina.”
Surely, the colleges and universities that have
invited and continue to invite Rusesabagina to speak on their campuses must not be
aware that he is a Tutsi genocide revisionist, for if they knew, they would not provide
him a platform. Free speech should have its limits, even in academia. In 2007 when
Columbia University invited Holocaust denier Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian
president, to speak on its campus, there was an uproar that was justified. In some
countries, for example Poland, Germany, and Austria, Holocaust denial is a crime
punishable by a prison sentence. David Irving, whom Deborah E. Lipstadt wrote about in
Denying the Holocaust, served a prison sentence in Austria after pleading guilty to the
crime. In Rwanda, where Tutsi genocide denial is also a crime, Rusesabagina would have
to answer for his revisionism in a court of law if he were to step in the country.
Could Rusesabagina’s
deliberately vague diction in his speeches on college campuses be the reason why his
revisionism has not been decoded? At Birmingham-Southern College where I heard him
speak, he told his audience that “the best and worst weapons in life are our words.” If, as
he claims, he used words adeptly to ward off Hutu militia and military bent on killing
Tutsis and moderate Hutus who had taken refuge at the hotel he managed, he is now
using a three-word phrase, “the Rwandan genocide,” that only few in North America –
and these include survivors and relatives of victims of the Tutsi genocide – can decode as
denying that genocide.
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