If, as he fears, Rwanda
returns to the bloodshed of its past, Paul Rusesabagina and his wine
cellar will no longer be coming to the rescue.
The former manager of the Hotel des Milles Collines, he famously sheltered
more than 1,200 Tutsi refugees during the 1994 genocide, persuading local
militiamen to turn a blind eye by plying them with best Burgundy.
But 16 years after the
slaughter that killed 800,000 people, the man whose quiet tact
inspired the Oscar-nominated film Hotel Rwanda has abandoned the role
of diplomatic maitre d'. Instead, he is an outspoken critic of the other
Rwandan hailed as a hero in the West - President Paul Kagame, the shoo-in
favourite to be returned to power in tomorrow's elections.
"The West is sponsoring a government that has been torturing and killing
its own citizens," Mr Rusesabagina, 56, who now lives in exile in
America, told The Sunday Telegraph.
"President Kagame has already eliminated or arrested his opposition, and
my only hope now is that the international community will realise that their
dollars have bought an illusion, not an election."
Sadly for Mr Rusesabagina and other opposition figures, the president's story
does not fit the kind of simple good and bad narrative that made his own
tale such a Hollywood hit.
Critics of the 52-year-old incumbent say he shows all the signs of becoming
yet another African "Big Man", welshing on the democratic reforms
he promised when he came to office 10 years ago. In recent months, his
intelligence services have been linked to grisly murders, several opposition
supporters have been arrested, and two independent newspapers suspended -
all part of a Mugabe-like plan, critics say, to cling to power.
However, in nearly every other aspect of his rule, he has been held up as a
model for other African leaders to follow. An austere, bespectacled figure,
his firm hand is credited with turning Rwanda from a bloodstained bankrupt
into one of the most dynamic nations on the continent.
Thanks to his Herculean efforts, Rwanda is today considered one of the top
five countries in Africa in which to do business. In Kigali, the capital,
living standards are rising as fast as sky scrapers, while the streets are
startlingly clean of litter, crime and beggars.
Household incomes have tripled, and in the next decade, Rwanda is tipped to
become the first African "basket case" to turn itself into a
middle-income country.
Small wonder, then, that Mr Kagame has many friends in the West who prefer to
focus on his good side, including Britain, which is Rwanda's biggest single
aid donor, giving f70 million a year. Tony Blair believes Mr Kagame is a "visionary",
while David
Cameron's Conservatives send MPs out there every summer voluntary work.
Andrew Mitchell, the new Secretary of State for International Development
believes that Mr Kagame should be "cut some slack".
"This is a government that had to rescue its country after the dreadful
events of the genocide," he told The Sunday Telegraph in a
recent interview. "We in the West should be respectful of that in
arriving at conclusions about how they handle it."
That view is not shared by Victoire Ingabire, 41, the chair of the opposition
United Democratic Forces. Since April, she has languished under house
arrest, after demanding to know why the genocide memorial in Kigali did not
also commemorate the Hutus who perished.
On the face of it, that question was not unreasonable. While the vast majority
of the casualties in the 1994 massacre were ethnic Tutsis, many moderate
Hutus also died under the genocidaires' machetes - including her own
brother.
Yet in Mr Kagame's Rwanda, to even talk about Hutus and Tutsis is to risk
being accused of "genocide ideology" - a vague, catch-all charge
which is ostensibly to promote harmony, but which some say is used to keep
opponents quiet.
Other regime critics have been silenced for good. Last month, the
vice-president of the Democratic Green Party was found almost decapitated
from machete wounds. And the month before, a journalist was shot dead after
publishing a story linking Rwandan intelligence to an assassination attempt
on a dissident general in South Africa.
While the Rwandan government protests its innocence, one Western diplomat in
Kigali observed that the "the sudden outburst of murders makes that
increasingly implausible."
Such talk is unlikely to bother Mr Kagame much. For one thing, he is virtually
assured of a repeat of the landslide vote he got in 2003. His election
poster stares out sternly all over Kigale, and his campaign rallies attract
tens of thousands, compared to small crowds for opposition candidates.
"Many people like him because he builds hospitals, he supports women, and
he creates unity in the people," said Alex Ntagengula, 20, a student
and Kagame supporter. "He has brought a strong democracy. Victoire
Ingabire, she brings a bad message to the people."
In Mr Kagame's view, the restrictions of which Mrs Ingabire fell foul are not
unlike Britain's "hate crime" laws - except that in Rwanda there
is a more demonstrable case for them. He also believes that creating
prosperity will prove the best way to sap the country of its ethnic hatreds,
as
he made clear in a Daily Telegraph interview last month. "We
must get people to take responsibility for improving their lives, rather
than putting them in a position where they sit back in their poverty and
blame others for it," he said.
Whatever Mr Kagame's intentions, tomorrow's election should mark his last
stint in power. He has said that if he has no credible democratic successor
by the next elections, in 2017, his rule will have been a failure. Yet his
critics fear that unless opposition parties are allowed to flourish, that is
exactly what will happen. They also say that by inhibiting discussion of the
genocide at all, the government may once again be stoking resentment in the
majority Hutu population.
"Rwanda was a volcano and it erupted in 1994," said Mr Rusesabagina,
who now runs a reconciliation charity that preaches a "never again"
message. "Today's it's a volcano once again."
