Posted on 12/11/2007 7:32:21 AM PST by DFG
Hotel Rwanda hero no hero at home Elizabeth Sullilvan
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
Paul Rusesabagina may be a hero, the real-life Hotel Rwanda operator who saved an estimated 1,200 lives by bartering words, cash and courage to save family, friends, neighbors and co-workers.
Yet the nonfictional subject of the 2004 movie cannot go back again.
The son of a Hutu father and a Tutsi mother - considered a Hutu by Rwandan standards - could have died for standing up to the radical 1994 Hutus who were butchering Tutsis and the Hutus who supported them. He saved hundreds in his Mille Collines hotel.
Instead, he says he is persona non grata in today's "democratic" Rwanda, with its Tutsi-dominated government. The 53-year-old has lived in exile in Brussels since 1996. His sons and nieces attend U.S. schools.
When Stuart Muszynski of the Cleveland-area charity Project Love was in long-distance discussions with Rusesabagina about the group's Humanitarian of the Year award this year, Muszynski says he unexpectedly got an e-mail from the Rwandan government. It said Rusesabagina wasn't a hero and didn't deserve the award.
Rusesabagina came to Cleveland anyway, and Muszynski presented the award to him last week at a ceremony.
Why is the hero of Hotel Rwanda not considered a hero in Rwanda?
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom at a White House ceremony (the same day as Paul Harvey and Aretha Franlin were awarded theirs).
Hotel Rwanda was a harrowing movie, and it had real audio footage of Dee Dee Myers saying that Clinton administration did not consider the Rwanda situation a genocide, but rather “acts of genocide”.
More Clinton parsing. If anyone tries to say how great the “First Black President” was to Africa, please remind them that Rwanda happened on his watch.
Murder is murder. Who was caling for murder of cockroaches? To me it was impossible to tell who was killing who and even reading the article it seems they were killing each other. I spoke with a military officer from there just a couple of weeks ago who was missing a finger—what sort of fiends do such things to one another?
Why is Paul Rusesabagina, the hero of Hotel Rwanda, not considered a hero in Rwanda? He is not considered a hero in Rwanda because Rwanda is in Africa.
Keith Richburg was based in Nairobi as the Africa bureau chief for the Washington Post in the 90’s. He has written, “Talk to me about Africa and my black roots and my kinship with my African brothers, and I’ll throw it back in your face, and then I’ll rub your nose into the images of the rotting flesh.”
Gruesome scene from the movie. While driving to try to find help, he can’t figure out why the road is so bumpy and difficult to drive on (dark night and little light). He finally gets stuck and jumps out to see what to do and discovers he is driving over a dump of hundreds of bodies.
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