One evening last August, Paul Rusesabagina, the former manager of the Hotel des Mille Collines, or “Hotel Rwanda,” boarded a private jet in Dubai allegedly commandeered by the Rwandan government. His family suddenly lost contact with him. Rusesabagina said he woke up in Kigali, Rwanda’s capital, where officials confirmed his arrest.
Rusesabagina was acutely aware of the danger the Rwandan government posed to his safety. When I met him in Washington, D.C., in 2015, at a talk I gave for U.S. government officials about my book Bad News: Last Journalists in a Dictatorship, Rusesabagina told me that Rwandan President Paul Kagame closely monitored his movements and that Rwandan government operatives had physically threatened him after he had criticized Kagame’s repressive policies. Kagame’s government has imprisoned and assassinated a string of dissidents, journalists, and political activists. Rusesabagina said he was unsafe even in the United States, where he lived in exile, and that returning to Kigali would be akin to a death sentence.
