A famous singer once wrote, "You can lie to some people sometimes but you cannot lie to all the people all the time”, and that is just what the self advertised Hotel Rwanda hero Rusesabagina has been learning these last weeks at his own disenchantment.

Note that this does not come as a surprise to us. If you have been following our writings in this column, one should have expected it to happen earlier but as the saying goes, "better late than never”!

Indeed we have been informing the public about the so-called hero’s mischievousness.

We highlighted the man’s shallow background, his rather heartless behaviour during his tenure of Hotel des Mille Collines, where he falsely pretended to have protected some Tutsi threatened by Interahamwe genocidaires and his new fame that lured him into petty politics while reviving genocide ideology through revisionist and negationist statements. We are now glad to see our endeavour starting to bear fruits as Rusesabagina is more and more facing trouble with different audiences that are now getting the awareness of his hidden agenda.

In a previous article, we narrated how Archbishop Kolini intervened in preventing Rusesabagina to continue misleading uninformed opinion, a landmark for all other churches, mainly in USA where he seems to take advantage of a medal by President Bush to present himself as an honorable man to be listened to.

The Archbishop requested the Wheaton Church not to let Rusesabagina address its parishioners.

This welcome move came after Rusesabagina’s statement at St. Sabina Church on 8 July in Chicago that "…the Intellectual Hutus, businessmen Hutus, the elite with or without reason are put into prison because of the name genocide… An average of their children does not go to school because their parents are in prison. Almost the whole country is in prison…”

While renowned human rights organizations such as Amnesty International are praising Rwanda for its standards...

"It is the first country in Africa’s Great Lakes region to call a halt to executions and the 100th country worldwide to abolish the death penalty.

Fourteen countries in Africa, including Rwanda, are now abolitionist for all crimes and a further 18 are abolitionist in practice. It is hoped that Rwanda’s move will spark a pattern towards abolishing the death penalty in Central Africa….”

Despite the commendable progress, Rusesabagina continues to unleash his old lies about what is currently happening in Rwanda.

More recently, on the 16th October 2007, Rusesabagina was this time cautiously received at Emory University.

He unsuccessfully tried his habitual allegations and falsehoods against his young audience: "…all of us had been in the Milles Collines hotel and had no idea what had been happening outside.

I had in mind that all that happened (outside was like) in the Milles Collines because no one was killed. No one was touched. So I had in mind that the whole country was just like that…” 

But in an interview in The Wheel the following day he states that "…Hotel Rwanda is a true story of what was going on in the place. But sometimes, a lot is less violent than the real life…” One really wonders whether the man in the hotel and the one paraded by the Hollywood fiction is the same. "…

In my life since I never kept quiet in 1994 during the Genocide… I never see myself today being silent.” He should be better advised to just do that otherwise he is going to embroil himself into more and more contradictions.

On the other hand, one could cynically encourage him to continue his insanities so that his limitations are revealed faster…

While introducing Rusesabagina to the audience, the College Council President, Mr Daniel Berger took his distance from what the man was going to tell and made a disclaimer in which he indicated that despite conflicting accounts of the heinous atrocities in Rwanda, they had welcomed Rusesabagina and looked at his story as one piece of a very complex and harrowing puzzle. The President of the Students council warned his colleagues saying that Rusesabagina’s views were in the least controversial…

When Rusesabagina, hoping that he was in front of  an ignorant audience like the ones he sometimes meets and repeats his old gross lies that: "…in 1990 they (RPF) waged a war on Rwanda coming from the north. They killed all men in the areas of Byumba and Ruhengeri. That is why today if one goes to areas of Byumba he can never find men.

80 percent of families are headed by widows… Eighty percent of students enrolled at institutions of higher learning are Tutsis, including at the National University of Rwanda, while 90 percent of their teachers are also Tutsis...”, the students became so annoyed and lost their patience and started booing him.

They surely regretted their students’ council decision to sign a contract with Rusesabagina’s promoters in which no other person could be allowed on the panel and all questions were supposed to be in writing.

We do contribute this information to the public so that those who still doubt are informed that the man is not worth wasting one’s time listening to.

Ends