“Lingering sympathy for Rwanda still runs through the State Department, where many still remember how the United States failed to intervene in the 1994 slaughter that claimed the lives of 800,000 people of both the Tutsi and Hutu ethnic groups,” Tom Zoellner, the author of Rusesabagina’s book wrote in The Washington Post on August 18. The article is so poorly argued that even editors at a tabloid newspaper would not accept it to pass scrutiny. But the color of skin is sufficient for writings of white men about Africa to bypass editorial standards. Anyone who reads the story is able to see two sides in every example that the author gives and at each step he urges the reader to show empathy with the villain. Zoellner urges President Biden to “press for a humanitarian release of the man the United States once lauded and should not abandon now,” in reference to the Medal of Honor that President Bush gave Rusesabagina in November 2005. In other words, sympathy should be extended to Rusesabagina because he was awarded with a medal “sixteen years ago,” despite the fact that Rusesabagina’s criminal actions suggest that the person lauded in 2005 is not the same person as the one arrested in August 2020, as Joshua Hammer detailed in this New York Times story. Zoellner wants empathy for his friend but he has none for genocide survivors. He aims to incur pain when he writes that the “Rwandan genocide” had 800,000 victims from “Tutsi and Hutu ethnic groups.” In doing so, he reduces the genocide to civil war where “both sides” lost people. Further, he is consistent in his vile racism. He has zero sympathy for the survivors of the terror for which his friend stands accused in the courts of law. As the ruling in the case nears, the victims can’t wait to finally get justice for their loved ones. On his part, Zoellner is rather focused on threatening one man who apparently the Rwandan judiciary “is a servant to” and who must be held “to account by demanding that he release Rusesabagina,” he writes. Reading Zoellner, it is as if it is President Kagame, not Rusesabagina, who is in the dock for terrorism. The schizophrenia is palpable. Zoellner doesn’t comment on his friend’s admission in the video that the NLF terror outfit that committed the atrocities belonged to him, although Rusesabagina calls it a movement that would liberate Rwanda from dictatorship having “tried all peaceful means and failed,” just like he called the FDLR - a US-listed terror organization that was formed from the army that executed the genocide - a “Rwandan liberation movement” while addressing students at the University of Central Florida on February 15, 2011. If Zoellner truly believed that there was no evidence against Rusesabagina, he would give the court a chance to pronounce themselves instead of trying to preempt it with demands for political interference from President Kagame and Joe Biden. It is precisely due to the mountain of evidence that resulted from judicial cooperation with law enforcement in the United States and Belgium, let alone the witness testimonies, that every sensible person, even those with sympathy for Rusesabagina, has since left his fate to the courts to decide. Indeed, they have wisely been demanding for a fair trial, which Zoellner doesn’t want since he thinks his friend might be guilty of the charges levelled against him. Sensible people also recognize that the victims need justice and cant just dismiss them because of the fact that the accused is a celebrity friend. Besides the tantrum, Zoellner is right to appeal to release his friend on humanitarian grounds. But he is doing this the wrong way: by attacking victims and threatening the same person from whom clemency is possible, as per the law. And this is only possible after a verdict, which he doesnt want to take place, has been reached and the offender is serving his sentence. It is equally ironical that Zoellner is appealing to the empathy of the person he calls a dictator. It might be forgivable to attack President Kagame. However, attacking survivors of genocide and terror as Zoellner does in his article is beyond the pale. No serious newspaper would publish this level of confusion. The fact that The Washington Post can publish this narcissism and cognitive dissonance is white privilege on stereroids.
