In a prison on a red dirt road on the outskirts of Rwandan capital Kigali lies a 67-year-old man who used to be a national hero.
He is serving 25 years for ‘terrorism offences’, after family say he was kidnapped while on a flight from Dubai to Burundi and given an unfair trial. His daughter says he is not receiving his medication and has suffered a stroke.
That man is Paul Rusesabagina, once Rwanda’s greatest hero who helped save more than 1,200 people during the 1994 Rwandan genocide by hiding many of them at Kigali’s Hotel des Milles Collines.
The wrongful conviction of this brave man – played by Don Cheadle in the Hollywood film Hotel Rwanda – is just one aspect of the grim slide to dictatorship by the country’s President Paul Kagame, who was once himself a hero of liberation.
Yet, in the same breath with which they decry dictator Vladimir Putin, today our Government signed a tawdry document with Kagame to “offshore” refugees in the country.
The deal was agreed weeks ago and kept ‘oven ready’ for a political emergency. And today saw Priti Patel give a press conference in Kigali to celebrate the world’s first “global migration and economic partnership”. Or, in other words, a foreign prison for frightened refugees in a country 4,000 miles away, with a deteriorating human rights record.
The ‘Hotel Rwanda’ Priti Patel is dreaming of is a former traveller’s hostel tragically misnamed ‘Hope House’ in the Gasabo district of Kigali.
A deep irony, given it will ultimately cost the taxpayer more than paying for frightened refugees to stay in the Ritz. The plan will then expand to take in unlimited numbers of people fetched off the beach by British Army snatch squads or picked up by gunboats at sea. A previous similar scheme by Israel – shrouded in secrecy – appears to have ended in disaster.
I make no apology for writing about Rwanda in Real Britain this week.
It’s Priti Patel who has made Rwanda an offshoot of British Home Affairs. A place where our dirty laundry can pile up like landfill thousands of miles from prying eyes.
I reported on and off from Rwanda for more than 10 years, including running the Mirror’s Village of Hope project out there, where we helped transform a community with the support of readers who donated an incredible £100,000.
I believe passionately in the resilience of the Rwandan people and have experienced their kindness many times. The land of the Milles Collines – a thousand hills – is a beautiful country. But not since the genocide, when a million Rwandans were murdered in 100 days, have I felt such an ominous sense of dread about that country’s direction. The latest update from Amnesty International reports: “Arbitrary detention, ill-treatment, and torture in official and unofficial detention facilities is commonplace, and fair trial standards are routinely flouted...” Meanwhile, as Zoe Gardiner of the Joint Council for the Welfare of Refugees points out, the situation in Rwanda for LGBTQI+ people is so poor the UK actually accepts Rwandan refugees on the basis of their sexuality.
Of course, it’s no coincidence that Patel flew a load of journalists to Kigali for a photo op, just as the Metropolitan Police fines hit the mat in Downing Street over Partygate. And just as Patel is clinging to her own job after Britain’s role in taking Ukrainian refugees descended into farce. Like cornered animals, politicians are at their most vicious when they have run out of road.
It’s also no coincidence the Prime Minister’s team was recently reinforced by the return of the ‘Wizard of Oz’ spin doctor Lynton Crosby. This is the man credited with dreaming up the ‘dead cat’ strategy, where politicians throw out a sensationalist policy to divert public attention from damaging news.
As dead cat strategies go, Prison Rwanda is one of the foulest stinking corpses ever dug up.
And it’s not even original. The spin doctor has been scapegoating asylum seekers for political gain throughout his career – most famously using them to propel John Howard to win a federal election in 2001 in Australia.
Over there, the policy takes the form of a grotesquely inhumane asylum prison on the islands of Nauru and Manus that violates international law and is astronomically expensive to boot.
Today, the British government said they will also be housing migrants at the former RAF base at Linton-on-Ouse in North Yorkshire. But after the fiascos at Napier and Penally Barracks, where people were maltreated during the pandemic, they also needed something even further away.
Never mind that, in Britain, the number of asylum applications is dropping. Or that our apparently proud, honourable country gives safety to less than 1% of the world’s refugees. Meanwhile, Paul Rusesabagina lies dying in prison to the south of Kigali. “We are extremely worried for his life‚” his daughter Anaise Kanimba says.
The story of Hotel Rwanda was never as straightforward as the Hollywood script. But we know that Rusesabagina has not received a fair trial.
“This was a show trial, rather than a fair judicial inquiry,” says Geoffrey Robertson QC, the Clooney Foundation for Justice’s expert on the case.
What message does it send to Vladimir Putin, when the British Home Secretary rushes to shake that regime’s hand?
And what of those who Britain may condemn to Rusesabagina’s fate? Human beings who have already fled war and terror, carrying only scars and unimaginable memories. As Dr Waheed Arian, a hero of the UK pandemic and former refugee from Afghanistan, said today: “Many others like me will now be sent to Rwanda to be re-traumatised rather than given a chance to rebuild their lives and contribute.”
Sabir Zazai, CEO of the Scottish Refugee Council wrote on Twitter : “Today’s awful announcement is difficult for me. Had I arrived under this regime, I wouldn’t have had my lovely kids, my brilliant colleagues and all of you amazing people as my friends. I would’ve been deprived of the love and compassion of this society.”
As for ‘why Rwanda?’ – Well, the Tories have had a strange love affair with Kagame since he addressed their Party Conference as the star turn in 2007. This was after wannabe-PM David Cameron flew a load of young Conservatives to Kigali for a very different photo op – a volunteer reconstruction project designed to showcase ‘Compassionate Conservatism’.
Now, 15 years later they have returned to showcase a more dominant form of Tory ideology – Cruel Conservatism.
This dead cat stinks as only a dead cat in equatorial Africa can.
