He Was the Hero of ‘Hotel Rwanda.’ Now He’s Accused of Terrorism.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/02/magazine/the-good-samaritan-on-trial-for-terrorism.html

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Early in the evening of Aug. 27, 2020, Paul Rusesabagina stepped off a flight from Chicago and walked into Terminal 3 at Dubai International Airport. He had been in the air for 14 hours, but his journey wasn’t done: Later that night, he planned to travel on to Bujumbura, the main city in the small Central African nation Burundi. Passing through immigration, Rusesabagina — who lived in San Antonio, Texas, but was originally from Rwanda, Burundi’s neighbor — texted his wife to let her know he had arrived in Dubai. “Are you safe?” she wrote back. “I’m fine,” he replied. Then he checked in at a nearby Ibis Styles hotel.

A friend was waiting for him there: Constantin Niyomwungere, a prominent Burundi-born pastor who ran a dozen evangelical churches in Burundi, Rwanda, Belgium and elsewhere. It was at Niyomwungere’s invitation that Rusesabagina had come, ostensibly to talk to the pastor’s congregations in Burundi about a dramatic series of events that happened a quarter century ago. During the Rwandan genocide of 1994, when Rusesabagina was the manager of the Hotel des Mille Collines in Kigali, Rwanda’s capital, some 1,300 people sheltered there for more than two months while murderous ethnic violence convulsed the country. The steps he took to safeguard this desperate group of guests were later heroicized in the acclaimed 2004 film “Hotel Rwanda” — Don Cheadle’s portrayal of him earned an Oscar nomination for Best Actor — and Rusesabagina himself became a minor celebrity in the global human rights community. He gave paid speeches at universities, think tanks and corporate gatherings; he started the Hotel Rwanda Rusesabagina Foundation; he collected awards and honorary degrees, including the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2005, the citation for which praised his “remarkable courage and compassion in the face of genocidal terror.”

But the invitations had dried up in recent years, and making money became even harder after the pandemic struck in March. “He had four kids, two just out of college, he didn’t have a regular day job, he’d just had cancer, the speaking engagements were few and far between,” says Kitty Kurth, a senior adviser and spokeswoman at his foundation. Rusesabagina had reason to be grateful for any work he could get, including church presentations in Central Africa. Yet traveling came with its own risks: In the years since leaving Rwanda, Rusesabagina had become a harsh critic of its leader, President Paul Kagame, denouncing him as a dictator and accusing him of carrying out extrajudicial killings. The Rwandan government, for its part, accused Rusesabagina of supporting a rebel army along the country’s borders with the Democratic Republic of Congo and Burundi and claimed he was involved in deadly attacks that took place inside Rwanda in 2018.

“I thought: Paul, why do you want to go to Burundi? It’s way too close to Rwanda,” Kurth says. “Kagame has people all over Burundi.” Rusesabagina hadn’t told his family that he was flying to Burundi, saying only that he was going to “see some people” in Dubai. “I asked him, ‘Can you please send me your coordinates, all the meetings, all the telephone numbers?’” his wife, Taciana, told me. “I didn’t have a good feeling about this trip.”

At the hotel in Dubai, Rusesabagina bathed, napped for about three hours, then left for his next flight with Niyomwungere. At the airport, the pastor took his passport and steered him through immigration. Then the two men clambered onto a private jet that had been chartered. Once airborne, they toasted each other with Champagne. Five hours later, most of which Rusesabagina spent asleep, Niyomwungere shook his friend awake. “We’re landing in Bujumbura,” he said.

As Rusesabagina stepped onto the tarmac, a half dozen armed men emerged from the predawn darkness. Identifying themselves as agents of the Rwanda Investigation Bureau — the country’s equivalent of the F.B.I. — they handcuffed him and hustled him into a waiting vehicle. It was only then that Rusesabagina realized that he had fallen into a trap. The plane hadn’t landed in Burundi. Their real destination was declared by a sign on the terminal: KIGALI INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT.

The origins of the Rwandan genocide stretch back to Belgian rule. In the first half of the 20th century, the colonial overseers deepened divisions between the Hutu, then mostly farmers, who make up a vast majority of the population, and the minority Tutsi, who were mostly cattle herders. The Belgians put Tutsi overwhelmingly in charge of the country, which meant jobs in the bureaucracy, access to higher education and other privileges. But as the Hutu came into power — the country achieved full independence in 1962 — its leaders promoted brutal discrimination against the Tutsi; hundreds of thousands fled the country. In 1990, a Tutsi-led rebel movement, the Rwandan Patriotic Front, advanced from Uganda to within 45 miles of Kigali before the Rwandan military, backed by French troops, pushed them back across the border. As pressure grew on President Juvenal Habyarimana to come to a power-sharing arrangement, Hutu extremists who opposed any compromise began to mobilize.

On the night of April 6, 1994, as Habyarimana flew back from negotiating a peace deal in Tanzania, assailants in Kigali blew up the presidential plane using two shoulder-fired missiles. It has never been conclusively determined which faction carried out the assassination, but the attack set in motion a plot to exterminate the Tutsi. Over the next hundred days — as the outside world looked on, unwilling to intervene — Hutu soldiers, militiamen and even ordinary civilians massacred some 800,000 people, according to a United Nations estimate. The Rwandan government, after it came under Tutsi control, would later put the total number of dead at more than a million — more than 97 percent of whom, it said, were Tutsi — although it included deaths going back to 1991.

As Newsweek’s Nairobi bureau chief at the time, I had an intimate view of the violence, which began to unfold just hours after Habyarimana’s murder. On April 13, 1994, I joined five other reporters on a six-hour road journey from Bujumbura to Kigali in a Red Cross convoy. After crossing a muddy river that marked the entrance to the city, we drove through roadblocks manned by Interahamwe, the fanatical Hutu militias that carried out much of the killing. I saw corpses lying on the roadsides, in front of militia barricades. At a Red Cross clinic a few blocks from the Mille Collines, a European doctor was treating a Tutsi with deep machete wounds in his skull and torso; he was the sole survivor, the doctor told us, from a busload of Tutsi who were stopped at a barricade and set upon by Interahamwe.

Soon after President Habyarimana’s assassination, the Dutch manager of the Mille Collines, before he and other expatriates were evacuated from the country, asked Rusesabagina — then running a sister property nearby, the luxurious Hotel des Diplomates — to take over for him. Rusesabagina, who trained in hotel management at the Kenya Utalii College in Nairobi, straddled Rwanda’s ethnic divide: His father, a farmer, was Hutu, and his mother was Tutsi. According to Rwanda’s patrilineal customs, this made him a Hutu, but he considered himself a moderate in the ongoing power struggle between the groups. His wife was Tutsi, and two of his brothers-in-law were guerrillas in the Rwandan Patriotic Front. Yet as a hotelier he had made a point of cultivating influential customers, including a Hutu cohort of extremist military officers and politicians who despised the Tutsi.

On April 12, Rusesabagina put his wife and children in a car and joined a government convoy headed toward the Mille Collines, a five-story structure that overlooked the city from a hillside. By then, the desperate crowd in the hotel had reached about 500, including well-connected Tutsi and a few moderate Hutu. I myself checked into the hotel a day later, though I don’t believe I crossed paths with Rusesabagina during my brief stay there. A sense of apocalypse pervaded the place. At one point, I stood beside a Tutsi family at a window and watched as a gang of Interahamwe trotted down the street, brandishing bloodstained machetes and clubs. That evening, I pushed open the door to the top-floor dining room, only to be chased away by a group of military officers. After 24 hours, United Nations peacekeepers told the reporters at the Mille Collines that they could not guarantee our safety, and they transported us to the airport.

At the hotel, meanwhile, the numbers of people seeking refuge continued to grow. Early on in the blockade, the government had cut all phone lines to the switchboard, isolating the Mille Collines from the outside world. But a fax line escaped the regime’s notice, and in the following days, Rusesabagina often stayed up until 4 a.m., phoning and faxing anyone he could think of — the White House, the U.N., the Peace Corps and Sabena, the hotel’s Belgian parent company — hoping to draw attention to the peril faced by those inside.

He also used flattery, bribery and subtle pressure to keep Hutu forces at bay. At 6 a.m. on April 23, Rusesabagina got a call from a military commander, giving those at the hotel 30 minutes to leave. “It was early to be calling Europe, but far too late to be calling the United States, which had been worthless anyway,” Rusesabagina wrote in his memoir. “I pulled out the black binder and started calling all my generals.” Eventually he reached Théoneste Bagosora, the hard-line director of the Ministry of Defense, a man later known as “Rwanda’s Himmler.” Rusesabagina led him to think he might shut down the Hotel des Diplomates — which he continued to manage as well, and where Bagosora resided in comfort — unless he could keep the Mille Collines open. Bagosora grudgingly complied. On another occasion, when Rusesabagina was away at a meeting with Augustin Bizimungu, the army chief of staff, he received word that machete-wielding Interahamwe had managed to get inside the Mille Collines. After Rusesabagina asked him to intervene, Bizimungu rushed to the hotel and chased the militiamen out, declaring, “If one person kills anyone, I will kill them.”

In May, according to Rusesabagina’s memoir, the Rwandan military, the United Nations and the Rwandan Patriotic Front arranged to begin evacuating those sheltering at the Mille Collines. Rusesabagina and his family were among the last to leave, in June, after 76 days in the hotel; they eventually made their way to a camp outside Kigali. For 11 weeks, Rusesabagina had kept the killers at bay. “He would always say, ‘I was just doing my job,’” says Tom Zoellner, co-writer of Rusesabagina’s 2006 autobiography, “An Ordinary Man.” “I think he didn’t want to embarrass Sabena. The idea of there being bloodstains in the lobby, on his watch, played a real factor in what he did.”

But according to some of the hotel’s survivors, Rusesabagina also demonstrated a compassion that was seen hardly anywhere else in Rwanda during those 100 days. “Nobody had been killed, injured, beaten, tortured, expelled or retrieved from the hotel during the whole time we were refugees,” Thomas Kamilindi, a radio reporter who took refuge with his family at the Mille Collines, would write in a 2,000-word testimonial in 2005. “Paul Rusesabagina managed to do the impossible to save our lives at the moment when others were massacring their own children, their own wives.” The writer Philip Gourevitch, who first brought the hotelier to public attention in his award-winning book about the genocide, “We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families,” described Rusesabagina to me as “a canny operator negotiating with the genocidaires, until everyone could be evacuated safely behind R.P.F. lines.”

Soon after the hotel’s evacuation, the tide turned against the Hutu government. In July 1994, the Rwandan Patriotic Front, under the leadership of an officer in his mid-30s named Paul Kagame, declared that it had defeated the government army. Many genocidaires fled across the border into Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo); thousands of civilian refugees also escaped the country. Kagame soon became the de facto leader of the new Tutsi-dominated government, was eventually elected president and declared he would mend his country’s divisions. His government eliminated ethnic identity as an official designation and removed it from the identity cards that played a key role in the genocide, and it created a community-based system of justice, known as gacaca courts, to try some crimes related to the genocide. Today Rwanda enjoys a prosperity and political stability that stands in sharp contrast to its turbulent, ethnically divided neighbors, Burundi and Congo.

Yet a group of Hutu-aligned critics outside the country have come to regard Kagame as a dictator, accusing his government of stifling dissent, assassinating enemies and even carrying out its own genocidal violence. And one of the most vocal critics — vexingly for Kagame and his allies — has been the celebrity protagonist of “Hotel Rwanda,” Paul Rusesabagina.

In December, I returned to Kigali for the first time in 15 years to find an entirely different city: an immaculate place of glass-and-steel high rises, crisply uniformed traffic police officers, median strips festooned with flowers. I had come to interview former associates of Rusesabagina about his arrest four months earlier, and I couldn’t help feeling his reputation had been transformed almost as radically. At Chez Lando — a hotel and restaurant where, on the first day of the genocide, the Presidential Guard executed the owner, a Tutsi leader of the Liberal Party named Lando Ndasingwa, along with his wife, two teenage children and mother — I met up with Wellars Bizumuremyi, who was working the Mille Collines reception desk when I and the other correspondents checked in. His wife and two children, trapped at home when the massacres started, died at the hands of the Interahamwe. He was evacuated from the hotel in June, but he didn’t learn their fate until the Rwandan Patriotic Front seized Kigali in July.

Bizumuremyi said he warmly welcomed Rusesabagina back to the Mille Collines in 2003, when the former hotelier accompanied the filmmaker Terry George on a research trip to the hotel. But when I asked him about the role that Rusesabagina played in 1994, he shook his head. “He wasn’t a hero,” Bizumuremyi said. “He didn’t save anybody.” Those inside owed their survival to one dynamic, he maintained: the fear of reprisal and the ever-present threat that the Tutsi rebels in the Rwandan Patriotic Front might execute their Hutu hostages. Bizumuremyi had been delighted to see the images of his former boss being trotted out in handcuffs at a news conference organized by Rwandan authorities on Aug. 31, 2020. That was just days after his arrest — and less than six months before Rusesabagina would go on trial in Kigali, starting on Feb. 17. The nine charges against him include murder, abduction, armed robbery, arson, financing terrorism and being involved in the creation of an irregular armed group. “Paul wanted to be president,” he told me. “After he received the medals and the celebrity, he thought he was as big as Paul Kagame. The film changed him.”

I tracked down others who endured the weeks in the Mille Collines, and I was struck by the consistency of their denunciations. Bernard Makuza, the current president of the Senate, told me that Rusesabagina extorted payments from guests — “even though Sabena specifically said he was not to charge people,” Makuza said. “Paul made them pay. And Paul threatened those who couldn’t pay with being thrown out of the hotel.” The film “Hotel Rwanda,” he said, was “pure Hollywood fiction.”

A former manager at the Mille Collines, Freddy (he asked me to withhold his full name), maintained that he could not “think of a single incident” in which Rusesabagina saved lives. “He was just a civilian. With what authority could he intervene?” He repeated an accusation made by Makuza, that Rusesabagina cut off the hotel’s running water in the last week of the siege. “If you wanted to get water, you had to go down to the swimming pool one by one,” he said. “But there were military guys just outside who were trying to identify each person who came out of the room to get water.” He said that Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines, a privately owned, extremist media outlet unrelated to the hotel, would broadcast their names to the killers. “They would say, ‘Inside the Mille Collines there is this person and that person.’” Taciana Rusesabagina says claims that her husband threatened to expel anyone who couldn’t pay or that he shut off water to the hotel are lies.

The Rwandan government has sought to undermine Rusesabagina’s reputation since at least 2006, when he turned decisively and publicly against Kagame. It was hard for me to judge whether these survivors were simply parroting government propaganda or whether the reports of Rusesabagina’s supposed crimes had prompted them to revisit the past in a new light. Tom Zoellner, the co-author of Rusesabagina’s autobiography, takes a cynical view, noting that these new denunciations closely echo the descriptions of Rusesabagina as a “fraud” and an “impostor” that appeared in the pro-government press in 2007, just after he emerged as a Kagame critic. “All these people came out of the woodwork who never said anything before,” Zoellner told me. “This is the nature of a totalitarian society. It was textbook dictator messaging.”

No one can deny that Kagame, in the 26 years since he rose to power, has helped to rebuild Rwanda from the ruins. Millions have been lifted out of poverty; the nation’s 73 percent literacy rate, according to the United Nations, represents an increase of 13 percent since the genocide, and petty corruption is nearly nonexistent. To me, having witnessed the genocide and its aftermath as part of decades of reporting in Africa, the country’s transformation seems almost miraculous. As Andrew Mitchell, a British Conservative member of Parliament and a longtime Kagame ally, put it to me, the rulers have “pulled the country back from utter barbarity, to a position where they have a working health care system, prosperity and development.”

Yet there’s also no denying that the government’s commitment to democracy and civil society has been tenuous. It has jailed journalists and opposition candidates; it has banned certain rival political parties that it claims foment ethnic division or deny the reality of the genocide — a crime in Rwanda. Kagame’s government has been accused of orchestrating a series of deaths, between 1997 and 2014, of exiled dissidents in South Africa, Uganda, Belgium, Britain and Kenya. “Anyone who remotely appears to be a popular or potential leader of some kind, anybody who can take away his shine, becomes a threat,” says David Himbara, an economist who was Kagame’s head of strategy and policy but who broke with him in 2009 and fled abroad, ending up in Canada. “It’s total control,” he told me.

Pierre-Richard Prosper, an American lawyer who served as a war-crimes prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Arusha, Tanzania, between 1996 and 1998, says that Kagame has had to navigate between opening the country to free expression and tamping down the ethnic hatreds that tore it apart. “The international community expects that once you have an election, you are automatically a democracy, and that’s not realistic. It’s a journey, not a destination,” Prosper told me. “Especially when you are dealing with a country that’s just come out of a genocide.” (Prosper was the lead attorney defending Paul Kagame in a lawsuit filed in United States federal court in 2010.)

Paul Rusesabagina’s alienation from the Tutsi-led government began to take hold soon after the genocide ended. Whether suspicious of his ties to the ancien régime or simply out of a desire to control everything, officials subjected Rusesabagina to petty harassment, searching through his baggage at the airport when he returned from trips to Belgium, according to his son Roger, a teenager at the time. A soldier once broke into his house, tried to steal his computer and threatened to shoot him. In 1996, the family resettled in Brussels, where Rusesabagina drove a taxi and started a small transport company. Among the community of Rwandan exiles in the city, there was a coterie of genocidaires and their supporters who embraced the ethnosupremacist ideology known before the genocide as Hutu Power, which called for Hutu to run Rwanda and remove Tutsi from public life.

In justifying such aims, these expatriates had convinced themselves that the new Kagame government was even worse than its critics imagined — that it, too, was carrying out genocidal violence. I happened to be present for the immediate aftermath of one incident they point to. In late April 1995, a year after the start of the genocide, I traveled to Kibeho, a town in Rwanda and the site of the largest of several camps set up by the French military in the region to protect displaced Hutu civilians. The Tutsi government had complained that the camps were sanctuaries for Hutu guerrillas, and earlier that April, troops had moved in to shut down Kibeho and return people to their villages. But as the soldiers began screening tens of thousands of them to identify those who had taken part in the genocide, some tried to flee. Gunfire broke out. According to some estimates, as many as 5,000 people were killed. (The Rwandan military said the number of deaths was about 300.) “It was savagery,” one U.N. peacekeeper told me, as I wrote at the time; we were standing beside the corpse of a woman who was trampled in the melee. A Red Cross official pleaded with a crowd gathered around him: “You must resume your lives. The war is finished.”

The Kibeho tragedy became one of the seeds of a dark narrative that has only grown in force since then. Even when the genocide was unfolding, the station Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines was broadcasting that Hutu civilians were being killed by the Tutsi of the Rwandan Patriotic Front as they advanced through the country. Hutu hard-liners in exile began claiming that reprisal killings of Hutu equaled — or possibly exceeded — the murders of Tutsi but were covered up by the Kagame government. This conspiracy theory has become known as the “double genocide” view of Rwandan history.

This view has found support in work done for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. After the genocide, the United Nations dispatched Robert Gersony, a freelance conflict and human rights investigator with long experience in Africa, to determine whether conditions in Rwanda were safe enough for refugees (who were overwhelmingly Hutu) to return. In one of the regions he visited, Gersony and his team found that many Rwandans had already come home, and the situation appeared to be “secure, stable and peaceful.” He collected evidence of arbitrary arrests, disappearances and physical abuse in another corner of the country. But when he visited an area in southern Rwanda declared off-limits by Rwandan Patriotic Front commanders, according to someone familiar with the investigation, he encountered depopulated villages; heard credible accounts of mass executions and killers going house to house; and observed scores of fresh corpses of men, women and children.

Gersony’s team delivered to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees a 14-page summary of their findings that described “systematic and sustained killing and persecution” of Hutu civilians in the south. They estimated that as many as 35,000 people had been killed in the region. Alison Des Forges, the Rwanda expert for Human Rights Watch, came to accept the report. The United Nations, seemingly concerned that it might sabotage international support for the new government, never published Gersony’s account, but within weeks its findings appeared in the press. Before long, though, according to Des Forges, the United Nations had successfully pressured the Rwandan government to get its commanders to stop the killings.

Gersony’s report has been widely accepted, and its implications — summary killings by Tutsi government forces, tens of thousands of Hutu dead — are an outrage and a stain on Paul Kagame’s legacy. But in subsequent years, the “double genocide” theory spiraled beyond all reason. Two American professors, Christian Davenport and Allan C. Stam, relied partly on pre-genocide census figures compiled by the hard-line Hutu regime — later characterized as shoddy by many critics — to argue that Hutu deaths had vastly outnumbered those of Tutsi. In a 2014 BBC documentary, “Rwanda: The Untold Story,” which led the Kagame regime to ban the network’s broadcasts in Rwanda, Stam said, “If a million people died in Rwanda in 1994, and that’s certainly possible, there’s no way that the majority of them could be Tutsi.” He estimated that the Tutsi death count could have been as low as 200,000.

Judi Rever, a Canadian journalist, claimed in a 2018 book that the R.P.F. massacred and then disposed of hundreds of thousands of Hutu in secrecy in 1994, both during and after the Tutsi genocide. “It was mass murder leaving barely a trace,” she wrote. Rever told me that in areas controlled by the R.P.F., S.S.-style “mobile killing squads loaded Hutus onto trucks” by the thousands, drove them into remote areas, killed them, burned the bodies and disposed of the remains. These brazen, or gullible, revisions of history found an eager audience among groups of Hutu extremists in exile, who were looking for ways to damage Kagame’s credibility, to minimize Hutu culpability and, for some, to justify attempts to retake Rwanda by force.

Despite his exposure to these ideas, Rusesabagina’s transformation into a vehement opponent of the government seems to have been a slow one. As late as 2003, he was donating money to Kagame’s successful campaign for president in Rwanda’s first multiparty election, and he even attended a rally for the president in Kigali, according to Odette Nyiramilimo, a former senator and one-time Rusesabagina confidante, who had encouraged him to return to his homeland. Taciana Rusesabagina denies this, saying, “He never would have donated money to Paul Kagame.”

But by 2006, Rusesabagina had joined a small group of Hutu exiles to found a new political party, P.D.R.-Ihumure. According to one account, there were hopes that he would eventually challenge Kagame for the presidency. Philip Gourevitch, who wrote sympathetically about Rusesabagina in his book, told me that the former hotelier was now “more than a critic of Kagame. He was using his Hollywood-hyped reputation as a hero as cover while aligning himself with Hutu Power ideology.”

One of the most controversial questions surrounding Rusesabagina’s activities during this time centers on the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (F.D.L.R.) — a rebel group based in the Democratic Republic of Congo whose fighters, among them former Hutu soldiers and Interahamwe, were carrying out many deadly attacks against Tutsi in Congo and Rwanda during the late 2000s. Rusesabagina’s allies say categorically that he never had any affiliation with the group. Taciana told me that the rebel group “hates Paul because he protected Tutsis during the genocide.”

But prosecutors claim to have evidence that Rusesabagina became personally involved with fund-raising and procuring arms for the group. The prosecutor-general’s office told me that during the trial, it will produce emails from 2007 between Providence Rubingisa, an expatriate P.D.R. leader, and an F.D.L.R. field commander in Congo. In them, the party leader indicates that Rusesabagina is in direct contact with Ignace Murwanashyaka, the F.D.L.R.’s leader, and reassures the field commander of the party’s backing: “We are going to do mobilization so that we can start sending you the support at the end of December,” he promises. (The emails are in Kinyarwanda, Rwanda’s national language.) He goes on to say that he has informed Rusesabagina about “the other equipment you’ve been asking for.” He adds, “Please continue to update me on the news of the battlefield.” Other indications of Rusesabagina’s involvement with the F.D.L.R. emerged in text messages from Murwanashyaka that were intercepted by German intelligence and submitted as evidence when, in 2011, Murwanashyaka went on trial in Stuttgart for war crimes.

By the mid-2000s, Rusesabagina was spending more time in the United States and cultivating a group of media advisers, politicians and academics to help him start his post-“Hotel Rwanda” career as a human rights speaker, one who staked out peaceful, pro-democracy positions in public. One of the most active of these new advisers was Kurth, a media consultant and Democratic Party activist in Chicago who met him in 2007, while he was looking for help delivering a letter to former President Bill Clinton in support of an international truth and reconciliation commission in Rwanda. (The Rwandan government says that its internal system has already filled that role.) Kurth knew little about Rwanda before her association with Rusesabagina, she admits, but she soon came to share his hostility toward Kagame, blaming Kagame for “lighting the fuse” of the genocide by “taking down the president’s plane” in April 1994.

Kurth brought in Brian Endless, director of the African studies and Africa diaspora program at Loyola University Chicago, as a senior adviser to the Hotel Rwanda Rusesabagina Foundation, a nonprofit set up to give assistance to orphans and widows in Rwanda. Endless, who has never visited Rwanda, told me that “400,000 Tutsis and 600,000 Hutus” died during the entire year of 1994 and argues that Kagame “invented” the “Tutsi genocide.” He says he has arrived at these conclusions after meeting exiles, following court cases and studying reports by Allan C. Stam and other historical revisionists. “It’s the Rwandan government’s goal to say, ‘No Hutus were killed, only Tutsis,’” Endless told me. “It’s creating a picture of Tutsi victims and Hutu oppression.”

Rusesabagina’s most prominent ally in the United States has been Robert Krueger, a former U.S. representative and senator from Texas. In the early 1990s, Krueger served as the U.S. ambassador to Burundi, where a Tutsi military ruled over an oppressed Hutu majority and carried out several widespread massacres. The experience introduced Krueger to the violent ethnic politics of the African Great Lakes region and helped shape his antipathy toward the powerful Tutsi leader across the border; Krueger would later call Kagame “the most murderous dictator in all Africa.” Kathleen Krueger, the ambassador’s wife, recalled to me a 1995 visit she made to a refugee camp in Burundi for Hutu fleeing what they described as reprisal killings by the Rwandan Patriotic Front. “It was a countergenocide,” she told me, though she provided no evidence to support those claims.

Rusesabagina met Bob Krueger in 2007 after a referral from Oprah Winfrey, Kathleen Krueger says, and appeared with him at speaking engagements across the United States. Two years later, after a series of break-ins at his Brussels home — for which Rusesabagina blamed Kagame’s agents — he and his wife relocated to San Antonio, near the Kruegers’ home in New Braunfels. Together with Krueger, Rusesabagina portrayed Rwanda as a lawless dictatorship, in which extrajudicial executions and disappearances were commonplace, and advanced the double-genocide theory. “Paul had begun to go after Kagame, in ways that I thought were really irrational,” Zoellner says. “He refused to see the nuanced picture of Kagame, as an iron-fisted authoritarian like Marshal Tito in Yugoslavia, who put a lid on the murderous currents in his society. I told him: ‘Paul, you need to be more like Nelson Mandela. You are criticizing Kagame too hard.’”

Rusesabagina articulated his position in a disjointed 2007 interview with Keith Harmon Snow, an American freelance journalist and self-described “war crimes and genocide investigator.” He insinuated that Kagame was the culprit behind the assassination of President Habyarimana and agreed with Snow that one motivation for the murder was to provoke a wave of killing and depopulate the country of much of the Hutu majority. “Who benefited from Habyarimana’s death?” Rusesabagina said. “It is Kagame and his people.” He claimed that Tutsi fighters had infiltrated the Interahamwe militias and that some Hutu fighters “were not aware that they” — meaning the Interahamwe — were “working for” Kagame. “Most of those guys who were just on the roadblocks were Kagame people.” Other victims, he argued, were randomly targeted by enraged civilians who had been displaced during incursions by the Rwandan Patriotic Front in the early 1990s. “All those refugees who surrounded Kigali, who had been angry for four years, who had lost their family members, killed by the rebels — they started revenging on everyone,” Hutu and Tutsi alike, he said. Kagame, he declared, “is the one responsible for the death of a million people.”

Today the successors to the Hutu Power movement are spread across three continents — Africa, Europe and North America — and at least two generations. They include exiles and fugitives who served in the ancien régime, as well as some of their children. Adherents propagate the double-genocide story and claims of Kagame atrocities via Twitter feeds, Facebook pages and online-media sites. One prominent outlet is Jambonews. It was founded in 2010 in Brussels, and its contributors have included Donatien Nshimyumuremyi, whose father, Félicien Kabuga, reportedly was a top financier of the genocide; he spent a quarter of a century as a fugitive and is currently at The Hague, awaiting trial. Nshimyumuremyi, a data scientist based in Belgium, typifies the educated second generation of Rwandan expatriates who embrace and promote denialism. A website affiliated with the family proclaims his father’s innocence and includes testimonials from prominent revisionists in Europe and the United States, including Keith Harmon Snow.

The Hutu Power exiles do far more than declare moral equivalence between the 1994 genocide and the supposed crimes carried out by the Kagame government. Some raise funds and provide other material support for the ragtag militias along the Rwandan border, who share their dream of replacing Kagame with a Hutu regime. Since 2017, their hopes have rested on the National Liberation Front (F.L.N.), a militia of a thousand or so men, based in bush camps in Burundi and Congo, that has been patched together from aging F.D.L.R. fighters and a new generation of disaffected Rwandan and Congolese youth. The rebel group is the armed wing of the Rwanda Movement for Democratic Change (M.R.C.D.), a Brussels-based coalition of parties in exile. There’s no question, Keith Harmon Snow told me, that Rusesabagina “supports an armed overthrow of the Rwandan government” to stop what Snow calls “the Kagame killing machine.”

In late 2018, Rusesabagina uploaded a YouTube video in English that declared the Rwandan Patriotic Front to be “the enemy of the Rwandan people” and pledged “unreserved support” for the National Liberation Front. The statement was especially shocking because the F.L.N. had just carried out a brutal attack inside Rwanda in June 2018. A group of armed men entered Nyabimata, a town near the Burundi border, and killed three people; six months later, guerrillas ambushed three buses traveling through the nearby Nyungwe Forest, killing at least six and injuring dozens. Around this time, Rusesabagina gave an interview to the Voice of America’s Kinyarwanda service. “Aren’t you afraid that you will be arrested?” the reporter asked. Rusesabagina replied: “We are paying a lot of attention. We have passed difficult roads, and we will survive.” The interviewer asked if his forces were still encamped in the Nyungwe Forest. “We are angry. We did not enter it to abandon it,” Rusesabagina replied. He added, “We are there to demand our rights as Rwandan natives.”

When I read these statements to Kitty Kurth and Brian Endless, they each questioned the accuracy of the translation. “It doesn’t sound like anything that Paul would say,” Kurth told me. She acknowledged that, if true, it would be damning evidence of Rusesabagina’s role in fomenting the insurgency. But Kurth later told me that the attack was probably “a false flag” operation staged by the Rwandan government to incriminate Rusesabagina. She insisted that “even if the F.L.N. engaged in the alleged terrorist activities and attacks,” Rusesabagina “had no connection to or responsibility” for them. Taciana Rusesabagina told me that the words were “taken out of context by the Rwandan government.”

By 2019, the government was determined to capture Rusesabagina. Two violent attacks had taken place in Rwanda the year before, and according to the prosecution, Rusesabagina had seemed to endorse them publicly. This led the Belgian Federal Police to summon Rusesabagina — who kept his house outside Brussels after moving to Texas and lived there intermittently — for questioning. Two Rwandan investigators flew in from Kigali to observe. Rusesabagina, accompanied by a lawyer, refused to answer many questions. A few days later, according to Taciana, four police officers searched his home, seizing a laptop, smartphones and documents. “They looked under the mattresses, everywhere,” she told me. “They went up to the attic and down into the garage.”

In Kigali, according to Prosecutor General Aimable Havugiyaremye, investigators analyzed WhatsApp messages between Rusesabagina and another person in which they discussed the 2018 attacks. “Was that ‘little thing’ yours?” the then unidentified correspondent had asked in Kinyarwanda, using an expression that connoted admiration. The correspondent was soon identified as Constantin Niyomwungere, and in early 2020, the police arrested the pastor on charges of abetting terrorism while he was visiting his churches in Rwanda. Niyomwungere, the prosecutor told me, expressed contrition under interrogation: “He said he felt bad that his friend was committing crimes — killing innocent people and burning houses.” Niyomwungere insists that he was secretly outraged all along by Rusesabagina’s role in the rebel attacks. “Paul said, ‘These are my guys, they had killed all those people in Rwanda,’” he told me. “When I discovered that Rusesabagina had carried out these terrorist activities, I was determined to help.” The prosecutor says that the pastor, to spare himself a jail sentence, offered to help set a trap.

Niyomwungere proposed telling Rusesabagina that he could escort him to meetings with F.L.N. leaders in Bujumbura and at camps in Cibitoke Province, near the Rwandan border. Havugiyaremye told me, “He said, ‘If you can hire a private jet, I can convince him that it was hired by the government of Burundi.’” As Niyomwungere himself told me: “I work with the authorities in Burundi. I know the government. I speak to the president.” The Rwandan government went along, and the Rwanda Investigation Bureau chartered the business jet from a longtime contractor with Kagame’s government. (Rusesabagina and his family maintain that Niyomwungere invited him to speak at local churches.)

On Aug. 25, the day before Rusesabagina set off from San Antonio, Niyomwungere boarded a flight to Dubai. The prosecutor general’s team viewed his departure with trepidation. “We thought, What if this man is lying and wants to run away?” Havugiyaremye told me. “He said: ‘I can assure you I will honor my promise. I have churches I want to run. I do disagree with what they did. Trust me.’ So, we took that risk.” Rusesabagina and Niyomwungere rendezvoused as planned at the Ibis Styles hotel and then went to the airport. There was an anxious moment aboard the business jet, when a flight attendant announced that they would be heading “to Kigali” — but they were talking and “he didn’t hear it,” the pastor told me. When Rusesabagina was whisked off to a Kigali jail cell, he thought Niyomwungere had been arrested, too; it was only several days later that he realized he had been betrayed.

Family and friends, as well as human rights groups, denounced Rusesabagina’s detention as a “kidnapping” and an “extraordinary rendition.” An American Bar Association Center for Human Rights background briefing released in January this year expressed concern about the lack of procedural safeguards surrounding his transfer to Rwanda, though the briefing made no conclusive judgments about whether it violated international law. Johnston Busingye, Rwanda’s justice minister, maintains that his government was acting within its rights. “If this man could dare do what he did, we had every right to go after him by any means necessary,” he told me. “We thought, If we could lure him into coming to Kigali, believing he was going somewhere else, and get him arrested at the airport, that would be wonderful.”

Rusesabagina is now being tried alongside 20 others who are accused of being F.L.N. organizers and combatants; the proceedings could last several months. The prosecution plans to present 80 victims of F.L.N. attacks, as well as three witnesses who are said to have worked alongside Rusesabagina, including Niyomwungere, who has been kept under watch for months in a hidden location. “I am happy to testify against a terrorist, someone who killed people,” he told me. “He deceived me. I want to help justice.” In a brief courtroom appearance in September, Rusesabagina said the F.L.N. had broken from its initial mission of defending civilians under threat from the Rwandan Patriotic Front. He had nothing to do with the attacks, he insisted: “I do not deny that the F.L.N. committed crimes, but my role was diplomacy.” Rusesabagina’s attorney Gatera Gashabana has challenged the prosecution on procedural grounds, claiming his transfer was unlawful, but hasn’t publicly indicated any other defense strategy before the trial’s start. (Officials refused to grant me a meeting with Rusesabagina during my eight days in Rwanda in December, citing an outbreak of Covid-19 at the prison.)

Rwandan prosecutors are hoping to prove that Rusesabagina was a major force in the rebel movement, but just how much influence he wielded is open to question. According to emails provided by the prosecution, the Rwandan exiles who backed the F.D.L.R. seem to have regarded him as a useful pawn at first — a celebrity who could lobby Washington, raise money and propagate their ideology on his speaking tours under the cover of his heroism. But over time, prosecutors claim, he took on more of a hands-on role. In the pastor’s telling, he was deeply involved in F.L.N. planning and logistics. One rebel leader on trial with Rusesabagina has referred to him in court as his “boss.”

Whatever Rusesabagina’s level of involvement, the F.L.N.’s ragtag guerrillas have never constituted a serious threat. But the Kagame regime, made up of many former guerrillas of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, knows from experience the dangers of letting a rebel movement fester along its borders. And despite continuous attempts over two decades to reintegrate the Hutu guerrillas, the insurgency has still not been defeated. Theogene Rudasingwa, a former field doctor with the Rwandan Patriotic Front and former Rwandan ambassador to the United States, who turned against Kagame and fled the country in the early 2000s, told me that he considered Kagame to be a “violent and insecure” dictator. But the alternative presented by Rusesabagina and his ilk, he said, was far worse: “I would rather have Kagame in power than these miserable groups like the F.L.N.”

One sunny afternoon in mid-December, I met Odette Nyiramilimo, the Rwandan senator and former close friend of Paul Rusesabagina, at the outdoor bar at the Hotel des Mille Collines. In late April 1994, a sympathetic major in the Rwandan police who was bunked at the hotel rescued Nyiramilimo, her husband and their four children from their home in Kigali. “It wasn’t Paul himself who came for me, but he did find someone who did,” she told me. We were sitting beside the swimming pool in the rear garden that provided water for the hotel’s occupants after someone cut off the water supply during the last weeks of the siege. “Paul didn’t do that,” she told me. “How could he have done it?” She strongly denied the frequently repeated claims that Rusesabagina threatened to evict refugees who couldn’t pay their bills. He had moved some nonpaying guests to cots in the restaurant and elsewhere on the first floor, she said, but “I never saw him threaten to expel people from the hotel if they didn’t pay up — never.”

Nyiramilimo was cautiously challenging the revisionist view of Rusesabagina that the government has taken such pains to propagate. “He was very humane,” she said. “He took care of his friends.” She described how he would ply Hutu government ministers with “food, wine and Champagne” in his hotel room and how he elected to stay behind after the first evacuation “to negotiate for the others.” At the same time, Nyiramilimo insisted that others had played a role in protecting those inside the Mille Collines and that Rusesabagina “was no hero.”

We walked up to the second floor and down a narrow corridor, which was dimly lit, with low ceilings and a scuffed orange carpet — little had changed outwardly since I stayed here in 1994. Nyiramilimo stopped before Room 226. “We were all in this suite, my husband and I and four kids, and another family with four kids, and another one who had three kids — 20 of us,” she recalled. “Paul brought in three mattresses, and everybody slept together, women on one side, men on the other.” Their days were filled with boredom, she said, interspersed with moments of terror. Sometimes Nyiramilimo would venture down the corridor and peer out a window that overlooked the parking lot and the road beyond. “I could see the Interahamwe in the streets, though I was terrified to look at them,” she said. I asked her if she believed that everyone in the hotel would have been killed if Rusesabagina hadn’t been there. “It’s possible,” she allowed.

But her respect and affection for Rusesabagina was now gone, replaced by contempt. Their friendship began to sour in April 2005, she told me, when Rusesabagina abruptly canceled his plan to fly to Kigali from Brussels to attend the national premiere of “Hotel Rwanda” at the InterContinental Hotel alongside Kagame, Terry George and other Mille Collines survivors. He claimed that he feared for his life because he had been denouncing the president in news conferences. “I said: ‘You’re crazy, why would the president want to kill you? Are you dreaming?’” she told me. “And that was when he started with this revisionism of the genocide.”

Their last conversation took place some months later — a phone call in which he urged her to join his anti-Kagame movement. “He said, ‘There are things that are being prepared.’ I said: ‘What are you talking about? I get the feeling that you’re trying to overthrow the government.’ And that was the end. I never even talked again to his wife, Taciana, who was my best friend for years.”

Nyiramilimo remains fiercely loyal to Kagame: He lifted Rwanda out of a nightmare, she told me, and brought stability and justice to a broken nation. In the end, she said, Rusesabagina had been brought down by hubris — his deluded conviction that it was he, not Kagame, who could heal Rwanda. “It was folie de grandeur,” she told me, as we left the Mille Collines. “After he became famous, everyone was telling him, ‘Paul, you could be president.’” He really came to the idea that he had saved those 1,300 people, she said. “He really wanted to be the star.”

Joshua Hammer is the author of “The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu” and “The Falcon Thief.” He last wrote for the magazine about a popular news site in the Philippines and its investigations of President Duterte’s extrajudicial killing campaign.

Source photographs, Rusesabagina: Nicolas Maeterlinck/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images; Kirk McKoy/Los Angeles Times, via Getty Images; Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post, via Getty Images; Cyril Ndegeya for The New York Times. Kagame: Arnd Wiegmann/Reuters. Rusesabagina’s eye: Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post, via Getty Images.