Africa-Press – Botswana. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken yesterday expressed US “concerns” about respect for human rights in Rwanda during talks held with the country’s President, Paul Kagame, in Kigali.
The head of US diplomacy discussed, in particular, with the Rwandan Head of State the fate of Paul Rusesabagina, a historical opponent of Kagame, who has been serving a 25-year prison sentence for “terrorism” since 2021 and has resident status. permanently in the United States.
Paul Rusesabagina, a strong opponent of Paul Kagame for more than 20 years, became famous for the film “Hotel Rwanda”, released in 2004, a feature film that tells how this moderate Hutu, who ran the Hotel Mille Collines, in Kigali, saved more than 1,000 people during the 1994 genocide, during which 800,000 people were killed, according to the United Nations, mostly from the Tutsi minority.
Rusesabagina lived in exile in the United States of America (USA) and then in Belgium since 1996, before being arrested in Kigali in August 2020 under obscure circumstances when a plane he was traveling on to Burundi was diverted to the capital. rwandan
At a conference that followed a meeting with the host Head of State, Blinken revealed that he told President Kagame that the US believes that “people in all countries should be able to express their views without fear of intimidation, arrest, violence or any other form of repression”.
The Secretary of State also underlined Washington’s “concerns” about the “lack of fair trial guarantees” offered to Paul Rusesabagina.
At the end of a trial in 2021, which Belgium considered to have been neither “fair” nor “equitable”, the Rwandan opponent was sentenced to 25 years in prison for “founding and belonging” to the National Liberation Front (FLN), a group accused of carrying out deadly attacks in Rwanda in 2018 and 2019.
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