The children of Paul Rusesabagina, the imprisoned Rwandan opposition figure, are only able to speak to their father for five minutes once a week. Even then the Rwandan authorities listen into the phone call.
Tricked into boarding a private plane in Dubai and flown to Kigali, the 67-year-old Rusesabagina – who came to international attention after his life-saving acts were depicted in the Hollywood film Hotel Rwanda, set during the country’s genocide in 1994 – was given what his family says was a show trial and jailed over allegations that he had been a founder and leader of a terrorist group.
During that trial, the phone of his daughter, Carine Kanimba, was targeted with the notorious Pegasus spyware, according to forensic analysis by Amnesty. Legal discussions and conversations were reportedly listened into, as well as meetings with senior foreign diplomats. The Rwandan government has previously said the country “does not use this software system … and does not possess this technical capability in any form”.
In the midst of their international campaign to secure his release, Carine, and one of his other daughters, Anaise Kanimba, say that even now the regime of the Rwandan president, Paul Kagame, is still interested in their activities.
The two women were Rusesabagina’s nieces, but were adopted as babies by Paul after their own family was murdered during the genocide and the girls were found by the family in a refugee camp.
In London to lobby on behalf of her father, 29-year-old Anaise describes her father’s disappearance. “My sister and I were together in Washington during lockdown. Ten days before Dad left, he asked us to help him book his plane tickets,” she says. “I feel a lot of responsibility.”
Knowing that the Rwandan authorities were seeking to arrest him, he was “extremely nervous” about travelling in Europe, she says. “I helped book his tickets to Dubai via Chicago.”
But while transiting through Dubai, Paul Rusesabagina disappeared. Then his family heard that he was in detention in Kigali after being tricked into getting on a plane he thought was taking him to a meeting in Burundi.
“It was 29 August. He disappeared on the 28th. Then I got a message from our younger brother saying: ‘They took Dad. He’s in Kigali.’ And I knew he wasn’t joking.
“And you know, he had put himself almost under his own house arrest because he felt they were watching him.”
In the seven-month trial that followed his arrest on arrival in Kigali, Rusesabagina was accused of being “the founder, leader, sponsor and member of violent, armed, extremist terror outfits … operating out of various places in the region and abroad”.
And while prosecutors said he had recruited dozens of fighters for the National Liberation Front (FLN), a rebel group that has carried out a number of deadly attacks in Rwanda in recent years – charges that he denies – serious questions have emerged since his conviction over whether he received a “fair trial”, including whether he was coerced into making a confession.
It is clear is that Rusesabagina was fiercely outspoken about the increasingly repressive rule in Kigali, was a member of an opposition group, and had even called for regime change. According to his family, his most serious crime was to be a high-profile critic of Kagame.
It is an accusation that Kagame himself denied following Rusesabagina’s arrest – although framed in terms that referenced his high profile. “He is here being tried for [his actions]. Nothing to do with the film. Nothing to do with celebrity status,” Kagame said in television interview.
Anaise believes there is an international infatuation with Kagame. “The world only wants to see [Kagame] as the guy on the white horse who ended the genocide,” she says.
Many observers see the luring of Rusesabagina to Kigali, his detention and trial as of a piece with the treatment meted out by Kagame’s regime to those who oppose it, including former members of Kagame’s inner circle.
At its most serious, this has allegedly included murders and attempted murders abroad – charges Rwanda denies. Most prominent of these was the murder of Patrick Karegeya, a former ally of Kagame turned opponent, in a South African hotel. Others have been warned about threats to their lives.
And, like others who have fallen foul of Kagame over the years, Rusesabagina’s first and most serious sin, it appears, was the prominence he received because of the film Hotel Rwanda.
“When father got a platform through the film, Kagame expected him to say just good things about Rwanda. But he wanted the truth to be known about what was happening in Rwanda,” says Anaise.
“When Kagame and the regime would speak about him, they would smear him. This is completely personal. They accused him of being the leader of attacks – of being the mastermind!
“We get to speak to him for about five minutes once a week. He’s been in solitary confinement for three months and can’t sleep because of the bed bugs. We worry about his health because he suffers from hypertension.”
If Rusesabagina’s disappearance, in what Kagame has boasted “was a flawless operation”, was sinister enough in its own right, it has been underscored by the targeting of Carine – a Belgian citizen, unlike Anaise – with the Israeli-developed Pegasus spyware.
“My understanding is that my phone was infected by an email address that was linked to Rwanda that was sent to me and then deleted. I never saw it,” explains Carine.
Among meetings that may have been monitored by the spyware were those she had with European foreign ministries and officials at this time about her father’s case.
The family also have reason to believe phone calls between Rusesabagina’s Rwandan lawyer and the family, as well as legal advisers in the west, about their legal strategy were targeted.
That spying, Anaise suggests, allowed Rwandan officials to block legal documents being delivered to her father in prison to sign that might have helped with his defence.
“The consequence of that surveillance,” says Kate Gibson, a UK-based lawyer who is advising the family, “is that Paul was blocked from seeing documents [and] his lawyer was not allowed to take out notes from their meetings.
“We knew something was up but it was only later that we found communications with his lawyer had been compromised,” she adds.
Gibson is scathing about the lack of due process at the trial, not least in a summary of the case drawn up for the campaign for his release.
“Mr Rusesabagina’s trial and judgment followed his illegal kidnapping and return to Rwanda, his torture for four days while held incommunicado in an unknown location, and 248 days of solitary confinement,” the summary reads.
“Throughout this process, his legal and human rights were violated by the Rwandan government at every turn. The judgment in this case continues this trend, with factual, legal and procedural errors throughout.
“Mr Rusesabagina’s judgment had very little to do with the law, and everything to do with continuing the illegal and arbitrary detention of a critic of the Rwandan regime.”
And with the Rwandan prosecutor appealing against his 25-year prison sentence (they had sought life imprisonment) – and little hope of a meaningful appeal to shorten it in Kigali – Rusesabagina’s family is now pinning its hopes on international pressure.
In June, the US-based Lantos Foundation for Human Rights & Justice filed a formal petition to the US state department and treasury calling for Magnitsky sanctions against the Rwandan justice minister, Johnston Busingye, and head of the Rwanda Investigation Bureau, Col Jeannot Ruhunga, “for their role in human rights violations committed against Paul Rusesabagina”.
In October, the European parliament passed a non-binding resolution by 660 votes to two, with 18 abstentions, strongly condemning Rusesabagina’s conviction, which it said was “exemplary of the human rights violations in Rwanda”.
“Our strategy,” says Anaise, who has briefed the House of Lords on her father’s case, “is to put as much pressure on Rwanda until Kagame is sick of hearing about my father’s case and the cost of it is too high.”
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