One Saturday morning in 2018, 17-year-old Isaac boarded a local bus bound for a nearby village, to visit his father, whose work had taken him away from home. Isaac never arrived at his destination. His father would never see him again.
During Isaac’s journey, his bus was ambushed. A group of armed assailants set the bus alight, trapping several passengers inside. Isaac was burned alive, murdered alongside five other passengers, including a 13-year-old girl.
In the following days, an armed group publicly claimed responsibility for the attack that took Isaac’s life. Later that month, the group’s founder posted a statement on YouTube, in which he pledged his "unreserved support” for the group, and hailed the launch of its "liberation struggle”.
The murders of Isaac and at least eight other innocent civilians in 2018 were acts of terror. Had this story played out in Europe or the Americas, those responsible for these murders would have been known to the world as terrorists.
Yet, when members of the National Liberation Front (FLN) responsible for these attacks were successfully brought to justice, international uproar ensued. The reason? The FLN’s founder, the man who had so publicly glorified the groups actions, was Paul Rusesabagina, a minor celebrity in the West.
After his arrest, Rusesabagina was hailed as a "hero” and a "human rights activist”, whose "only real crime was to be critical”. His armed militia, which had openly claimed responsibility for murdering innocent men, women, and children, was dismissed as an activist "political movement”. Their victims were left anonymous, unmentioned.
For terrorism in the West to be met with this type of reaction would be inconceivable. But this series of events took place in Rwanda – in Africa, where the standards for terrorism are apparently different.
Rather than holding Paul Rusesabagina to account for his role in the murder of 17-year-old Isaac Niwenshuti, 13-year-old Ornella Sine Atete, and at least eight other innocent Rwandans, protests of his innocence were immediate and widespread.
Fiction was privileged over reality: a Hollywood script, of the 2004 film Hotel Rwanda was sufficient to exonerate him in the court of public opinion. In the real world, however, Rusesabagina’s involvement with terrorism was beyond doubt.
This much has been known since 2008, when a Stuttgart trial first uncovered his involvement with the FDLR, a group sanctioned by the UN for "serious violations of international law”. Western Union transfers to FDLR members, obtained by American and Belgian law enforcement, were revealed at trial. He described the foundation of the FLN in an online press conference, as a force made up of ex-soldiers from known terrorist groups, and bragged about their presence in the forests of Burundi on public radio, including on Voice of America.
The rest of the world had seemingly confused Rusesabagina for Don Cheadle, the actor who played Rusesabagina in a fictional 2004 film. Thus, the picture painted by the global media was of heroism, rather than terrorism.
It was not just journalists who fell into this trap. American Senators, British MPs, European MEPs, and several NGOs lamented Rusesabagina’s arrest and conviction. To them, there was no point in even considering the notion that the much-lauded "real-life hero of Hotel Rwanda” could put a foot wrong.
Regrettably, these blatant double standards are hardly surprising. Nor are the failures to treat the victims of terror with the respect they deserve. For centuries, African realities have been flattened, distorted by one-dimensional perspectives, which privilege simplicity and sensationalism over nuance and analysis.
As if to underscore this, Rusesabagina’s 20 co-defendants, also confessed members of the FLN, were swept aside, ignored by Western audiences fixated on headlines alone. Even less column inches were devoted to the FLN’s victims.
Time and again, Africans realities are fit into pre-conceived frameworks, and thus violent armed movements like the FLN are depicted as "activists”, repressed freedom fighters taking arms against "authoritarian” governments. The Manichean dichotomy – good vs. evil – distorts the field of reality. Governments trying to protect the peace and safety of their citizens are demonised as "repressive”.
It is time that the world reassesses how these underlying biases affect the way in which Africa is treated.
Governments who are fighting day and night to protect our communities against this violence are not necessarily asking for material support. What we do ask for is solidarity.
When terror strikes the Western world, solidarity, thoughts, and prayers pour from every corner. Yet too often, the reaction to similar events in Africa and elsewhere is scorn and suspicion, cynicism rather than sympathy.
We cannot, to borrow Teju Cole’s words, accept the deaths of African civilians like Ornella and Isaac as "natural and incontestable”. Each life lost to terrorism is a violation, an assault on humanity.
Yolande Makolo is the Spokesperson for the Government of Rwanda
This opinion was first published in Issue 71 of The Continent