Hollywood made up hero, Paul Rusesabagina, returned to court last week. But he and his backers seem not to want justice and have tried everything to avoid accounting for his crimes against his compatriots and motherland. In this, they clutch at one excuse after another, but each slips out of their grasp, and now they are running out of pleas. The latest in this attempt to defeat justice is denial of who he is, turning his back on a country he has had ambition to lead. He is now Belgian, not Rwandan and therefore out of reach of Rwandan courts We will not go into the legal merits or otherwise of this claim. It is a matter before court and the judges will rule on it this week. But before then, legal experts and other keen minds will have gone through law books and come up with the acts, clauses and sections of the relevant laws. From what I gather from experts, Rusesabagina’s citizenship plea is on shaky ground in national and international law. But we must wait for the judges to make that pronouncement. Rusesabagina is not the first to plead foreignness in order to escape justice. It is a familiar tactic some Rwandans charged with genocide and crime against humanity have used in the past. Leon Mugesera, extradited from Canada, and tried for his role in the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda in 1994, used a similar ploy. He wanted court proceedings conducted in French claiming that he didn’t understand Kinyarwanda very well. His prayer was not granted because it was founded on false grounds. A group of genocide suspects living in the United Kingdom hang on their British nationality to avoid accounting for their crimes in Rwandan courts. They include one Bajinya turned Brown to prove his Britishness. Was there also a bleach to match the change and can it remove the blood stains from multiple victims on his soul? It must be obvious, even to those who plead foreign nationality, that it does not remove their culpability. They do it for a different purpose. One reason they do it is to divert attention from the substance of the charge. Long drawn out arguments on procedural matters are meant to serve this purpose. It is not for nothing that all Rusesabagina’s defenders are silent on the charges he faces. It is an attempt to obscure the charges but also admission of their validity. Another is a not-so-veiled threat. You can’t touch a Belgian, a European. These are superior beings, way above your laws and if you dare do so and even go further and actually have them arraigned, there will be dire consequences. Rusesabagina and others might assume and probably believe that diversion and intimidation are a very useful defence. However, negation of what one is betrays a high degree of self-contempt that indeed makes him foreign to his native country and the values of its people. He doesn’t know that Rwandans don’t prostrate before anyone – bullies, creators of fake reputations, preachers and high priests of every sort, watchdogs of whatever – the lot. They have agaciro. Obviously Rusesabagina missed out on the restored values of Rwandans. He was busy basking in the false sun of artificial stardom and all the while hatching, with his tutors, terror plots against his country. Before this latest legal ploy that is bound to fail, there were others that flopped. One such is that Rusesabagina will not get a fair trial. As was evident last Wednesday, that argument is falling apart. His trial was held in open court and streamed live across the world. It was attended by ambassadors of western countries. He was heard and allowed to make his absurd objections. Another has been the fame and hero card. He is a famous man, a humanitarian celebrity, winner of many awards and so he can’t be touched. That argument too does not hold with Rwandans. They know what heroes look like and what makes them such, having quite a few among them going back centuries. They also know a liar and pretender when they see one, especially when he has lived among them most of his life. They have experienced the terror visited on them by Rusesabagina’s gunmen. And they are right because as it turns out Rusesabagina is not a selfless humanitarian but a scheming individual with political ambitions that he is willing to attain by whatever means, including terrorism. He is dishonest, a dissembler and a cheat. So what is the next plea in this scheme to subvert justice? Insanity or diminished responsibility due to excessive ambition, intense hatred for his own, and unceasing tutoring by foreigners with their own agenda? He is not an earthling but an alien from another planet and so not subject to this earth’s laws? Or he is an angel sent to save us from ourselves? You can never know what the delusional will come up with next. But you can be sure they will be heard. The views expressed in this article are of the writer.
