Paul Rusesabagina - Rusesabagina's Acts

Rusesabagina's Acts

During the Genocide, Paul made countless acts for trying to protect his refugees and family. When militia captains would come to decree an want for the Tutsi refugees, Paul would slip away and come back to them with money, the finest alcohols, and cigars to persuade them to leave. Most of those persuasions were also aided by copious phone calls to city heads that Rusesabagina had developed tight contacts with, during their stays at the hotels that he managed; those city heads he would call would aid in his hotel's protection from massacre, but only for a short time, for the militia was persistent.

He smuggled his family and 32 neighbors in the beginning of the attacks to save them from brutal massacre; Paul recounts when he woke up one morning to see neighbors dead and some neighbors holding machetes covered in blood. For those 1,268 refugees he made calls to smuggle in food and when the water supply was taken away, Paul gave his guests water from the pool so that they wouldn't dehydrate and die. He stayed awake until late the next morning, even stay to 5am using the only phone line the militia didn't cut and sent faxes and pleas to important heads, including Bill Clinton and King of Belgium.

Paul's number one priority was to help his guests where he constantly said that he was simply doing his job as a hotel manager.

Rusesabagina and his immediate family remained in Rwanda for just over two years following the genocide. In 1996, they moved to Belgium, where he applied for political asylum. While in Brussels he bought a cab and was later able to buy several more and develop his own cab company. Soon he bought a trucking company in Zambia. He uses his trucking company to deliver necessities and goods to rural villages in Zambia.

In his autobiography, Rusesabagina explains that “We may have left Rwanda, but Rwanda will never leave us.”