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RWANDA’S PRESIDENT DISMISSES ‘HOTEL RWANDA’: Paul Kagame says Hollywood got the story wrong.
*Rwandan president Paul Kagame has no love for the 2004 film "Hotel Rwanda," saying Wednesday that the Oscar-nominated drama was an attempt by Hollywood to rewrite the history of the country’s 1994 genocide.
Kagame’s main issue is with the depiction of Paul Rusesabagina, the real life hotel manager portrayed as a hero in the film by Don Cheadle. Amidst the massacres, in which some 800,000 minority Tutsis and moderate Hutus were butchered in 100 days of killings, Rusesabagina, in the movie, uses his position to help save more than 1,200 Tutsi refugees.
During a visit to Washington, Kagame told reporters that the film exaggerated Rusesabagina’s impact.
“It has nothing to do with Rusesabagina," Kagame said. "He just happened to be there accidentally, and he happened to be surviving because he was not in the category of those being hunted."
Kagame said people in the hotel were saved in part because U.N. forces occupied the hotel and because the killers wanted to use it as a place to chill and drink beer while plotting their murders for the following day.
Kagame, a Tutsi, said another reason lives were spared is that talks had been underway between his rebel group and the then-interim government to exchange Tutsis in the hotel for Hutu soldiers captured by his group.
"Someone is trying to rewrite the history of Rwanda and we cannot accept it," he said.
As most of the world stood by and watched, the genocide was finally ended by Kagame, who led a rebel army from Uganda to seize power.
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