Prison Rwanda

Thirty years have passed since the last genocide of the 20th century. The images of corpses stitched with machetes shook the world. It was an ethnic conflict, we were told, between two groups with an ancestral hatred for each other. The Hutus, who were the majority, massacred the Tutsi minority. The toll was 800,000 dead in 100 days between April and July 1994. This is the official history of the Rwandan Genocide. A story that two Spanish journalists, Jon Cuesta and Xurxo Fernández, wanted to revisit. The result is a documentary that shows the most unknown part of the Genocide, revising the version of the Rwandan government, and puts into context the causes of the conflict and its consequences, which last until today.

The story of Prison Rwanda begins in 2014 when Jon Cuesta travels to the Central African country to cover the commemoration events of the Genocide against the Tutsi, and after conducting different interviews, the journalist suspects that the story is too uniform to be credible: “It was like a genocide theme park, with all the journalists following the official path. Without being conspiratorial I said to myself, I want to talk to more people, and I was not allowed, that’s when I started to worry.” Then he decides to confront it with that of the opponents in exile. One of them is Paul Rusesabagina, the Rwandan ‘Schindler’ who saved the lives of 1,200 Tutsis and inspired the film Hotel Rwanda. Cuesta found it hard to believe that the ‘hero of the Genocide’ is now an outlaw who has been tried to be assassinated on numerous occasions: “I have interviewed him several times and it is a surprising case, someone who was promoted as a hero by Hollywood and who has given lectures all over the world after saving many Tutsis in his hotel, becomes a villain detested by the regime and his books and the film are banned”. Among the dissidents, there are also Rwandans of Tutsi ethnicity, very close to the current president Paul Kagame, such as his former head of Security and the former head of the Intelligence Services.

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Regime's retaliation

Five years later, Xurxo Fernández took over the project due to Jon Cuesta’s well-founded fear of feeling under surveillance by the Rwandan regime: “In Europe, opponents murdered by the Rwandan secret services have appeared. I was also persecuted and photographed simply for having met with people uncomfortable for the regime”. Fernandez meets with the few remaining opponents in Rwanda and from then on the problems begin. The journalist is watched, they try to confiscate his material at the airport and the people he interviews are repressed. A member of the opposition helps the journalist to make a copy of his recording and a few hours later he is killed. “After realizing that they were following my colleague, Xurxo Fernández, we asked them to keep a copy of the interview in case they took our material at the airport. The next day, Anselme, who was in charge of crossing the border with the material, was found murdered and tortured.” Another dissident who participates in the documentary is arrested months later and is later found hanged in his cell.

The Rwandan regime’s reprisals extend even beyond its borders. So it was with the hero of Hotel Rwanda, Paul Rusesabagina, who in 2020 was kidnapped on a commercial flight and taken to Rwanda to be imprisoned: “I interviewed him a few months before he was kidnapped. He is an American and Belgian national and yet they had no problem putting him on a tricked-out plane and forcibly taking him to Rwanda. Paul Kagame is obsessed with him because he is a public figure who defends a version that is not the official one”. Many of the protagonists of this documentary are part of a list of ‘enemies of Rwanda’ who must be eliminated. Hundreds of people have disappeared or have been killed by the Rwandan secret services. Also nine Spaniards, who between 1994 and 2000 witnessed massacres against the civilian population at the hands of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, the party currently in power.

The explanation offered by this documentary differs radically from the story offered so far by the mainstream media. Prison Rwanda dissociates the Genocide from the ethnic conflict and frames it in a struggle for economic and geostrategic power in the heart of Africa. The war for the control of minerals that is devastating the Democratic Republic of Congo is the most tangible example. That was the objective of the Rwandan Patriotic Front after the Genocide, when more than two million Rwandans of Hutu ethnicity took refuge in the former Zaire. General Kagame’s troops invaded the neighboring country to hunt down the refugees and overthrow the government of Mobutu Sese Seko. “The Rwandan army chased the Hutu refugees into Eastern Congo, an area they occupy to this day, with a double objective: to massacre the Hutus and control the minerals. It sounds very twisted, but it’s a roundabout move,” reflects Cuesta. Las dos guerras que siguieron a esta invasión dejaron más de 10 millones de muertos. Tutsi militias financed by Rwanda, such as the M23, continue to operate in eastern Congo, destabilizing the country and plundering its wealth. Rwanda is today the largest exporter of coltan in Africa, even though it does not have a single reserve of this mineral on its territory.

Ébano Stories’ Prison Rwanda took place in April 2024, coinciding with the 30th anniversary of the Genocide against the Tutsi that the Rwandan government is commemorating. This gripping documentary will be screened at festivals and cinemas by Distribution with Glasses before being made available on digital platforms.

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