Michael, who was born and bred in the Congo, had moved to Rwanda after the genocide. I ordered tilapia fish, which came with potatoes and spinach. We were soon joined by Hyppolite Ntigurirwa, who, like Michael, is an alumni of the international leadership programme that I direct at Yale. Located in the central business district, the Hôtel Des Mille Collines remains a popular destination for Rwandan elites, and as we sat down at the Legacy terrace adjacent to the swimming pool, the hills of Kigali were visible through the haze. A Belgian citizen with a US Green Card, Rusesabagina was tricked into returning to Rwanda and in September 2021 he was sentenced to 25 years in prison for his leadership of a coalition of exiled opposition groups whose armed wing stands accused of conducting attacks inside the country. Hailed in the US as the hero of the film for providing refuge to a thousand or so Tutsis fleeing the violence that erupted in 1994, his criticism of President Kagame made him an enemy of the regime. Its manager at the time of the genocide, Paul Rusesabagina, has recently experienced a complete reversal of his fortunes. Inaugurated in 1973 as the premier grand hotel in Rwanda, it has since been surpassed by much grander establishments.
The 6’ 5” lawyer picked me up from where I was staying and drove me to the hotel made famous by the film Hotel Rwanda. Michael Kalisa suggested that my first lunch should be at the Hôtel Des Mille Collines. Three decades on, I was visiting this land-locked country for the first time, hoping to gain a sense of how this nation of a “thousand hills”, where a political fixation on difference and division had once led to such calamity, had transformed itself into the safest place in Africa. At the time, I was working at the Refugee Studies Centre in Oxford and had befriended a Rwandan woman and her son who were among the 15,000 Rwandan survivors granted asylum in the UK. I had been interested in Rwanda since the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi. More than 45,000 people crossed the Channel in small boats last year and, despite the possibility of landing in Dungeness and ending up in Kigali, the numbers show no signs of abating. Yet due to ongoing legal battles in the British courts, no asylum seekers have arrived yet. Under the terms of the agreement, the Rwandan government has so far received $170m (£137m) to process 1,000 people over a five-year trial period.
The UK government still, it seems, intends to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda.
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