The Trap | After Hotel Rwanda
Slate Presents
Slate Podcasts
4.3 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 8 May 2024
⏱️ 31 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
An old friend persuades human rights activist Paul Rusesabagina to travel from his home in San Antonio to Burundi for a speaking engagement. But the friend turns out to be collaborating with the Rwandan government, and the journey is a trap.
After Hotel Rwanda tells the story of Paul Rusesabagina, a human rights activist who in 2020 was lured from his home in San Antonio, Texas, to his former country of Rwanda, where he was tried on terrorism charges and sentenced to 25 years in prison. Rusesabagina had been a national hero in Rwanda for saving the lives of more than twelve hundred people during the 1994 genocide there. A decade later, his story was told in the Oscar-nominated movie Hotel Rwanda. Our four-part series describes how Rusesabagina went from hero to dissident in Rwanda—and how a team of supporters in Washington and elsewhere managed eventually to bring him home. The story is reported by Foreign Policy staff writer Robbie Gramer.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, I'm Elena Schwartz, a senior producer here at Slate. Welcome to Slate Presents, |
| 0:18.4 | Slate's home for narrative podcasts and investigations that go deep. |
| 0:23.3 | There's no shortage of podcasts out there, but what's harder to find is the kind of storytelling |
| 0:29.0 | that actually stays with you. We made Slate Presents to be exactly that. I want to tell you a little |
| 0:36.9 | bit about this podcast after Hotel Rwanda. |
| 0:41.0 | It's the story of Paul Recessibagina, a human rights hero, or an unrepentant terrorist supporter, |
| 0:50.0 | depending on who you ask. During the Rwandan genocide, Paul saved the lives of over a thousand |
| 0:56.3 | people by sheltering them inside the hotel he ran. Then, years later, the Rwandan government |
| 1:03.4 | accused him of terrorism and abducted him to bring him to trial. What followed were nearly |
| 1:09.9 | three years of incarceration, and an international |
| 1:14.4 | campaign to set Paul free. Thank you for listening to After Hotel Rwanda. Here's the show. |
| 1:22.1 | A bit more than a year ago, I was put in touch with a person I'd never met, a woman named |
| 1:27.0 | Anais Canimba. I'm a woman named Anaisa Kniemba. |
| 1:28.8 | I'm a Washington journalist, and so it's not unusual for people to just reach out. |
| 1:33.6 | Usually, it's government spokespeople or experts or lobbyists. |
| 1:38.6 | Anaisa was a little different. |
| 1:40.5 | Her father was this legendary human rights activist who was imprisoned in Rwanda. |
| 1:45.0 | By the time we got connected, this was in 2023, he had been locked up for nearly two years. |
| 1:51.5 | He had initially been held in a secret facility and said he was tortured. |
| 1:56.7 | President Joe Biden's team and the State Department were working on his case. |
| 2:00.9 | I cover the State Department, which is how we got connected. |
| 2:04.9 | I'd been following her father's case since I first learned about the bizarre circumstances around how he was imprisoned. |
... |
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