Paul Rusesabagina’s birthday

Paul is spending his second birthday unlawfully detained in Rwanda

Today is Paul Rueseabagina’s 657th day in a Kigali prison. That’s 657 days he has not been given his heart medication. It’s 657 days he has been kept away from other people (he was first in solitary confinement and now no one is allowed to talk to him). It’s 657 days he has been deprived of his basic human & civil rights.

In the early 2000s, I worked at the United Nations in Washington, DC. I had known about the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 but wasn’t all that interested. At the UN I read reports from Congo that made my blood run cold. Stories of families who jumped into crocodile-infested waters to escape the rebels (aka Paul Kagame). I put out a press release almost every day about the horrors I was reading about. Several articles were written by reporters who said things like, I will write about this if you stop sending me these releases. Like Andy Dufresne in Shawshank Redemption, I just sent more.

Then I watched Hotel Rwanda. If one person can have that much of an impact, I felt I had no excuse to not try to do the same. I started volunteering for anti-genocide groups. Then I learned my good friends, Kitty Kurth and Kevin Lampe, worked with Paul Rusesabagina and I reached out to see if I could help. When Paul would come to DC, I…