Since the police killing of George Floyd in May 2020, Representative Ilhan Omar has been a staunch and admirable advocate for the rights of defendants and the fight against abuses by US law enforcement.
So it came as a surprise when Omar brushed off the blatant breaches of due process and said the US shouldn’t help the hero of Rwanda Hotel Paul Rusesabagina simply because he had been accused of a crime by a well-known totalitarian regime for murdering and imprisoning his critics.
The House Foreign Affairs Committee approved a resolution on February 8 calling for the release of Rusesabagina from a Rwandan prison. Omar was one of the opposing voices.
“While I acknowledge reports of serious due process concerns regarding his arrest and trial,” she said. “This man is likely charged with terrorism, tried and sentenced.”
“Serious concerns” is an understatement, given what happened to Rusesabagina. On August 29, 2020, he was lured away from his home in Texas and tricked into boarding a flight to the Rwandan capital where he was later tortured and subjected to a show trial on bogus “terrorism” charges in which no credible evidence has been presented. , and coerced witnesses even reconsidered their accusations. He was sentenced to 25 years.
His only crime was talking. Since his heroism during the 1994 genocide captured global attention, Rusesabagina has used his platform to draw attention to the dictatorship’s widespread human rights abuses in his home country, kidnappings and the routine killings of dissidents that led Freedom House to call the country abysmal. 22 out of 100. The Rwandan dictator, Paul Kagame, has long considered him an enemy.
MinnPost photo by Craig Lassig Rep. Ilhan Omar
Would Omar now be willing to tell a Minneapolis resident that as long as some shadowy police agency “credibly accuses them” she would have no problem if the cops shoved them into an unmarked car, tortured them, extorted testimonies against them to witnesses the defendants had never met and so seriously violated their due process that the American Bar Association was moved to say the obvious show trial had been “irreparably damaging” in favor of the prosecution and had caused “serious concern” to independent legal observers?
Omar’s vote came after a visit she made to Rwanda on October 9, 2021 where she attended a meeting at Kagame’s office. The visit foreshadowed her change of attitude from a congresswoman who had previously been unafraid to speak out against human rights abuses – the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, China’s treatment of its people ethnic Uyghur, Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories – in an attitude that excuses an unlawful kidnapping by a despotic regime which, according to the State Department, has been competent in “unlawful or arbitrary arrests and detentions, killings and enforced disappearances”.
Rwanda is eager to do business with the United States. It is home to a branch campus of Carnegie Mellon University and a start-up minor league National Basketball Association. Goldman Sachs is funding a women’s education program there, and electric car manufacturers are eyeing the tin and tungsten produced from its Rutungo mines.
The regime’s 2020 kidnapping of its most prominent critic, Paul Rusesabagina, has been a bit of a test: how much can they get away with? Can they silence a critic who happens to be a lawful permanent resident of the United States and a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom? If they can get away with it, imagine what they can do – and have done – to humiliate people without such a reputation.
Omar’s stance on Rusesabagina comes with domestic complications, threatening to cast his entire stance on the US criminal justice system in a light of hypocrisy. Is she saying that police abuse that is unacceptable in America is okay as long as it is perpetrated in Africa?
What is clear is that she cannot have it both ways. She cannot be a human rights champion while carrying the waters of a brutal human rights violator.
Tom Zoellner is the co-author of Paul Rusesabagina’s memoir “An Ordinary Man”. David Himbara is a former economic adviser to the Rwandan government now living in exile in Canada.
