the times | Saturday September 5 2020 2GM 43
to the several thousand Britons granted
French citizenship since the 2016 refer-
endum. The number of British citizens
obtaining French nationality surged
after 2016, with 1,500 in 2017 and 3,268
in 2018.
Mr Ridealgh, who has lived in France
since 1989, said that he had long felt
French but his decision to take citizen-
ship was triggered by the 2016 Brexit
vote. “Britain has turned away from me
with Brexit,” he told The Times.
Mr Ridealgh, who is a manager with
Vodafone Automotive and lives in
Paris, is married to a Canadian who has
also taken French citizenship.
Mr Macron told Mr Ridealgh and the
other new citizens, from Algeria, Cam-
eroon, Peru and Lebanon, that they
were following in the footsteps of great
figures from French history who were
of immigrant origin. He cited Léon
Gambetta, the statesman son of an Ital-ian, who proclaimed the Third Repub-
lic from the City Hall in Paris in Sep-
tember 1870 after the defeat of the
French army by the Prussians at the
battle of Sedan.
Mr Ridealgh said he thanked Mr Ma-
cron in a chat after the ceremony.Matthew Ridealgh, originally from
Essex, has taken French citizenshipGrieving surgeon who
saved the lives of
16,000 cats and dogs
Page 47
Love lives of father
and son philosophers
scandalise Paris
Page 45
anti-Brexit Briton in citizenship ceremony
The murky capture and rendition of the
most celebrated critic of Rwanda’s
repressive regime read much like the
screenplay of a thriller.
Perhaps it could have been the sequel
to Hotel Rwanda, Hollywood’s portrayal
of Paul Rusesabagina’s bravery during
the 1994 genocide, in which Don
Cheadle played the heroic hotel man-
ager who sheltered 1,200 people from
blade-wielding mobs.
His actions during the 100-day
slaughter of up to a million Tutsis and
moderate Hutus won him the US Presi-
dential Medal of Freedom and status as
a global symbol of peace.
Rwanda suffered one of the worst
atrocities of the 20th century after the
shooting down of a plane carrying the
leader of the Hutu-dominated govern-
ment. Reprisal killings quickly spread
to villages where neighbours turned
against Tutsis and moderate Hutus
with machetes and clubs.
Mr Rusesabagina’s bravery put him
on a perilous collision course with Paul
Kagame, Rwanda’s autocratic presi-
dent, who is a Tutsi. Mr Rusesabagina,
66, was forced into exile in 1996 as he
spoke out against what he regarded as a
pitiless regime even as it was embraced
by the West.
That enmity led to an extraordinary
twist this week when Mr Rusesabagina
was paraded on terrorism charges in the
Rwandan capital, Kigali. Details about
how he got there are blurred; his family
suspect abduction and rendition.
Delivering such a high-profile critic
into the hands of Mr Kagame is be-
lieved to have required the complicity
of foreign powers without due process
and perhaps a ruse that persuaded Mr
Rusesabagina to board a private jet that
spirited him to the place he most feared.
“There must have been some sort of
trick or entrapment to get him to Rwan-
da,” his adopted daughter Carine Kan-
imba, 27, told The Times. The first she
knew of his capture was when she saw
him in handcuffs on television. The
family had last heard of him shortly
after his safe arrival in Dubai on an
Emirates flight from Chicago, but then
his phone went dead. “He was in Dubai
for some meetings but we don’t know
who with,” she said.
The Rwandan authorities credited
“international co-operation” for his
arrest on a warrant but have refused to
name the foreign partner that helped to
land an enemy who they claim was
founding and leading “armed extremist
terror outfits” against his country.
The United Arab Emirates denied
any part, saying that Mr Rusesabagina
had legally flown out of al-Maktoum
airport on a private plane bound for Ki-
gali five hours after flying in.
The seizure is seen as the biggest vic-
tory yet for Rwanda over a perceived
enemy in exile, and brazen even for a
regime that has been named as com-
plicit in a series of assassinations at
home and abroad.
Theogene Rudasingwa, who worked
closely with Mr Kagame for 15 yearsdomestic terrorists
Rwandan ‘agents
lured regime critic
into rendition trap’
until falling foul of him, believes that
the Rusesabagina operation would
have been directed by Kagame himself.
He speculated that foreign merce-
naries would have been deployed to
lure him to meet in Dubai, offering the
sort of bait that the emboldened activist
may have wanted: “Arms or financing.”
In a video from 2018, shared by the
Rwandan authorities to illustrate that
he was plotting insurrection, Mr Ruses-
abagina says: “The time has come for us
to use any means possible to bring
about change in Rwanda.”
Dr Rudasingwa said that he had in-
sight into the president’s thinking.
“Kagame’s maxim is ‘do what is needed
and deal with the consequences later’,”
he said from his home in Washington,
where he has lived in exile since 2005.
He cited the hotel room murder in
South Africa of the exiled spy chief Pat-rick Karegeya as a typical entrapment.
The former colonel had somehow been
tricked into a meeting with four hitmen
in Johannesburg despite threats to his
life. A delayed inquest ruled that it was
“directly linked” to the authorities in
Rwanda. Mr Kagame has denied re-
sponsibility for this and other killings.
Demands from America and Belgi-
um for Rwanda to protect Mr Rusesa-
bagina’s rights will have little effect, Dr
Rudasingwa said. “Kagame always de-
scribed the West as very fickle and said,
after somebody was dead or jailed, ‘It
will die down.’ ”
Emboldened by “a great victory”, Ki-
gali will be plotting a move against
another enemy, Dr Rudasingwa said.
There are fears for the safety of Denis
Mukwege, 65, who was awarded the
Nobel peace prize for his work with
rape victims in the eastern Congo. He
has called for perpetrators among the
rival militias, who wreak havoc over the
border from Rwanda, to face justice.
Dr Mukwege has been in hiding since
being denounced on state television by
Mr Kagame’s long-time security advis-
er. Hollywood, meanwhile, has an-
nounced it has cast the Gladiator actor
Djimon Hounsou to play Dr Mukwege
in a version of his story.Rwanda
Jane FlanaganMr Macron said the 150th annivers-
ary was overshadowed by “the threats
that are weighing on the republic” from
Islamist separatism and other sources.
“There will never be a place in France
for those who, often in the name of a
god, sometimes with the aid of foreign
powers, aim to impose the law of a
single group,” he said.
He referred to the opening this week
of the trial of alleged accomplices in the
murders of the staff of Charlie Hebdo
magazine in 2015 and said that France
would always defend “the freedom of
expression going as far as the right to
blaspheme”.
France refuses to renounce any part
of its history, Mr Macron said, referring
to the fashion for removing statues to
dishonour historical figures deemed to
have been racist. “The republic does not
pull down statues. You don’t choose just
a part of France.”told them that Joe Biden was late to visit Kenosha, weak as a senator and in the pocket of China and left-wing radicals
UAE
DubaiRwanda
Kigali Indian
OceanRed
Sea250 milesEVAN VUCCI/APPaul Rusesabagina
was paraded in
handcuffs after
being flown to
Kigali by private jet