Born: 24 October 1958, Rwanda
Died: NA
Country most active: Rwanda
Also known as: NA
Tatiana Rusesabagina is a Rwandan humanitarian who, with her husband Paul Rusesabagina, helped protect 1,268 Hutu and Tutsi refugees in the Hotel des Milles Collines during the Rwandan genocide in 1994. Their story was used as the basis for the 2004 film Hotel Rwanda. When Tatiana was working as a nurse, she had faced discrimination because of her Tutsi ethnicity, and her mother was murdered in the genocide along with other family members and their bodies were thrown into a pit with many others. Her father had forged all of her family’s identification cards to say that they were Hutu, but the militia had other ways of tracking Tutsis, which the Hutu people were killing in mass in an attempt to make the Tutsi extinct. The conflict between the two ethnic groups dates back centuries in Rwanda. Paul’s family was of mixed Hutu and Tutsi which meant he was less of a target than a full Tutsi.
Paul had Tatiana come to the hotel, which he managed, for safety with the children. He tried to smuggle them out of the country by hiding in a truck that would take them to the airport, but the militia figured out their plan. Tatiana was a target for brutal beatings because the militia knew that she was the Tutsi wife of the hotel manager. She narrowly escaped death and made it back to the hotel, where she was bed-ridden for several days because of her injuries. The people taking shelter in the hotel were all saved because of Rusesabagina’s careful diplomacy with the government, which included bribing them so they would not enter the hotel and harm anyone
Once they were able to leave the hotel, Paul and Tatiana went to a refugee camp to begin looking for family; they were reunited with Tatiana’s two nieces, who were starving and covered in dirt when they were found. The family escaped to Tanzania and later settled in Brussels, where they often received threats. Paul received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2005, with Tatiana by his side. The family is still active as advocates for genocide survivors and for the betterment of the Tutsi people in Rwanda. They created the Hotel Rwanda Rusesabagina Foundation in 2005, with a mission to “prevent future genocides and raise awareness of the need for a new truth and reconciliation process in Rwanda and the Great Lakes Region of Africa”.