An Ordinary Man

by Paul Rusesabagina

  “If somebody comes and wants to shoot you, ” I said, “do you think that the pistol will protect you?”

  It turned out that he had more reasons to be afraid than just his job. One day he came to the hotel with an elderly woman in tow. “Paul, ” he said, “I am bringing you my cockroach.”

  It was his own mother, a Tutsi. I assigned her to live in Room 237 without saying anything further.

  Another person who found his way to us was a man I will call Fred, though that is not his real name. He was one of my neighbors from Kabeza, but not a very popular person. He had beaten an old man to death several years before and had been released from prison just before the genocide. He was a Tutsi, which made him an automatic target, but he was also a wanted man because he had three sons serving in the RPF. In the opening days of the genocide he was one of the neighbors who took shelter in my house. On that day, April 9, when the Army had come to take me to the Diplomates, he made several desperate comments, shaking as he spoke. “I know these people are looking for me. Let me go out there so they can kill me before they kill everyone here.” Fred was not my best friend, but when he showed up later at the Mille Collines I was happy to see him alive and made sure that he got a place in a room and was protected from harassment by those who knew his story. There is no sin so great that somebody should die for it. When you start thinking like that you become an animal yourself.

  I suppose Fred was another one of those wounded lions that my father had been so fond of talking about. There was a whole pack of them living in my hotel. By the end of May we had 1, 268 people crammed into space that had been designed for 300 at most. There were up to 40 people living inside my own room. They were in the corridors, in the ballroom, on bathroom floors, and inside pantries. I had never planned for it to get this big. But I had made a promise to myself at some point that I would never turn anybody away. Nobody was killed. Nobody was wounded or beaten in the Mille Collines. That was an extraordinary piece of luck for us, but I do not think there is anything extraordinary about what I did for them with a cooler of beer, a leather binder, and a hidden telephone. I was doing the job that I had been entrusted to do by the Sabena Corporation-that was my greatest and only pride in the matter.

  I am a hotel manager.

  EIGHT

  WAKING UP BEFORE THE SUNRISE has been my habit ever since I was a boy. I seem biologically incapable of sleeping in. Before the killing started that predawn quiet was one of my favorite times of the day. I would slip out of bed gently, so as not to wake Tatiana, and go out into the yard and putter around at various tasks. There was a radio on the outside ledge and I would listen to the news. I suppose it is that bred-in-the-bone Rwandan love for news. Besides, a hotel manager needs to know the gossip. This was one of the only times in the day I would have all to myself.

  During the genocide I yearned to have one of those quiet mornings in the yard, when the news was just soccer scores and road closings instead of incitements to murder and lists of the dead. I still woke up in the hour before dawn, in a room jammed with people, and I craved that time when I was all alone. So I developed an early-morning ritual of visiting my favorite spot in the whole hotel.

  To get there you take the stairs to the top floor. The rooftop restaurant and the conference rooms are down the hall to the right. You turn left off the staircase and enter the second unmarked door on the south side of the hallway. Behind this is another door, but this one is locked. You open it with a key that only the manager and the chief of security possess. You go up another flight of metal stairs, and there you are on the roof, with the whole of the city of Kigali spread out before you.

  The hotel was built on the slope of Kiyovu Hill and the panorama is gorgeous. Even in the midst of war and death this aerie of mine had a peaceful aspect if you didn’t look at any spot too closely and focused just on the hills and the sky. To look at the streets for longer than a few seconds was to see homes with broken windows, wrecked vehicles, roadblocks, and corpses everywhere. Better to focus on the distance than the details.

  To the west, along the line of the far mountain ridge, you could see the road that snaked away down the valley. It led eventually to the city of Gitarama, where the crisis government held its seat. To the north was the area held by the rebel army. In the middle was Amahoro Stadium, where I knew there were over ten thousand refugees crammed inside, sleeping on the soccer field. It was a larger version of the Mille Collines, only with a different ethnic majority and living conditions that were far worse than what we had. There was nothing to cover anybody from the rain. Those who were wounded had no real medical care and their cuts grew infected and gangrenous. There was nowhere for people to relieve themselves and so the field became a stinking heath.

  Between the army lines was the no-man’s-land. There is a saying in Rwanda: “The elephants fight, but it is the grass that suffers.” Caught between the armies, we were the grass. When I came here at night I could see the flashes of gunfire and the red tracer bullets whizzing across the sky. But early mornings were calmer, the mortar shelling quiet and the popping of gunfire only occasional, heralding not a clash between troops but the killing of a lone victim or his family.

  These mornings on my roof, with the sky melting to blue from purple, I took the time to prepare myself for what I knew was coming. I was going to die. I had done far too much to cross the architects of the genocide. The only question would be the exact time, and the method of my death, and that of my wife and our children.

  I dreaded machetes. The Interahamwe were known to be extremely cruel with the people they chopped apart; first cutting tendons so the victims could not run away, then removing limbs so that a person could see their body coming apart slowly. Family members were often forced to watch, knowing they were next. Their wives and their children were often raped in front of them while this was happening. Priests helped kill their congregations. In some cases, the congregations helped kill their priests. Tutsi wives went to sleep next to their Hutu husbands and awoke to find the blade of a machete sawing into their neck, and above them, the grimacing face of the man who had sworn to love and cherish them for life. And Tutsi wives also killed their husbands. Children threw their grandparents down pit toilets and heaved rocks on top of them until the cries stopped. Unborn babies were sliced from their mothers’ wombs and tossed about like soccer balls. Severed heads and genitals were on display. The dark lust unleashed in Rwanda went beyond friendships and beyond politics and beyond even hate itself-it had become killing for killing’s sake, killing for sport, killing for nothing. It raged on, all around the hotel, on the capital’s streets and in the communes and in the hills and in every little spidery valley.

  There was a stash of money in the hotel safe. The money was for a last bribe, something to pay the militia to let me and my family be shot rather than face a machete.

  Seven time zones away, in the United States, the diplomatic establishment was tying itself up in knots. Everybody wanted to avoid saying a certain word.

  A Pentagon study paper dated May 1, 1994, sums up the prevailing attitude. The author was suggesting a way for the United States to take limited action in Rwanda without getting in too deep. “Genocide investigation: Language that calls for an international investigation of human rights abuses and possible violations of the genocide convention-Be Careful. Legal at State was worried about this yesterday-Genocide finding could commit [the U.S. government] to actually ‘do something.’” So the pressure was on. There had to be a way to call what was happening by something other than its rightful name.

  It is not as though there was an information blackout. The U.S. government-and, in fact, most of its citizens who watched the news-knew what was taking place in Rwanda. Romeo Dallaire had made himself available to anyone who wanted to interview him by telephone, and had taken to calling the slaughter “ethnic cleansing.” The BBC’s courageous reporter Mark Doyle was granted access to the hopeless UN mission and filed a story every day about the ongoing slaughte
r. Journalists slowly realized this was more than just another African civil war. And by the end of May the broadcasts of the nightly television news and the newspapers in America were full of accounts of mass murders and bodies floating down Akagera River toward Lake Victoria. But even with this incontrovertible evidence the U.S. government would not let itself admit that what was happening was a genocide. This played right into the official lies of the génocidaires: The killings were a spontaneous uprising of grief among the villagers at the assassination of the president and not something that had been carefully planned.

  The official U.S. State Department phrasing was nothing less than bizarre: “Acts of genocide may have occurred.”When spokeswoman Christine Shelley was asked how many acts of genocide it takes to equal a genocide she did a clumsy dance by saying that it could not be determined if the violence was directed toward a certain ethnic group-never mind that five minutes of listening to RTLM would have told them all they needed to know. “The intentions, the precise intentions, and whether or not these are just directed episodically or with the intention of actually eliminating groups in whole or in part, this is a more complicated issue to address, ” she said. “I’m not able to look at all of those criteria at this moment and say yes, no. It’s something that requires very careful study before we can make a final determination.”

  All in all, I would call this a very good Rwandan no.

  The peculiar avoidance of the word genocide was for a reason. The word is actually a relatively new one in the English language. It was coined by a Polish-born lawyer named Raphael Lemkin who then helped persuade the United Nations to pass a resolution, in 1948, expressly forbidding the destruction of a group of people because of their religion, nationality, or ethnicity. Lemkin had been horrified by the Turkish slaughter of the Armenians during World War I, but was even more appalled that it seemed to be no crime in the conventional sense. Nations could not be held accountable for murder in the same way people could. Furthermore, there was nothing legal or otherwise that separated the random killing of civilians from the attempt to eliminate an entire race.

  Grappling for a way to express the magnitude of the Nazis’ plans for and actions against the Jews during World War II, Lemkin decided that we needed a new word to embody the concept. It had to be short and easy to pronounce and convey a certain horror. After some experimentation he chose genocide, blending the Greek word for “race” (genus) with the Latin word for “kill” (cide). The word caught on and was quickly added to Webster’s New International Dictionary. UN member states signed a treaty in 1948 threatening criminal penalties for the leaders of any regime found to have conducted an extermination campaign against a particular religious or racial group. But the United States dragged its feet, fearing the encroachment of a world government telling it how to act. It was not until 1986 that the U.S. Senate finally ratified the agreement. By then genocides had been carried out in Cambodia, in Nigeria, in Pakistan, in Burundi, and in many other places on the globe.

  But this is characteristic. As Harvard University scholar Samantha Power has pointed out, the world’s foremost superpower, America, has almost never acted to stop a race of people from being exterminated, even when confronted with overwhelming evidence.

  Lemkin’s idea was romantic and idealistic: That it is in the interests of the entire interconnected human family to see that no one part of it is wiped out. And yet ever since, the short-term interests of national sovereignty have always carried the day. So it was with Rwanda, where “acts of genocide may have occurred” but no actual genocide that anyone really cared to see. If U.S. officials actually spoke the word out loud they might have been morally and legally compelled to act under the terms of the 1948 treaty. Few officials in Washington wanted that with a midterm congressional election around the corner. Everyone in the Clinton administration was mindful of the disaster in Somalia that had occurred the previous October, when eighteen Army Rangers were killed in the Black Hawk Down incident that seemed to symbolize everything that could go wrong with peacekeeping missions. Even though our situation was radically different in origin and nature, anything that called for a commitment of American troops to Africa was anathema in the halls of the U.S. State Department. And, of course, there was no natural resource in Rwanda that anybody cared about either-only human beings in danger.

  I still wonder how policy officials from that time can sit down at the table with their families and have any appetite for food, or go to sleep at night, knowing that they failed to act. Human beings were sacrificed for political convenience. This would be enough, I think, to turn any reasonable man into a prisoner of his own conscience for the rest of his life.

  Even a proposal to jam the frequencies of RTLM was rejected, on the grounds that the Army National Guard airplane required for the overflights cost eighty-five hundred dollars an hour to fly. If that plane had been kept aloft for every second of the genocide it would have worked out to about twenty-four dollars for each life taken that might otherwise have been saved.

  Before the killing in the hotel could start they would have to get rid of me. I was standing between them and the prize targets inside. We had senators, doctors, ministers, priests, maids, peasants, housewives, intellectuals. Inside the Mille Collines was the remnant of what might be called the “Tutsi aristoc-racy”-the living embodiment of the phantom enemy that the hate radio was preaching against-as well as a good contingent of moderate Hutus who did not agree with the genocide. The hotel was becoming a holy grail of the killers, a giant resting place of cockroaches they were eager to wipe out for good. I was convinced we would be invaded by the militia any day. I knew also that that would mark the day of my death. We were all condemned prisoners, but we did not know the date of our execution, and we woke up every morning wondering if we were in our last few hours of consciousness.

  In the early morning of April 23 I went to bed at around 4:00 A. M. I had spent several hours on the phone in the office, getting nowhere, as usual. I quietly unlocked the door of the suite so as not to wake up the other occupants, and fell into the spot that Tatiana had saved for me on the bed. I knew nothing but blackness for two hours and then I felt my wife pushing me. “There is someone on the phone that wants you, ” she said. You could still make phone calls at that point, and it was the reception desk asking for me.

  A man whom I’ll call Lieutenant Mageza came on the line. I knew him, but his voice sounded like cold marble. “Are you the manager?” he asked.

  I was still fighting my way out of a deep sleep and my answer was thick.

  “Yes. What is it?”

  “I have an order from the Ministry of Defense for you to evacuate the hotel within thirty minutes, ” he said.

  That woke me up.

  “You want me to evacuate the hotel?”

  “If you do not I will do it for you.”

  “What do you want me to tell the guests? Where are they going to go? Who is taking them? What security has been organized?”

  The lieutenant was having none of it. “Do you not understand what I am saying? This hotel must be evacuated within thirty minutes. Tell the people here to ‘go as they came.’” He used an expression in Kinyarwanda that means, in effect, if they came by car, they will leave by car. If they came on foot, they will leave by foot. The vehicles that had brought most of the guests were long gone, of course, and so most would have to simply walk away. This spelled certain death for nearly everybody in the hotel. But I didn’t get the impression that the lieutenant was concerned.

  I made an instant guess while I sat there in my underwear. If I was wrong, more than a thousand people would die. But I couldn’t dwell on it; I had to take action. And my suspicion was that this lieutenant had not been ordered to do the killing himself. The idea was to shoo us out and let the street militia do the actual murdering. It would be less systematic, and many would surely get away, but it would eliminate the government’s long-standing problem of the Mille Collines.

  I decided then to-
as the American phrase goes-kiss his ass.

  “Yes, I understand what you are saying right now. I appreciate you informing me of the situation. I will comply with what you say. But can I please just have half an hour to get myself awake and get showered before I do what you want? Then I will begin the evacuation.”

  “Thirty minutes, ” he said, and hung up.

  I did not wash. I did not even put my pants on. I ran five flights up to the roof and looked down at the street. What I saw opened a hole in my stomach. The militia had the place completely surrounded. There were hundreds of them holding spears, machetes, and rifles. It would be a killing zone here in an hour.

  I raced down the stairs and back into my room, where I quickly calculated global time. It was early to be calling Europe, but far too late to be calling the United States, which had been worthless anyway. There was only one thing I could think to do: Get on the phone with somebody in the Rwandan Army who outranked the lieutenant and could order him to rescind his evacuation order. I pulled out the black binder and started calling all my generals. Though it was early in the morning I was able to reach several, and I described the threat with what I hoped was the right amount of urgency. Those that I reached knew that the Mille Collines was being set up and were not willing to say who had given the order. I was still phoning for help when a knock came at the door from a reception clerk. Somebody wanted to see me out front, he said. I started to dress, thinking it was probably the last time I would ever put on a pair of pants or button a shirt. Why hadn’t I taken more pleasure out of these mundane tasks of everyday life?

  I went down to the reception area to meet Lieutenant Mageza. I was surprised instead to see a very short man wearing the insignia of a colonel on his shoulder and assorted colorful medals on his chest. I recognized him as a high-ranking police officer named Ntiwiragabo.

  “What is the situation here?” he asked.