An Ordinary Man

by Paul Rusesabagina

  “Listen, Paul, ” he said. “We are going to attack you today at 4:00 P. M.”

  “Who?” I asked. “How many?”

  “I do not know details.”

  “Are they coming to kill or are they coming to clear it out?”

  “I do not know details. Don’t ask me for a solution. But I am telling you this as a friend: 4:00 P. M.” And with that he turned and left.

  I had only a few hours. I went straight to my office and began calling names in my book, pleading with them to lobby the Interahamwe to call off the raid. If that was impossible, could I at least get some more protection from policemen or the military? It was clear that I would have to invoke some international pressure to stop the raid, and so I started pestering the White House, the Quai d’Orsay, the Belgian government-anybody I could think of.

  One of the calls I made, of course, was to my bosses at Sabena, who shared my panic and pledged to raise hell with the French government. This “French connection” was a key pressure point that already saved us from disaster many times. I was going to press on it once more-hard. Let me explain.

  The Hutu Power government maintained close ties to France throughout the genocide. It was the French who had provided military training and armaments to most of the Rwandan Army and smuggled French guns kept flowing in through neighboring countries even after Habyarimana’s plane was shot down. Even the Interahamwe knew who their friends were. They were under strict instructions not to harm or harass any French nationals who came through their roadblocks. Belgians, meanwhile, were supposed to be murdered on sight. It was the height of idiocy to think that a lost tourist necessarily supports or even agrees with every tangled fine point of the foreign policies of their home nation, but that was what passed for logic in Rwanda during those times.

  A general panic in the hotel would have been disastrous, so I told only a few refugees of the upcoming deadline. I dialed the world, with the clock ticking down. We had a few weapons in the hands of our policemen. We had some cash. Some drinks. But I didn’t think it would be enough to bribe our way out of a wholesale raid. When four o’clock arrived I stood near the entrance and waited. And nothing happened. No mobs were gathered behind the bamboo fence. Perhaps the leadership was late in arriving. Or perhaps the lieutenant’s information was off by an hour. Five o’clock ticked by. And then six. The sun went down and there was nothing but quiet. I did not relax. It seemed that one of my telephone pleas had gotten through-I could not be sure which one-but it may have only purchased a temporary stay.

  At about 10:00 P. M., a rocket-propelled grenade smashed into the south wall just above the second floor. It tore a hole in a staircase wall and blew out the glass in Rooms 102, 104, and 106, but nobody was injured. I braced for an invasion, but that single shot was all that came. I immediately got on the secret phone with General Dallaire and told him we were being attacked. But no further rounds were fired. Dallaire showed up about half an hour later with a squad of subordinates and looked at the damage. They were joined by a Congolese soldier who had earned my lasting disrespect after I saw him try to buy a four-wheel-drive car from a refugee.

  I can still see this group milling about the swimming pool deck, trying to decide where the missile had come from. One pointed to the headquarters of the gendarmerie down the valley. Another pointed off toward the RPF lines. They argued and gestured, apparently unable to make up their minds.

  About half an hour later they left with a shrug. Would there be more rockets fired at us? There was no way to tell. There wasn’t anything I could do to prevent it from happening; all I could do was try to keep my cool when and if it happened. Nearly delirious with fatigue after what had been one of the longest days of my life, I crawled into bed beside my wounded wife and fell into a dark unconsciousness.

  To my huge surprise things became quiet for a few weeks after that. Once again my premonitions of my death were mistaken. We still saw the killers moving on the sidewalks behind the bamboo, but there were no invasions and no random violence. No more missiles were fired. We counted down the days until May 26, when the United Nations, the Army and the rebels wanted to make a second try at an evacuation. This time they would send us not to the airport but to a hill behind the rebel lines.

  My friends made several attempts to convince me to sign up for it. No way, I said. There were hundreds of refugees who would not be evacuated and they still needed my protection, for the same reasons I had cited when I refused to go along with the first evacuation. And this time I would not allow Tatiana and the kids to go either. I did not trust the UN. My wife was now able to sit up in bed, and even walk around a bit, but she was shaken and frail and frightened of every bump in the hallway. I also felt that even if they got out safely it would be a sign to the Interahamwe that I trusted the rebels to take better care of my wife and children. That would be pushing things far too far. I had been skating on paper-thin ice for so long, but even my oldest friends in the highest ranks of the Army would not be able to stomach that sign of treachery. They would not be there to help when the militias came in. Their continuing friendship was my one lifeline, even though it was as thin as a sewing thread.

  “But these thugs know you are the one who has been protecting everybody, ” said Odette. “They will surely kill you.”

  “I would never be able to face myself again if anybody dies, ” I told her. “And if my wife and my children go with you they will see that I have taken a side. They will not hesitate to come kill me.”

  The night before the evacuation four families gathered in Room 126. We were all old friends. In the room were: Odette and Jean-Baptiste and their four children; John Bosco Karangura and his three children; journalist Edward Mutsinzi and his wife and child; and Tatiana and me and our four children.

  We were going to do a pacte de sang-a blood oath. It is one of the most powerful bonds you can form with someone in Rwanda. It is the same igihango game I played as a boy, except the stakes are higher and the friendship is not a secret one. You are supposed to cut yourself in the stomach along with your friend and drink the other person’s blood from your hands. Few people took that physical step anymore, not since the advent of AIDS, but you could still make a verbal pledge. Other than the promise you made to marry somebody, it was the most solemn vow you could make.

  “Listen to me, ” said Jean-Baptiste. “Listen to me all the children here. Look around. You see all the adults in here. We have decided from here onward to become brothers and sisters. If your parents should be killed, then the adults in the room tonight, then they become your parents. Get away from danger and find them if you can. Everyone in here has promised to raise the orphans as their own children. And if all the adults should be killed, then the oldest child will take care of everyone.”

  We did not cut our bellies and mix our blood, but we all sipped from a glass of red wine as a symbol of the promise we had made. We all stood up, many of us crying, and shook hands. There were bitter tears in the room that night, but also love. We had been through a sea of fire and we clung to one another, not knowing if we would ever see one another again or even be breathing after the next twelve hours. I am a hotel manager and I don’t usually think in terms of such finalities, so I can only say that when death is all around and life is draining away by the second, that is when humanity can be so sweet and so fine.

  The evacuation started much like the first, with stony good-byes that did not match the emotion of the previous night. I watched my friends pull away and went back inside. This convoy was much better organized than the first, and the militias had been ordered to keep their distance. Several hundred were moved out that day, leaving the Mille Collines still jammed with people, but feeling oddly empty.

  “Most of the traitors have gone to join the cockroaches, ” said the radio. But the threat never stopped. On June 17, early in the morning, the killings flared up at the Sainte Famille Church, which was barely half a kilometer away from us, just down the hill. It is one of Kigali ’s premi
er Catholic churches, and was a major site of refuge. There were at the entrance to the hotel dozens of people snatched inside its redbrick walls. The RPF had staged a daring rescue one night, leaving those left behind vulnerable to attack. From the roof I could see the crowds of militias circling like insects around a light. I was afraid the violence would inevitably spill over on the hotel. After two and a half months of nonstop slaughter this was the one place in Kigali where nobody had died. It was, for that reason, a kind of trophy.

  During this particular crisis I finally blew my cool. It happened when I was talking in the lobby with the mayor of Kigali, a man I had known for years. He was also a colonel in the Army and someone in a position to help us.

  “The militia are killing people at Sainte Famille Church, ” I told him. “Surely they will also kill refugees here. I want soldiers with a lot of strength here to protect us.”

  “Paul, I tell you I cannot spare any more police to help you. It is not possible.”

  “Do you not understand the situation here? This is what has just happened. You can see it all from my roof if you want. The militia has attacked innocent civilians. It will happen again.”

  “There is nothing I can do.”

  “Listen, my friend” I said, feeling my anger welling up inside. Anybody who knows me will tell you that when I start to call a person “my friend” it usually means I am feeling the opposite.

  “Listen to me now, ” I repeated. “One day all this will be over, and on that day you and I will have to face history. What will they say about us? Are you willing to say that you denied protection when it mattered and that innocent people died because of it? Are you sure this is the answer you want to give history?”

  I don’t know what made me choose those particular words. As a failed pastor I suppose I should have invoked God, as in, Listen, my friend, when we die we will have to give an account to heaven. But somehow it seemed more appropriate to remind him of history’s indelible record.

  I have told you that Rwandans have a special ear for their own history; we take it seriously in a way that few other nations do. It is what caused us to pick up arms against ourselves and kill each other. Perhaps this registered with my friend the mayor. In any case, he was offended by what I had said. He turned away without another word and stalked out of the Mille Collines. He left me standing alone and frightened. I worried that I had lost a key friend, and my friends were all that were keeping us alive.

  That same day, at noon, I had an appointment to see General Bizimungu, who was at the Diplomates. It was one of the few times I ventured outside the grounds of the Mille Collines since I had arrived there nearly seventy days earlier. The trip was only five minutes long but it wound past the heaps of corpses and bloodstains on the road that seemed like natural parts of the scenery now. I met the general in the lobby and took him immediately down to the wine cellar, where I knew there would be some remaining stocks of Bordeaux and Côtes du Rhône or something else I could give him. It was now my habit. If I survived the genocide, I thought ruefully, it would be a long time before I could interact with anyone in a position of power without feeling the urge to stockpile a favor with him.

  We talked about the war and he repeated the mournful prediction that he had made in my hotel room. The government was losing. They could hold the lines temporarily, but their supplies were running low. The rebels had too much momentum and superior military. They would be flooding into Kigali before long and would perhaps put all the leadership on trial for war crimes. But in the midst of all the murder and insanity, the government of Rwanda had continued to do business as if everything was functioning normally.

  It occurred to me that this wine cellar had also been the scene of a strange conversation I had had with General Augustin Ndindiliyimana of the National Police force several weeks earlier. He was the one who had dismantled the roadblock for me on April 12, and a man whose continued friendship was helping keep us alive. I had come down here with him to look for a drink and he took the opportunity to tell me something absurd. He had just been appointed our nation’s ambassador to Germany.

  “Are you going to go?” I asked him.

  “If the RPF agrees, ” he said. This surprised me. He was speaking about the rebel army as if it was already the government of Rwanda.

  Bizimungu shared this dim view of his own fortunes, and as we talked amid the dusty bottles of wine, I wondered how much longer he was going to be able to hang on.

  Our surreal conversation was interrupted by the arrival of one of the general’s staff who came with an urgent message: “The militia has entered the Mille Collines.”

  So this was it. My worst nightmare was coming true and I wasn’t even there to see it happen. My children. My wife. My friends. All those people.

  “General, let’s go back to the Mille Collines, ” and he did not hesitate to come with me. It seemed that he was just as eager to be there as I was. On that drive through downtown Kigali it came to me quite calmly that this was almost surely the end of my life, the last day I would ever exist. I regarded this probability without a great deal of interest. I had contemplated my own death so many times in the last two and a half months that it had lost whatever power it had once had to upset me. All I wanted to do anymore was the work in front of me; I had lost the desire for everything else. At some point in that strange twilight of the genocide I had taken leave of myself as a sentient person. My only existence anymore was in my actions. And when those actions were halted it would be no more remarkable than the mindless tug of gravity terminating the roll of a child’s rubber ball. Death no longer frightened me.

  But I still thought I might be of some use.

  When we passed the roadblock near the front of the hotel I saw that nearly every one of the killers was gone-a very bad sign. The driver sped us to the front entrance. I heard General Bizimungu deliver an order to the sergeant with us. I’ll never forget what he said:

  “You go up there and tell those boys that if one person kills anyone I will kill them! If anybody beats anyone I will kill them! If they do not leave in five minutes I will kill all of them!”

  I ran inside the hotel, feeling as though I were underwater, and discovered the reception desk unmanned. But I heard shouting and crashing upstairs. One of the Interahamwe was in the corridor. He was dressed in ragged clothes and holding onto a rifle. He stared at me. I was wearing a plain white T-shirt and black pants.

  “Where is the manager?” he demanded of me.

  “I think he went that way, ” I said, pointing down a corridor. And then I strode off in the opposite direction. I could always give that Rwandan no with the best of them.

  Once I was out of his sight I slipped upstairs. The militia had broken down several room doors, to make sure they had discovered everyone. The door to 126 had also been smashed open. So they had found my family.

  I went inside the room, wondering if I would see their corpses. But the room was untouched. There did not appear to be any signs of a struggle. I went inside the bathroom and something motivated me to peek behind the shower curtain. There they all were, clustered in the arms of my wife, staring back at me.

  Relief flooded over me, but I had to see what was happening to the others. I told them to stay put without making a peep, dashed down the stairs, and ran down that spiral staircase near the bar and out to the back lawn, where I saw all my guests on their knees near the swimming pool. This quiet square of water had once been the shadow capital of Rwanda and now it appeared to be the site of an imminent massacre. The militia was strutting around, demanding that everybody put their hands in the air. One of the men waved his machete in the air. I saw one of my receptionists among the militia-I had always suspected him of being a spy.

  They had herded everyone to the swimming pool. By that point I thought it was generally understood that everyone inside the Mille Collines was a refugee from the militia and thus had reason to be killed. Why the need for formalities? Why not just start the killing machine? Th
e only thing I could imagine was that they were aiming to shove the dead bodies into the swimming pool to foul the water for any refugee who might have escaped their notice.

  Whatever the reason, the delay saved us all.

  I saw Bizimungu inside the hotel, chanting his angry command. He emerged onto the pool deck now, enraged, his khaki and camouflage well pressed, his pistol drawn, his face taut with anger. Bizimungu was known as a quiet man, almost timid by military standards, but I had seen him angry a few times before and his temper was volcanic. He roared out his order again: “If one person kills anyone I will kill them! If anybody beats anyone I will kill them! If you do not leave in five minutes I will kill all of you!”

  There was a moment of surprise. The militiamen looked at one another, as if seeking the approval of the group for whatever actions would follow. The lives of hundreds hung in their uncertainty. They could easily have disobeyed him. Bizimungu was a powerful man with powerful allies, but there had been hundreds of mutinies against Army officers during the genocide-thousands of unapproved murders. And this was the Hotel Mille Collines: the citadel of Belgian arrogance, the luxurious island of privilege, the best redoubt of cockroaches anywhere in Rwanda. Didn’t the general see what kind of prize he was giving up?

  I saw surly looks on the faces of several of those boys. Their lust had been rising and now it had been denied. They were primed to kill and this traitor general had put a stop to it. I could tell they now wanted to turn their fury onto him. But they didn’t. They lowered their machetes and began to file out.

  General Augustin Bizimungu now sits in a jail cell. He will probably be there the rest of his life.

  After the genocide he fled to Zaire, and then into faraway Angola. He was captured by local police there and brought before the International Criminal Tribunal that was organized to prosecute war crimes committed during the genocide of 1994. Bizimungu was charged with supervising the arming and training of the militias. As I write this, he has not yet been convicted. He is now held in Arusha, the same city in Tanzania that had hosted the ill-fated peace talks that led to the final outbreak of hostilities between the Rwandan Army and the rebels.