An Ordinary Man

by Paul Rusesabagina

  The UN official who directed General Dallaire to take this deferential action was the chief of peacekeeping, Kofi Annan, who would one day serve as secretary-general.

  Jean-Pierre’s warnings were effectively brushed off. Nobody from the UN ever heard from him again.

  So it did not stop.

  The guards opened the gate for me at my house, and I walked through my front door to the sound of a ringing telephone. It was Bik Cornelis, the general manager of the Hotel Mille Collines-my counterpart at Sabena’s other luxury hotel. He was a colleague and a friend, and not one to waste time when something was pressing.

  “Paul, ” he said, “your president and the president of Burundi have been murdered.”

  “What?”

  “Their plane was shot down with a rocket just a few minutes ago and they are both dead.”

  My wife and I stared at one another from across the living room while I tried to digest the meaning of these words. The only clear thought I could manage was that Tatiana must have heard the sounds of a plane exploding. I had no idea what that must have sounded like.

  “All right, ” I said to Bik. “What does this mean?”

  “I don’t know, ” he said. “We don’t know what is going to happen. But I think you’d better go back to the Diplomates. We don’t know what will follow this.”

  “All right, ” I said. “But I don’t think I should go alone. I’m going to call for a UN escort.”

  “Whatever you think is best, ” he said. “I will be in touch.”

  We hung up and I told my wife the news while I dug in my pants pocket for a phone number. Tatiana looked as if she might faint. There was no need for us to discuss the gravity of the situation. We both knew Rwanda ’s history. Murders at the top are usually followed by slaughters of everyday people. And since I was such a political moderate and she was a Tutsi we were both in trouble. How much time would we have before there was a knock at the door?

  I picked up the phone.

  The leaders of the UN troops had always been cordial to me on their frequent visits to the hotel, and they often said things like, “If there’s anything you need, please call the compound and we’ll see what we can do for you.”This seemed like a good time to play that card. I was put on the line with the commander of the Bangladeshi troops that made up the largest contingent of the United Nations’ mission in Rwanda. I had heard rumors about their poor training and lack of equipment, but they were wearing the uniform of the UN, which carried a kind of magical protection for them. Unlike nearly everybody else, they could pass roadblocks without harassment by the militia.

  “I need a military escort to the Diplomates Hotel, ” I told him. “Can you help me?”

  His voice sounded very far away, as if he was speaking from down a long hallway.

  “People have already started killing other people, ” the major told me. “They are stopping people at roadblocks and asking them for identification. Tutsis and those in the opposition are being killed with knives. It is very dangerous to go outside. I don’t think I can help you.”

  “Well, what am I supposed to do if they come here looking for me?” I asked.

  “Does your house have two doors?”

  “Pardon me?”

  “Does your house have more than one way to get inside?”

  “Yes, of course. There is a front door and a backdoor. Why?”

  “It is very simple. If the killers come looking for you through the front door, just leave through the backdoor.”

  I thanked him for this advice and hung up.

  It seemed that this was going to be all the help we would get from the United Nations tonight. I resigned myself to staying at home that night and hoping that nobody would come through either door.

  My next phone call was to my friend John Bosco Karangwa, who was someone I could always count on for a good laugh. I knew he would be at home alone-his wife was in Europe for medical treatment. John and I had been in the moderate political party together-the Democratic Republican Movement, or MDR-and we shared a mutual dislike for Habyarimana. John hated him with a special passion. To tease John Bosco I sometimes referred to the president as his “uncle.” Even though I knew Habyarimana was a criminal, he had been ruling Rwanda for more than twenty years, and it seemed surreal that he was gone.

  “Your uncle has been killed, ” I told John Bosco.

  “What?” he said. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. They shot down his plane about an hour ago.”

  “Let me confirm this before I start celebrating, ” he said.

  We shared a little laugh, and then I got serious with him. I hated thinking about my friends according to their ethnicities or loyalties, but now was no time for reflection. A crude equation was now in effect. John Bosco was in the political opposition party and the assassination could spell only very bad things for him.

  “Bosco, you could be killed tonight, ” I told him. “I want you to stay inside, keep your lights off, and let nobody inside your door.”

  I am happy to tell you that I received John several days later as a refugee inside my hotel. He had been in hiding in his house as he had promised. A friend had delivered his younger brother’s three children into his care because the brother and his wife had been murdered. When I finally saw John Bosco, he hadn’t spoken above a whisper for days. We made no more jokes about the death of the president.

  Pieces of the story started filtering in from the radio that night. President Habyarimana had been flying back from Tanzania, where he had been negotiating how to implement some provisions of the Arusha peace agreement. On the plane with him was the new president of Burundi, Cyprien Ntaryamira; the chief of staff of the Rwandan Army, Déogratias Nsabimana; and nine other staff members and crew. At approximately 8:30 in the evening, as the plane was approaching the airport, two shoulder-launched missiles were fired from near a grove of banana trees in the Masaka neighborhood. One of them struck the fuselage of the president’s Mystere-Falcon 50 jet, which had been a treasured gift from French president François Mitterrand. The fuel tank exploded and the fragments of the plane rained down over the Masaka commune. Some of it landed on the lawn of the presidential palace. There were no survivors.

  It remains a mystery to this day who fired these missiles. One credible theory is that the rebel army had learned of the president’s flight plan and decided to take down the plane as a military tactic. We may never know for sure. But whoever did it must have known that the immediate effect on Rwanda would be catastrophic.

  With the death of its president the nation of Rwanda was officially decapitated. Members of the akazu gathered around a conference table at Army headquarters and allowed Colonel Théoneste Bagosora-the father of the Interahamwe-to effectively take charge of the country. Romeo Dallaire was at this meeting and he urged the new crisis committee to allow the moderate prime minister, Agathe Uwilingiyimana, to take power, as she should have. They refused, calling her a traitor. But she was a problem they would not have to suffer for long.

  Later that night Agathe called the UN detachment and asked for more security. She wanted to go to Radio Rwanda in the morning to tell the nation not to panic, that a civilian government was still in charge. How little she understood. Rwandan Army soldiers were already surrounding her home in the dark shadows of the jacaranda trees. When fifteen UN soldiers arrived in the hour just before dawn they were welcomed with a burst of gunfire that shredded the tires and wrecked the engines of two of their jeeps. The prime minister, frightened and screaming, climbed over her back wall into the house of a neighbor.

  I was listening to the buildup of this disaster being broadcast live on Radio France International. It was preposterous and macabre and pitiful and terrifying. Agathe’s hiding place in the toilet was discovered and she was led outside in the midst of a cheering mob. There was a brief argument among the Rwandan soldiers over whether she should be taken prisoner or executed on the spot. The squabble ended when a police officer, who had been t
raining to be a judical officer, stepped forward and shot the prime minister in the head at close range. The bullet tore away the left side of her face and she bled to death right there on the terrace in front of her house.

  The UN soldiers, meanwhile, were persuaded to give up their weapons and led to Army headquarters near the heart of downtown, right across the street from the Hotel Diplomates, as it happened. Five of the soldiers were from Ghana and they were allowed to go free. Ten of them had the misfortune of being from Belgium -the colonial master country, the ones who had glorified the Tutsis and made them like kings. RTLM had been passing the sentence for the last few hours: The Belgians were already “suspected” of being the ones who had shot down the president’s plane. This was in conflict with the line that was already becoming like gospel on radio trottoir-that it was the RPF rebels who had sneaked into Kigali with a shoulder missile and hidden in the weeds near the airport, waiting for the wink of Habyarimana’s French jet in the eastern sky. But it was no matter. Logic was out the window. The Belgians and the rebels must have worked together. Of course.

  A crowd of excited Rwandan soldiers set upon the Belgians and began clubbing them, some of them to death. A few of them managed to grab a loaded rifle and take refuge in a small concrete building near the camp entrance. They managed to fend off their attackers for a terrified hour before their holdout was stormed. They were tortured and mutilated horribly, their tendons sliced so they could not walk.

  The secret plan to get the peacekeepers to leave-the one the UN knew about four months in advance-was being carried out according to the letter.

  I tried not to listen to RTLM in those first hours, but it could not be avoided. Given the choice between listening to filth and missing potentially crucial information, I will choose the filth every single time.

  But it was even worse than I could have imagined. The radio was instructing all its listeners to murder their neighbors.

  “Do your work, ” I heard the announcers say. “Clean your neighborhood of brush. Cut the tall trees.”

  I would hear variations on these phrases echoing countless times over the next three months. The “tall trees” was an unmistakable reference to the Tutsis. “Clean your neighborhood of brush” meant that rebel army sympathizers might be hiding among Tutsi families and so the entire family should be “cleaned” to be on the safe side. But somehow the worst phrase of all to me was “Do your work.” It made killing sound like a responsibility. Like it was the normal thing to do.

  Here at last were the bones under the skin. All the anti-Tutsi rhetoric put out on the air over the previous six months had blossomed into what they were now actually saying out loud: Kill your neighbors. Murder your friends. Do not leave the graves half full. Fantasy had become reality. Theft of life was now mandatory. This seemed to be the consensus of the national village, a sickening version of justice on the grass.

  The mass murders were under way in Kigali. The Intera-hamwe militias started setting up some roadblocks, which were often no more than a few bamboo poles set on milk cartons in the road, or sometimes the burned-out hulk of an automobile. Eventually, the roadblocks would be made of human corpses. Every carload of people that came by was subject to a search and a check of those identity papers that listed ethnicity. Those who were found to be Tutsis were dragged to one side and chopped apart with machetes. The Presidential Guard paid visits to the homes of prominent Tutsis, opposition people and wealthy citizens. Doctors were pulled out of their homes and shot in the head. Old women were stabbed in the throat. Schoolchildren were hit on the head with wooden planks and their skulls cracked open on the concrete with the blow of a boot heel. The elderly were thrown down the waste holes of outhouses and buried underneath a cascade of rocks.

  Thousands would die that day, the first citizens of what would become a nation of the murdered.

  I looked out the next morning at a street that had been transformed.

  There was the usual smoky tang of morning mist in the air, the usual dirt street and adobe walls and gray April sky, but it was a scene I could barely recognize. People whom I had known for several years were wearing military uniforms and several were carrying machetes dripping with blood. Quite a few had guns.

  There was one in particular who I will call Marcel, though that is not his real name. He worked in a bank. Marcel had a reputation for a gentle approach in a business that can sometimes be hard-hearted. His specialty was helping uneducated people work their way through complicated financial transactions, and I never once knew him to lose his temper. He seemed to be a gentleman who respected himself. But here he was, wearing a military uniform and apparently ready to kill-if he hadn’t already.

  “Marcel, ” I remember saying, “I didn’t know you were a soldier.”

  I was trying to keep the irony out of my voice, but he gave me a blank look through his banker’s spectacles.

  “The enemy is among us, ” he told me. “The enemy is within us. This is very clear. Many of the people we have been mixing with are traitors.”

  I thought it best to end the conversation there and went back into my house. Marcel watched me go. I could hear gunfire all around us, though not a heavy concentration from one place, as from a military battle. The rounds were cracking all around periodically, almost lazily, in every direction.

  What I did not tell Marcel-what I was not about to tell anybody-was that there were up to thirty-two of the enemy already packed inside my house. These were neighbors who knew they were on the lists of the Interahamwe. There was Muhigi and his family, as well as Michel Mugabo. There were also people like me who had refused, for one reason or another, to buy one of the cheap firearms on the street prior to the eruption of mass murder. Why they thought I might be able to protect them was beyond me, but it was my house they flocked to. We put the visitors up in the living room and the kitchen and tried to stay quiet.

  It occurred to me later: I had seen this before. My father had opened our tiny hillside home to refugees during the Hutu Revolution of 1959. I had been a young boy then, a little older than my son Tresor. My father’s favorite proverb came back to me: “If a man can keep a fierce lion under his roof, why can he not shelter a fellow human being?”

  Earlier on that endless morning we had lost track of our son Roger. In the chaos of getting all our frightened visitors comfortable my wife and I had failed to keep a vigilant eye on the children. At the time, Lys was sixteen, Roger was fifteen, Diane was thirteen, and little Tresor was not even two years old. We had instructed them all quite sternly not to go outside under any circumstances, but in the early morning Roger could not resist a check on the welfare of our neighbors. He had gone over the wall, as he would in normal times, to see his next-door friend, a boy who everybody called Rukujuju, which means “boy who sleeps in the ash.” I suppose it sounds like a mean thing to call a child, but it was one of those nicknames that must be understood as loving teasing. In any case, the boy never seemed to take offense.

  Rukujuju had been hacked apart with a machete. He lay facedown in the backyard in a small pool of his own blood. Nearby lay the bodies of his mother, his six sisters, and two neighbors. Some of them were not yet dead and were moving around slowly. Roger blundered back over the wall and went immediately into his room. He did not speak for the next several days.

  These neighbors had joined others who had been slaughtered around us. The woman who lived in the house behind ours was named Leocadia. She was an elderly widow who used to totter over to my house to gossip with Tatiana. Her son was unmarried, a source of some concern for her. She was a Tutsi, but it didn’t matter to any of us. Not until today.

  I heard the sounds of a commotion at her front door and peered over the wall. There was a band of hyped-up Intera-hamwe there, holding guns and machetes. There was no time to think through my decision. I leaped over the wall and dashed to get help from my neighbor who I knew was a soldier in the Rwandan Army, but not a hardliner.

  “Please, ” I told the soldier
who opened the door to me.

  “They are going to kill this old woman. Come over and save her.” Leocadia was dead, but without any apparent wounds. By the time we arrived with his colleague, it was already too late. She died of a heart attack. I do not want to know what the last thing she saw might have been.

  What was I going to do? It seemed terribly strange to be thinking about work, but my mind kept drifting back to my responsibilities as the general manager of the Hotel Diplomates. It has since been suggested to me that this is one of the ways that people cope with things too horrible to understand-they gladly throw themselves into the little tasks of normal life as a way to distract themselves from the abyss. Perhaps this is what I was doing; I am not sure. But I can tell you that while the corpses of my neighbors stacked up around me I was obsessed with figuring out how to return to the hotel where I felt I belonged. The manager of the nearby Hotel Mille Collines, Bik Cornelis, was a white man and a citizen of the Netherlands who had told me he would almost certainly be evacuated on the first available flight. This would leave not one but two hotels without any leadership during the bloodshed. I had promised the Sabena Corporation that I would do my best to look after both properties when he left. It seemed vital that I live up to my word on this matter. I was apparently useless here at home, anyway.

  In the middle of the day on April 7 I finally succeeded in getting through on the telephone with Michel Houtard, the director of the hotels division of the Sabena Corporation. He was a European gentleman of the old landed-gentry school, courtly and generous. He came on the line and I could hear genuine concern in his voice. We had a conversation in French.