“Paul, we are hearing very bad reports of violence breaking out all over Kigali. Are you in any danger?”
“Not at the moment, but I am trapped in my house. Some of my neighbors have been killed. The roads are too dangerous to travel and I have not been able to arrange a military escort to the hotel.”
“Can we help in any way?”
“I’m not sure. If I can get to the hotel I will contact you from there and let you know the situation. The radio news has been sketchy. I have to tell you that I am not very well informed about what is going on.”
“Well, I want to let you know that we will be trying to do all we can from here to ensure the safety of you and all the employees.”
It was strange: While we spoke, I could not help but see the city of Brussels, where Tatiana and I had been just the week before. I pictured flocks of pigeons bobbing their heads in parks, gray mansard roofs, statues of dead aristocrats on horseback, chocolates under glass, pastel-painted town houses, bars full of carefree young people drinking Jupiler pilsner. It had been spring there and the trees were just coming into bud. It seemed like another existence altogether.
I really should have been dead. In retrospect it is a miracle that my name was not on the lists of the undesirables that the Presidential Guard were sent out to eliminate in the first two days. I had been an irritant to Habyarimana and a member of the moderate party. I had been the one who hosted that conference at the Diplomates called by the hated RPF. Furthermore, I was married to a Tutsi “cockroach” and had fathered a baby-my son Tresor-of mixed descent. They had every reason to behead me. Somebody had recently scrawled a number in charcoal on the outer wall of my house-it was 531. I could only guess that it was a code, and an easy way for the death squads to find me.
Every time I saw soldiers walking down my street I assumed it would be my door they would come knocking upon. My plan was to keep working the phones and hope that the military or the UN could find time to get me and my family an escort to the Diplomates. But the radio made it sound as if all hell was breaking loose in Kigali and it was not clear when the troubles would ebb.
On the morning of April 9 they finally came for me. Two Army jeeps tore into my front yard and a squad of soldiers piled out. The captain walked up to me and poked a finger in my face. He was sweating heavily and had angry eyes. I saw immediately that this conversation could very well end with him shooting me in the face. I looked at him with the calmest expression I could manage.
“I hear you are the manager of the Hotel Diplomates, ” he told me. “We need you to open up the hotel. We want you to come with us.”
Here was my chance. I told him I would be happy to accompany him to the hotel, if only my family could come. What I didn’t tell him was my extremely liberal interpretation of the word family. This was my excuse to load my neighbors and family into the hotel van and my neighbor’s car. I would call them my “uncles, ” “aunts, ” “nephews, ” and “nieces” if challenged. I gave my own car keys to another neighbor named Ngarambe.
“This car could save your life, ” I told him quietly.
We followed the Army caravan on the road out of Kabeza but went only a mile before the captain waved me to pull over at a spot on the road where dead bodies were piled on both sides. It was the scene of a slaughter.
The captain came over to me with a rifle.
“Do you know that all the managers in this country have already been killed?”
“No, ” I said.
“Even if you do not know, this is how it is. And you, traitor, are lucky we aren’t killing you. We have guns and we’re going to kill all the cockroaches in the hotel bar and in your house. You are going to help us.”
The captain held out the rifle and nodded toward the people huddled in the cars. His message was clear: These people were to be killed right now. And I was chosen to be their killer. It would be my rite of passage.
But I noticed something. He would not look me in the eye.
In that one small turn of the face, I saw that there might be some room for me to maneuver. I saw that I had a small chance to save the lives of my family and neighbors. All I needed to do was find the right words. Everything now depended on my words.
I looked at the Kalashnikov rifle this army captain was offering me-bidding me to wipe out the cockroaches like a good patriotic Hutu-and then I began to talk.
“Listen, my friend, I do not know how to handle a gun, ” I told him. “And even if I did, I do not see what would be accomplished by killing these people.”
Surrounding us on every side were the bodies of people who had been freshly murdered. They had been pushed out of the roadway. A few of the lucky ones had been shot, but most had been hacked apart by machetes. Some were missing their heads. I saw the intestines of one man coming out of his belly like pink snakes. This captain had taken me to this spot on the road on purpose, I thought, and was counting on all the bodies and the blood to send a clear message. You will join these corpses if you don’t follow our orders, he wanted me to understand. But he would not look me in the eye when he asked me to kill and that’s how I understood-somehow-there was a crack in his resolve that I could exploit. I wasn’t yet sure how or why, since he and his men could have clearly killed me on the spot without consequence or remorse.
I went over to one of the cars where my neighbors were huddled. I purposely selected the frailest old man I could find and asked the captain: “Look, is this really the enemy you are fighting?” I pointed out a baby in a mother’s arms, and said it again, trying to push all the panic out of my voice: “Is this baby your enemy? I don’t think this is what you want to do. You are what? Twenty-five years old? You are young. Do you want to spend the rest of your life with blood on your hands?”
When I saw this argument wasn’t going anywhere, I switched tactics. I aimed lower this time. Morality wasn’t working; maybe greed would.
“My friends, ” I said, “you cannot be blamed for this mistake. I understand you perfectly. You are tired. You are hungry. You are thirsty. This war has stressed you.”
I wanted just one thing to leap into his mind: cash. But I wasn’t sure this was going to work either. I had only a few minutes to size him up and wasn’t sure where his ultimate interests lay. Maybe he was more hardline than I had thought. I found myself wishing I could put a cognac in front of him to loosen him up. Everything now came down to how well I was reading this man-if the promise of money would be enough to tempt him away from the murders he had been ordered to commit. I was like a Mephistopheles trying to corrupt him. It was a role I was only too happy to play if he would only spare the lives of the people behind me.
“I have another solution, ” I told him. “I know how to solve this problem. Let us talk otherwise.”
We began to talk in terms of cash. It seems strange to say, but putting a price on lives was like a kind of sanity compared to the murders he had been suggesting. At first the captain demanded that each Tutsi cockroach pay every one of his soldiers 200, 000 Rwandan francs in exchange for their lives. This was roughly the equivalent of $1, 500 American per person-many times more cash than an average Rwandan will ever see in their lifetimes. But this was negotiation. You always start with the crazy price and then work downward.
“My friends, ” I said, “even you do not have this much money. You cannot expect these people to be carrying that kind of sum. But I can get it for you. I am the only person who can do this here. It is in the safe of the hotel and you will never be able to open it without me. Drive me to the hotel and I will pay you the money.”
I hustled the refugees into the manager’s house of the Diplomates. In a way, we were going straight into the dragon’s den-these were the men who were ordering Hutu citizens to pick up kitchen knives and machetes and kill anybody in Rwanda suspected of being a descendant of the Tutsi clans or one of their allies. But I knew I would be safe here. Despite the captain’s bluster, I had sized him up as a basically small man. He would not kill me in t
he presence of his superiors.
I told the captain to stay where he was-I now felt confident enough to command him-and got his money out of the safe. It was the price we had finally agreed on: a million Rwandan francs for everyone. It was the end of the week when we always had a stockpile of liquid cash. It was supposed to have been converted into foreign currency and wired to the corporate office in Belgium. Now it was going into the pockets of killers, but I think it was the best use of that cash anybody could have imagined.
I went and paid off the captain. He drove away with his death squad and I never saw him again.
It was later suggested to me that I could have broken my agreement with this killer, simply refusing to pay the money once I and my neighbors and family were safely inside the Diplomates. But this was inconceivable. He would have remembered me and surely taken revenge, for one thing. And I had given him my word. Even if it was loathsome to reward him for being a potential killer and to measure human lives in cash, I never make promises I cannot keep. It is bad policy. There is a saying in Rwanda: With a lie you can eat once, but never twice.
He left me with something valuable, too. He told me that I was not powerless in the face of the murderous insanity that seemed to have descended over my country in the last seventy-two hours.
With that brief refusal to meet my eyes, he told me that I might be able to negotiate with evil.
I soon discovered the true reason why I had been brought to the Diplomates and not killed. It was solely because of the keys I had been holding. The interim government of Rwanda -a rump committee of the very same men who had organized the militias-had taken over all the rooms as a temporary headquarters of the new government. But they needed the keys. Once I had opened the suites and the bar, my life was expendable. I tried my best to keep myself and my family out of sight and they seemed to forget about me in the chaos, for which I was deeply grateful.
The rebels soon learned what was happening at the Diplo-mates and started firing mortar shells at the hotel, which was all too exposed on the hillside. They had an easy shot from their stronghold near the Parliament building. Bullets started whizzing through the windows and I couldn’t go into my office because it faced the direction of fire. The crisis government hastily started packing supplies and papers into boxes and prepared to decamp to the city of Gitarama, about fifty kilometers southwest. They also looted bedspreads, pillows, television sets, and other items from their rooms, but it seemed best not to complain about this small larceny. There was my own life to think about. I made a show of preparing to evacuate with them and they seemed not to mind-although what they would want with a hotel manager I have no idea.
It did not matter: I had a secret plan in mind. My family and I would pretend to follow the military train, but then split off almost immediately. We would use the cover of the government convoy as a safe way to get to Sabena’s other luxury property, the Hotel Mille Collines. This was a place I knew very well from my time there in the 1980s and there were four hundred refugees who had taken shelter there. Barely a half mile of hillside separated the two properties; I could have walked it in ten minutes during peaceful times. But it would have been inviting death by machete to do it now while the Interahamwe were running about. We would have to leave my neighbors hidden inside the cottage-it was too dangerous to try to move them out now-but I resolved not to forget them. I would simply have to come back later and rescue them by other means. But I wasn’t sure I could even save my family, or myself. I would be leaving the Diplomates, where I was technically still the manager, and going over to the Mille Collines, where I had plenty of friends and a long work history but was technically not the boss. What kind of reception was I going to get over there? I had no idea what would happen.
On the morning of April 12 the government leaders started their trip to the emergency capital and I rolled out with them behind the wheel of a Suzuki jeep. On that brief five-minute trip I kept seeing patches of red on the dirt of the shoulder. Days later I would see trucks that would normally have been used to haul concrete blocks or other construction material. They would be stacked high with dead bodies: women, men, children, many of them with stumps where their arms and legs had been. Somebody with the city sanitation department apparently had the foresight to clean them off the roadways and take them for burial in mass graves all over Kigali.
For now, though, there were only the bloodstains on the side of the road.“Don’t look, ” I said to my children and my wife. But I had to keep my eyes open to drive.
SIX
I PEELED AWAY from the killers and turned the car toward my beloved Hotel Mille Collines.
A squad of militia had set up a roadblock right in front of the entrance. I had come to dread them on sight-young boys, many no older than fourteen, dressed in ragged clothes with red, green, and yellow stripes and carrying spears and machetes and a few battered rifles. These boys had liberated some Primus beer from someplace and were guzzling it down, though it was early in the morning. They were checking the identification papers of everyone attempting to get inside the Mille Collines. But they had not yet entered the hotel itself.
I got out of the car to talk to them. It is always better to be face-to-face with the man you intend to deal with rather than have him standing over you. To be on the same physical plane changes the tone of the conversation.
“I’m the manager of both the Diplomates and the Mille Collines, ” I told them. “I’m coming to see what is going on.”
To my surprise they did not ask me for my identification book. They glanced briefly at my family in the car before waving us through. I thought I saw them smirk to each other. If I had to guess what they were thinking, it would be this: “Oh, why not let six more cockroaches inside? It will make it easier to find them when the time comes.” They looked at me and my wife and children and must have seen corpses.
All over Rwanda people were leaving their homes and running to places where they thought they might be spared.
Churches were favorite hiding places. In the village of Ntarama just south of the capital the mayor told the local population of Tutsis to go inside the rectangular brick Catholic church to wait out the violence instead of trying to hide in the nearby swamps. The church had been a safe refuge during the troubles in 1959 and nobody had forgotten the seemingly magical role that it had played. More than five thousand frightened people crammed inside. But here, as well as everywhere in Rwanda, the sanctuaries of Christ were a cruel trap; they only made easy places for the mobs to herd the fugitives. RTLM radio kept saying the churches were staging bases and weapons depots for the rebel invaders, which was total nonsense, but it provided a motivation-and perhaps some intellectual comfort-for hesitant killers to go inside and start chopping. Like my father said when I was a boy: “Any excuse will serve a tyrant.”
Four busloads of cheerful Army soldiers and militiamen arrived to do the job at Ntarama. A man named Aphrodise Nsengiyumva was at the altar leading prayers and trying to keep everyone cheerful when those outside started breaking holes through the walls with sledgehammers and grenades. Light streamed into the darkened room. It would be among the last things most people in here would ever see. Grenades were tossed in through the holes, blasting some of the refugees into bits, splashing blood and muscle tissue all over the compound. Other militiamen broke down the doors and waded into the crowd with spears, clubs, and machetes. Babies were ripped from their mother’s arms and dashed against the wall. People were cut down as they prayed.
It happened at secular buildings as well, and there, too, death was usually preceded by a betrayal.
A rumor went around in the suburb of Kicukiro, for example, that the UN troops stationed at a technical school would offer protection from the mobs. There were indeed ninety commandos at the school, but they were less than eager to offer any protection. Nonetheless, about two thousand of the hunted took shelter in the classroom buildings behind the very thin layer of safety afforded by the blue helmets and their weapons.
On April 12, the same day my family and I reached the Mille Collines, the order was given for the UN troops to abandon the school and help make sure that foreigners got out of Rwanda safely. The mission had changed. As the country slid further and further into mass murder, the Security Council, Kofi Annan, and the United States decided that the mandate of the UN troops was not to halt the killings but to ensure an orderly evacuation of all non-Rwandans. Everyone else was to be left behind. Anyone with white skin or a foreign passport was given a free trip out. Even their pet dogs were evacuated with them.
The nation of Belgium was more than happy to go along; the grisly torture slayings of the ten soldiers assigned to protect Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana had shocked the public back home. The former colonial masters could no longer stomach the quagmire they had helped create. As it happened, the ninety UN troops at the vocational school were native Belgians. They must have heard the stories of the militia at the roadblocks making sawing motions across their throats with machetes whenever they spotted a Belgian uniform. Most of the Interahamwe, in fact, would be given standing orders to kill any person found carrying a Belgian passport. The militias surrounding the school did not have the firepower to take on the UN soldiers, so they lay on the grass drinking beer and chanting slogans and making threatening gestures. It must have been something of a relief for those Belgian soldiers to move out, knowing they would be killed cheerfully if they ran out of ammunition in a firefight. This was the clearest signal yet that the world was preparing to close its eyes, close its ears, and turn its back on what was happening.
The refugees knew what lay in store. Some begged the departing soldiers to shoot them in the head so they would not have to face slow dismemberment. Others tried to lie down in front of the Belgians’ jeeps so they could not leave. Still others chased after the vehicles screaming, “Do not abandon us!” The soldiers responded by shooing the refugees out of the way and firing warning shots to keep them from mobbing the departing convoy.
An Ordinary Man Page 10