An Ordinary Man

by Paul Rusesabagina

  Everything I suggested came to pass-almost. I did find some red wine from the cellar to spare. I had it loaded into his military jeep. So far as I know, he did go home and enjoy some of it that night. But the compromise never happened. The colonel did not come back and Thomas was not executed.

  I had dozens of conversations like this throughout the genocide, surreal exchanges in which I would find myself sitting across a desk or a cocktail table with a man who might have committed dozens of killings that day. In several cases I saw flecks of blood on their uniforms or work shirts. We would talk as though nothing was out of the ordinary, as if we were negotiating the purchase of new kitchen equipment or discussing an upcoming special event in the ballroom. Human lives almost always hung in the balance during these talks. But they were always lubricated with beer or cognac, and usually ended with my gifting that day’s murderer with a bottle of French champagne or whatever else I could dig out of my dwindling liquor cabinet.

  I have since thought a great deal about how people are able to maintain two attitudes in their minds at once. Take the colonel: He had come fresh from a world of machetes, road gangs, and random death and yet was able to have a civilized conversation with a hotel manager over a glass of beer and let himself be talked out of committing another murder. He had a soft side and a hard side and neither was in absolute control of his actions. It would have been dangerous to assume that he was this way or that way at any given point in the day. It was like those Nazi concentration camp guards who could come home from a day manning the gas chambers and be able to play games with their children, put a Bach record on the turntable, and make love to their wives before getting up to kill more innocents. And this was not the exception-this was the rule. The cousin of brutality is a terrifying normalcy. So I tried never to see these men in terms of black or white. I saw them instead in degrees of soft and hard. It was the soft that I was trying to locate inside them; once I could get my fingers into it, the advantage was mine. If sitting down with abhorrent people and treating them as friends is what it took to get through to that soft place, then I was more than happy to pour the Scotch.

  There is a letter from the American president Abraham Lincoln that helps illustrate what I believed I was doing. Though he is remembered as the man who freed the slaves, his real objective in the civil war was keeping the United States together. And so he wrote to a friend: “If I could preserve the Union and not free any slave, I would do it. If I could preserve the Union by freeing all of the slaves, I would do it. If I could preserve the Union by freeing some slaves, and keeping others in bondage, I would do it.”My only goal was saving the lives of the people upstairs, and questions of my taste in friendship were secondary-if they were relevant at all. If you stay friendly with monsters you can find cracks in their armor to exploit. Shut them out and they can kill you without a second thought. I reminded myself of this over and over.

  Another principle helped me in these conversations, and it is this: Facts are almost irrelevant to most people. We make decisions based on emotion and then justify them later with whatever facts we can scrounge up in our defense.

  When we shop for a car we make sure to investigate the gas mileage, look at the leg room, peer at the engine, and evaluate the cost, but the decision to buy it always comes down to a feeling in the gut. How will I look behind the wheel? Will it be fun to drive? What will my friends think? We congratulate ourselves later for a shrewd acquisition based on reasons a, b, and c, but the actual decision cannot be put in terms of an equation. People are really never as reasonable as they seem to be-in fact, “reason” is usually an afterthought, nothing more than a cover story for the feelings inside.

  The same is true in politics. Let me give you a rather pertinent example. I seriously doubt the leadership of Rwanda really believed that average Tutsis were spies who had melted into the general population. I think they whipped up the flames of fear to create that belief. They were appealing to a dark place in the heart-that unreconstructed part of us that comes down from our ancestors, who lived in constant fear of beasts in the night. There was an emotional reason for people to hate and fear the Tutsi, and that nonsense about traitors in the villages was a set of “facts” grafted into place to justify the violence. And as I have said, the ethnic violence was only a tool for a set of cynical men to hold on to their power-which is perhaps man’s ultimate emotional craving.

  It is a dismal principle. But I could use it to save lives.

  When I took that colonel into my office, poured him some beer, and puffed up his ego it was not about the facts of the matter at all. It was about his insecurity in his position and his need to feel like an important person. I created a web of words in which the choice I did not want to see him make-killing Thomas-was running counter to his emotional needs. I made him believe that such a loutish task was beneath him. And he bought it, even though he probably had the power to snap his fingers and have me and other troublemakers chopped to bits within twenty minutes. It is not that the colonel was a stupid man. Even the best of us can be slaves to our self-regard.

  They kept coming and coming. From houses in Kabeza to besieged churches in Nyamirambo, they heard on the radio trottoir about the safe haven at the Mille Collines.

  One of them was a man named Augustin Hategeka, who had run from his home with his pregnant wife when the killings broke out. They had taken refuge in a patch of forest and ate scavenged food for several days. Augustin had stood guard, watching for killers as she gave birth to their new son in the shade of a bush. Not knowing if he would live, they named him on the spot: Audace, French for “brave.”With the help of some Hutu friends, the family found temporary refuge in St. Paul ’s pastoral center and I sent Army soldiers to fetch them to the Mille Collines. I met them at the entrance and made sure the baby was washed in hot water and covered in clean sheets.

  I had known Augustin before the killings broke out and over the next several days we talked to each other about the things we had witnessed. Our conversation went something like this:

  “My neighbors started killing my neighbors, ” he told me. “I saw people I have known for years taking out machetes and screaming orders. Old people were murdered. Children were murdered. I heard screams.”

  “I know, ” I told him. “The same thing happened in Kabeza.”

  “They chopped innocent people to pieces in the street. They cut the tendons in their legs so they could not run away.”

  “It is disgusting.”

  “I thought I knew these neighbors of mine, ” he told me.

  “I don’t think anybody knows anybody anymore, ” I told him.

  We looked at one another across my desk. I knew what each of us was thinking: Could we even trust each other? I know for my part that I trusted nobody completely anymore. To relax my suspicions could mean death for me and everybody I was trying to protect. I had heard too many horrid stories by that point. Rwanda had gone insane.

  I remember another guest, whom I will here call Jane, who had worked as a nurse alongside my wife. Her story was not out of the ordinary for Rwanda that spring. She had been married to a man named Richard, a stout man with eyeglasses who worked as a civil servant. He was a quiet man, one of those people you don’t really notice in a group. That anyone would have considered those people a threat was ludicrous, Jane was of mixed race and the family had been marked for elimination. They tried to lie low in their house. A squad of Interahamwe broke inside and began to do their work. Jane managed to scramble into the kitchen and hide underneath a few sacks of charcoal. She stayed there while her husband and two children were cut into pieces in the other room. How she managed to remain quiet I will never know. She stayed under the coal for several hours and then crawled out to see the bodies of her family strewn about the front room. She fled from the house and, with the help of a neighbor, found her way to St. Paul ’s Church. We sent a car with policemen to pick her up. Her eyes were completely empty; it seemed the life had been washed out of them forever.
I recognized the look. It was all over the hotel.

  In all of this, I was fortunate to have a handful of soldiers who wore the blue helmet of the United Nations. I have previously expressed my disgust with the UN as a collective body, but those individuals serving in its name were capable of bravery. The men in my hotel displayed courage in going out onto the streets of Kigali to fetch the condemned. They were chauffeurs through hell. One in particular, a captain from Senegal named Mbaye Daigne, became legendary for his ability to dodge the Interahamwe. His companion, Captain Senyo of Ghana, displayed equal bravery at plucking refugees from their houses. It was a task that probably violated the ridiculous mission parameters handed down from New York, but these rules deserved to be broken.

  These soldiers never used the hotel van; that would have been inviting death, because everybody in town knew that we were a haven for refugees. They used instead a white jeep with the UN logo. Rwandan soldiers also helped rescue people. One day they went out to find a prominent politician who had been hiding in a private house. On the way to the hotel they were stopped at a roadblock manned by an especially savage bunch of militia. There were corpses stacked up on either side, the hacked-up remains of people who had produced the wrong kind of identity card. The car got an unusually thorough search and they discovered the refugee hiding in the back.

  “Where are you bringing this cockroach?” they demanded.

  The soldier thought quickly. “We are taking him to the ministry of defense, ” he said. “Now let us pass before the Army starts to wonder where we are.”

  That was good enough for the militia and our refugee made it inside the Mille Collines without further incident. I suppose it was fortunate for us there were no cell phones in Rwanda in 1994, before the widespread use of cell phones. As we have seen, the violence was inherently full of chaos and mistakes. The chain of command was often vague and the orders were sometimes confusing. In such an environment it was therefore possible to make a convincing bluff that you were working for somebody in authority without anyone able to check your story. If there had been cell phones I think many who escaped death would have been killed instead. But that is not to say that the phones would have all worked for evil. I have said before that tools of murder can be turned into tools of life. If we had had cell phones in Rwanda, the Interahamwe would have been more efficient, but we also would have been able to coordinate more rescues right under their noses.

  I used my secret fax phone many times to get a bead on where a given refugee might be hiding. One of them was my friend Odette Nyiramilimo, and her husband, Jean-Baptiste Gasasira, and their children, who I hoped was still in her house. In the first days of the genocide they had traded their family car, their stereo, their television, and other goods to some policemen in exchange for a ride south of Kigali, to where they thought they might be safe. But the policemen reneged, leaving my friends to try and flee through the marshes on their own. They were captured by Interahamwe and led in for interrogation, which they managed to escape. But in the chaos of war somebody made a mistake and put their names on the list of people who had been eliminated. Odette and Jean-Baptiste heard their own names being read on the rebel army’s radio station as among those who had been killed. This took the heat away temporarily and, not knowing where else to go, they went back to their house and stayed out of sight, afraid even to answer the telephone. I rang and rang again. But one day when their food was almost gone, the phone started ringing.

  “Don’t pick it up!” ordered Jean-Baptiste.

  “It’s all the same, ” said Odette. “We are going to die of hunger here anyway.” She answered the phone and it was me on the other end.

  She could not have been more surprised. “We thought you were dead!” she said.

  “I thought you were dead, too, ” I answered. “But don’t go anywhere. I’m going to organize a rescue.”

  “Who are you going to send?”

  “Froduald Karamira.”

  I meant it as a small joke, for he was a businessman who was notorious for his role in the massacres, but Odette missed my humor. “No, he will kill us all!” she said, and I made up a proverb on the spot: “If you want your goods to be safe, give them to a thief.” Though she was in tears, she laughed. It was good to hear.

  I negotiated again with Commander Habyarimana for the services of a Lieutenant named Nzaramba. His uniform and vehicle would give him partial, but not total, protection against the militias, and so it was going to be a risky operation. Not wanting to risk having the whole family in his jeep, Nzaramba made three separate trips. Odette came first with her son Patrick, and they were stopped at a roadblock close to the hotel.

  “Where are you going?” they demanded.

  She pulled out a supply of malaria pills and showed them to her would-be killer.

  “I am coming to take care of the manager’s children inside the Mille Collines, ” she said. “They are sick.”

  It worked. When she came in her eyes were glassy and faraway. I had not seen her since the killing had started.

  “Odette, what may I bring you?” I asked her and could not have been more surprised to hear her say, “A beer.” I had never seen her drink beer before. It went down in three gulps.

  Once she came out of her daze Odette told me that being inside the Mille Collines was like being in a land of the resurrected dead; she was seeing many people who she had heard had been killed.

  The next time Nzaramba went out he came back with Odette’s children in the back of his jeep, and they too were stopped at a roadblock. This one happened to be right in front of the warehouse of an old friend of mine named Georges Rutaganda.

  “Where are you going?” asked the man who leaned in their window. “Where are your parents?”

  “My father is manning a roadblock and my mother is at the hospital, ” said Odette’s son. The killers did not buy the story and withdrew to discuss what should be done. The machetes were just coming out when a car pulled up. Inside was Georges Rutaganda.

  Let me pause here a minute and tell you about this man. We grew up together. He took an investment from his father and made quite a lot of money as the executive distributor of Carlsberg and Tuborg beer in Rwanda. He also went on to become the vice president of the Interahamwe and a man very close to the party of President Juvenal Habyarimana. I tried not to let this get in the way of our friendship. I did tell him several times before the killing started, “Listen, Georges. What you are doing is wrong. You are going down the wrong path.” But he never got angry with me for my opinions. This absence of acrimony was a key element of our relationship. We both knew where the other stood politically. We had to stop visiting each other’s families in the evenings, but our professional dealings continued, as did the presence of good feelings. It was like that German expression I mentioned earlier: Dienst ist dienst und schnapps ist schnapps. We continued to do business together even during the genocide. In fact, he was the main supplier of beer, toilet paper, and other necessities to the Mille Collines. Yet another irony of Rwanda: The man near the heart of the militia movement was making cash on the side by helping the refugees. I used these deal-making sessions to take him into my office and speak to him, as only one friend from the hills can do to another. “Listen, Georges, ” I would tell him, “I would like you to be very careful with my hotel. It would be very bad for me if any of your Interahamwe came inside. Please do me a favor and tell them it is off-limits.”

  Several people have criticized me for staying close to such a bad man, but I have never apologized for it. People are never completely good or completely evil. And in order to fight evil you sometimes have to keep evil people in your orbit. Even the worst among them have their soft side, and if you can find and play with that part of them, you can accomplish a great deal of good. In an era of extremism you can never afford to be an extremist yourself.

  So at the roadblock Georges looked inside the car and saw children he thought he recognized.

  “Aren’t you the
kids of Jean-Baptiste Gasasira?” he asked, and they nodded, frightened, not knowing what else to say. Now it was clear: They were cockroaches. They would be killed without further delay.

  Georges then stepped in. Perhaps he had a soft spot for Odette and Jean-Baptiste, who had gone to the same university as he had in the 1970s. Perhaps he recalled that Jean-Baptiste had been his parents’ personal physician. Perhaps this bankroller of the militias never agreed with the genocide that unfolded from his actions. I cannot say. But he turned to the captain of the roadblock and berated him.

  “Let them go right now, ” he demanded. And one of the top officials of the murderous Interahamwe waved the lieutenant and the jeep and the children on toward the Mille Collines.

  Just as I dealt with some questionable people during the genocide, I also sheltered some questionable guests. Several times in those days I drank cognac with a man named Father Wenceslas Munyegeshaka, who was the priest at the Sainte Famille church just down the hill from my hotel. He had abandoned the black robes of a priest and was wearing jeans and a T-shirt and carrying a pistol in his belt.

  His church had been turned into a refuge for Tutsis, but the militias felt a lot more comfortable going inside it than they did the Mille Collines. Hundreds of people were taken from their refuge inside its redbrick walls and murdered elsewhere. And Father Wenceslas showed no interest in stopping it from happening. I knew that he even had a working telephone in the sacristy and I don’t think he made phone calls to save anybody from execution, even though he also had political contacts.

  One day when he was over having a drink my wife asked him, “Father, why don’t you put on your robes and pick up a Bible instead of wearing a pistol? A man of God should not be wearing a pistol.” For some reason, he directed his answer to me and not Tatiana.

  “Listen, Paul, ” he said. “There have been fifty-nine priests become the sixtieth.”