An Ordinary Man

by Paul Rusesabagina

  I have been criticized for my friendship with him during the genocide, but I have never apologized for it. “How could you have stayed close to such a vile man?” I am asked, and my answer is this: I do not excuse whatever he may have done to promote the genocide, but I never heard him agree with any of the bloodshed when he was in my presence. I had to stay close to him because he could help me save lives. I would have stayed close with anyone who could help me do that.

  He is a man who cannot be judged in stark terms. Like almost all men, there are hard places and soft places inside and the final verdict can never be a simple one. There is a saying in Rwanda: “Every man has a secret corner of his mind that nobody will ever know.” And I do not think I know enough about Bizimungu’s secret corner to judge him. He may well have done terrible things in Rwanda before and during the genocide, but I know that he stepped in for me at crucial moments to save the lives of innocent people when it was of no conceivable benefit to him.

  If I had ended that friendship, I do not think I would be here to write these words today. There are also at least 1, 268 people who survived the killing partly because of the instructions of Bizimungu. In my book that counts for something.

  The aborted slaughter at the Mille Collines was what it took to convince all parties that the hotel must be cleared out without further dithering. The United Nations, the rebels, and the Rwandan Army conferred and decided to do it that very day. They assigned us those five Tunisian soldiers to guard the parking lot for the last night. It made me furious that they were given to us long after we needed them, but there was no point in making a scene. On that afternoon I busied myself with making sure everybody was out of their rooms safely. There was a line of jeeps and trucks outside, the third such time that an evacuation convoy had been assembled there, but I had a feeling this would truly be the last one.

  I made a last check of the hotel where I had spent seventy-six of the longest days of my life. Though I had been convinced I would die inside of it I felt affection for the place. When I was a young man it was where I had found my true occupation. I had met some of the most generous people in my life within its walls. Sabena gave me a job when I needed one and taught me things I never would have learned otherwise. They showed me how to respect myself by respecting others. When the killing started the hotel had saved people. It had projected the image of an ultimately sane world that kept the murderers at bay. I am not a particularly sentimental man, but I felt the odd urge to stroke it like a pet dog.

  I made sure that the hotel was empty of everybody who wanted to go. Some employees had asked to stay, and I let them. I couldn’t tell how many had been spies for the militia all along. By that point I was beyond caring. It was time to leave. When the UN convoy pulled away I was in the backseat of the last jeep. I hid under a plastic tarp for fear that the militias would recognize me and shoot at me as we drove by the roadblocks. The Mille Collines had been one of the very few places in Kigali where nobody was killed.

  TEN

  IN THE TIME BEFORE THE GENOCIDE it had been fashionable for the elite to buy country estates near a region named Kabuga just outside the capital. The area is attractive, with low hills and unusually large plantations full of grazing livestock. Almost everyone in Rwanda, no matter how long they have lived in a city, keeps close connections with the soil, and even a lifelong office worker probably has a few goats to call his own in a village somewhere outside the capital. The biggest gentlemen-farmer flocks, however, were at Kabuga. It was the best weekend address in the nation.

  We were hustled there by the Rwandan Patriotic Front, which had turned it into a kind of refugee holding area. But it was no camp in the conventional sense. It was a looting zone.

  Soldiers from the rebel army had stolen food from all the shops. Potatoes had been dug out of the fields. Goats had been captured and slaughtered. This made me furious. It was the same kind of impunity we had seen in 1959 during the Hutu Revolution, only this time it was yesterday’s victims who were helping themselves to the spoils. War is hell, and ugly things happen in its midst-I know this. But they always create permanent resentments that have a way of erupting later in history. The casual disrespect for other people and their property was what helped create the genocide we had just lived through. I was afraid I was watching the conception of another. It made me feel as though Rwandans had learned nothing at all.

  It therefore does not make me proud to tell you this: I, too, was among those who had to forage for food. I can only say that it was a choice between that or going hungry. My family and I also slept in the house of an unknown family who had fled the advancing rebel army. I can only hope these strangers would forgive us today. I never knew who they were, but it made me terribly uncomfortable to be using their property.

  There was a surprise in the camp. We spotted the children of my wife’s brother-the man who I had been dining with on the terrace of the Diplomates on the night Habyarimana’s plane had been shot down. Anaise was two and a half and Izere was barely a year old. They were being taken care of by our housemaid, who had managed to struggle into the camp. Both of the children were covered in dirt and appeared to be starving and barely alive. They had been living for months on ground-up chicken feed. Where were their parents? Tatiana was frantic to know. But the maid could only hold up her hands. The parents had both disappeared shortly after the genocide broke out. I remember shaking hands with my brother-in-law and his wife the night of the president’s assassination, a time that seemed to be as far away as my own childhood. He was bidding me good-bye and urged me to be safe before I went into my house that night. I now wondered if I had shaken his hand for the last time.

  There were stories like that all over the camp: unexpected reunions and revelations of awful news from the past two and a half months. Nights were the hardest for us. Weeping filled the air. I found it hard to find even the mindless release of sleep. Wives came to understand that they would never see their missing husbands again. Parents had to force themselves to stop imagining how their irreplaceable children had died at the hands of strangers. And that emptiness in their lives would go on and on. It took a tremendous force of will to keep your own heart together in this unending grief.

  The rebel soldiers were hardly welcoming. They treated us like prisoners of war. Some of the stronger men among us were offered the chance to take a few days of military training to fight against the Rwandan Army. The offer was a little tempting, but I refused. “I always fight with words, ” I told them. “Not with guns.” Many of the refugees who chose to join up never came back; they were killed in combat, or killed by their supposed protectors in the rebel army. They were invited for meetings and that was their last night on earth.

  What I really wanted was to get the hell out of Rwanda. I had had enough. We were away from the militias but still in danger to be killed anytime by the rebels. We were also filthy and exhausted and needing a break. I told my new hosts that I and my family wanted either to be driven to the Ugandan border or flown to Belgium. What I got in reply was a wishy-washy response, that classic Rwandan no of which I was thoroughly sick: “We will look into it for you, Mr. Manager.” Nothing happened, of course. Day followed day. All we could do was eat more purloined bananas and wait for the war to be over, or to be killed ourselves.

  Meanwhile, one of the largest mass migrations of people in African history was under way.

  The government of France had been in continual and friendly contact with its allies at the top of the Hutu government and was growing increasingly alarmed at the likelihood of their neocolony falling to English-speaking rebels. In mid-June, just as my hotel was being evacuated, the French announced plans to send a peacekeeping mission to the western part of Rwanda for “humanitarian” reasons. This gave the génocidaires the chance to look like victims instead of aggressors, and they started to pack up and leave for the protected area that became known as “the Turquoise Zone.”

  RTLM radio then performed its final disservice to the nat
ion by scaring the living daylights out of the people remaining in Rwanda, a considerable number of whom had just spent two months murdering their neighbors and chasing the less compliant ones through swamps. The radio told them that the RPF would kill any Hutus they found in their path and encouraged all its listeners to pack up their belongings and head either to Tanzania or the western part of the country and the borders of the Democratic Republic of Congo (what used to be called Zaire), where the French soldiers awaited. Nearly 1.7 million people heeded the call. Entire hills and cities mobilized into caravans: men carrying sacks of bananas, some with bloody machetes in their belt loops; women with baskets of grain on their heads; children hugging photo albums to their chests. They wound their way past corpses piled at the side of the road and the smoldering cooking fires in front of looted houses. I am sorry to say that the dire predictions of the radio were not rooted in fantasy, as the rebels did conduct crimes against humanity in revenge for the genocide and to make people fear them. In any case, what was left of Rwanda emptied out within days.

  The U. N. Security Council, so ineffective in the face of the genocide, lent its sponsorship to the camps the French set up to protect the “refugees.” The main place of comfort to the killers was at a town called Goma, just over the border into the Democratic Republic of Congo. It is in a bleak area at the foot of a chain of volcanoes and the town is set in a plain of hardened black lava. Into this hellish landscape, the French airlifted twenty-five hundred well-equipped paratroopers, Foreign Legionnaires, helicopters, fighter jets, tents, water supplies, food, jeeps-everything, in short, that the pathetic UN force could have used when the murders were at their height in April. Now all of these assets were being used to feed and shelter some of the very people who carried out the slaughter.

  Many of the French troops sent to support the effort were apparently there in the belief that they would eventually be used to attack the rebel army, which was closing in on Kigali. Meanwhile, the Interahamwe began organizing the refugees into squadrons in the camps, preparing them for an imminent return to Rwanda to keep filling the graves. Radio RTLM set up relay transmitters in the camp so their broadcasts could continue to be heard among the faithful. It was difficult to tell the innocent from the guilty, but comfort was provided to everyone.

  In a surprise for all of us the United States finally was persuaded to act. When cholera and other diseases broke out the Clinton administration announced it would seek $320 million in aid for the camps at Goma and the killers and announced a public health initiative to clean up the water-bloated corpses that had floated over into Uganda. This US aid package totaled more than sixteen times what it would have taken to electronically jam the hate radio, which would have stopped many of those people from becoming corpses.

  On July 4, with much of the civilian population in flight, the RPF captured the capital of Kigali after a brief battle. They had conquered a ruined city and caused further destruction. Houses were knocked over. Churches were covered in blood. Hospitals were empty shells, looted of supplies. Land mines and live mortar rounds were lying everywhere. Wrecked vehicles blocked the roads. And the corpses were stuffed everywhere: inside closets, underneath desks, and down water wells, and shoved casually to the edge of the sidewalks. The stench of decaying flesh choked the air. Barely thirty thousand people remained, a tenth of Kigali ’s population before the genocide began.

  Rwanda ’s other major cities toppled swiftly from there and the country was all but conquered. On July 14 the plug was pulled on RTLM for good. Less than a week later the rebel army swore in a new government. It marked the official end of the genocide, but not the end of the killings. The aftermath would be long and dirty.

  I was informed that my request to travel to Belgium had been approved on one condition: that I travel alone, leaving my wife and children behind. “Forget it, ” I told them. “I have changed my mind. I am staying now.”

  The rebel army took us back to the Mille Collines, which was in wretched shape. After I had left some people had taken it upon themselves to start cooking fires on the lobby tiles and ash was everywhere. The hallway carpets were covered in a disgusting glaze of grease and human waste. Doors were broken from their hinges. The RPF had looted the remaining supply of drinks and liquor that I had used to keep so many people alive. The kitchen was a disaster. Almost everything of value had been stolen or damaged beyond repair.

  I cleared the squatters out, rallied what staff I could find, and got to work. We obtained some cleaning solution and carpentry equipment to make the place semipresentable again. My colleague Bik Cornelis had arrived back in the country from the Netherlands and was working side by side with me. The hotel had to start functioning again. Rwanda was about to be besieged with journalists, humanitarian workers, peacekeeping soldiers, and more than 150 nongovernmental organizations. All those people who had abandoned us during the slaughter were coming back and they needed a place to stay. The irony was too bitter to think of for long. There were many things it didn’t pay to think of for very long. And truthfully, it felt good just to have this housekeeping task in front of me, and I lost myself in a million details. I am a hotel manager and this was where I belonged.

  We reopened on July 15, having been closed a little less than a month.

  My family settled in the manager’s house at the Hotel Diplomates, where some of our friends had hidden under the noses of the génocidaires. It was where we felt the safest. We did not dare to go back to our family house in Kabeza, and I had no particular desire to see those neighbors of mine who had transformed themselves into lunatics during those first days in April.

  My wife and I had been continually worried about our families in the south and I was able to take a day off from the hotel to go check on them. My friend John Bosco hot-wired an abandoned car, as was the custom in those days immediately after the genocide. When the road opened up into the lush hills that I loved, we found ourselves in a twilight country we did not recognize. The silence was near complete. Everybody was either dead or exiled. The only thing I heard was dogs barking and snarling as they fought each other to feast on human remains. Crowds of people normally line the sides of the roads in Rwanda: boys driving herds of goats; women in colorful shifts balancing baskets on their heads; elderly men carrying sticks and wearing donated T-shirts; merchants hawking batteries and leaves of tobacco on blankets spread on the ground. They were nowhere to be seen. The life of the country had been sucked away. It was like a plague from the Dark Ages had descended.

  “I don’t know this place, ” said my wife. “I’m scared.”

  I began to dislike the eucalyptus trees on the side of the highway. They were reminding me of the killers I’d seen from the hotel roof. I found myself scanning the brush on the side of the road for the flash of a machete or a grinning killer. We saw so many dead bodies scattered on the side of the road that we began not to see them anymore. I wanted to make conversation with my wife just to distract myself, but there was nothing to talk about that didn’t lead to a bad place, and so I fell into a reverie. I wondered how many of those dead shells I might have known in the time before, perhaps people who had come into the Mille Collines for drinks, or relatives of friends that I’d met. Perhaps I’d only passed them in the markets without looking. Whoever they were, each one was irreplaceable, as irreplaceable to the people they loved as I was to my wife, or she was to me, or us to our children. Their uniqueness was gone forever, their stories, their experiences, their loves-erased with a few swings of a cheap machete.

  Ah, Rwanda. Why?

  My family and I could easily have been a part of that caravan of the dead. All it would have taken was a slip of my luck, the wrong word to a general, a whim of a militia chief. Even after everything I had seen in the previous three months I felt as though I had been terribly naive. I hadn’t really grasped the true scale of the disaster, how deep it had gone, and how that membrane of protection around our hotel had been so fragile. That it had held up for seventy-six days
was a miracle. With the rest of the country looking like a giant cemetery there was nothing that should have stopped those killers from wiping us out as well. We would have been like a handful of sand on a mile-long beach.

  It did not ease my feeling of general anxiety at all that we were the only car on the road. There were a number of roadblocks, of course. They were manned not by the Interahamwe this time, but by the RPF. The soldiers looked at us curiously. “What are you doing out here?” they wanted to know. “Don’t you know how dangerous it is out here?” They were very suspicious of us. But they let us pass.

  We arrived in my hometown after a few hours. It was as deserted as the roads had been. This was where my friend Aloise had wanted us to take refuge-the place where the mwami had taken his cows for safety during wars of past centuries. But that old myth had been broken in the past few weeks. The genocide had come here, too. More than 150 people connected to the Seventh-day Adventist Church had had the same idea as Aloise. These rural pastors and their families had come here thinking they would be protected at the college at Gitwe where I had attended school. They had all been slaughtered.

  It occurred to me that if I had stayed with my earlier ambition to be a pastor, I might very well have been among them, and then killed in the same classroom where I had learned to make letters.

  Things were no better in the neighboring town where my family had lived. In the commune house several dozen Tutsis had gathered under the protection of the local mayor, who had promised to shield them from the mobs of ordinary people who had taken up machetes against their neighbors. On April 18 an official had been called to a political meeting in the nearby city of Gitarama, and when he came back there was trouble. “I am no longer the person you knew, ” he allegedly said, and then put a handgun to the head of a friend of his, a man he had gone to school with and had known for more than twenty years. He shot his friend and then ordered an attack on the commune house. Those refugees who weren’t killed immediately darted into the swamps and the hills, where they spent the next two months trying to hide from the bands of bar keepers, schoolteachers, and housewives who had been told: “Do your work.”