Thomas, who had well-placed friends, had heard that large-scale massacres of Tutsis were being prepared nationwide by the President’s extremist entourage, and that lists of Hutu oppositionists had been drawn up for the first wave of killings. But he had never imagined that Habyarimana himself might be targeted. If Hutu Power had sacrificed him, who was safe?
The radio normally went off the air at 10 p.m., but that night it stayed on. When the bulletins ceased, music began to play, and to Thomas the music, which continued through his sleepless night, confirmed that the worst had been let loose in Rwanda. Early the next morning, RTLM began blaming Habyarimana’s assassination on the Rwandese Patriotic Front and members of UNAMIR. But if Thomas had believed that, he would have been at the microphone, not at the receiver.
Odette and Jean-Baptiste were also listening to RTLM. They’d been drinking whiskey with a visitor, when a friend called to tell them to tune in. It was 8:14 p.m., Odette recalled, and the radio announced that Habyarimana’s plane had been seen falling in flames over Kigali. Jean-Baptiste’s immediate reaction was “We’re leaving. Everyone get in the jeep, or we’ll all be massacred.” His idea was to head south, to Butare, the only province with a Tutsi governor and a stronghold of anti-Power sentiment. When Jean-Baptiste showed such adamance, their visitor said, “OK, me too. I’m getting out of here. Keep your whiskey.” Odette smiled when she told me this. She said, “This man liked his whiskey. He was handicapped, and he’d come over to show off his new television and video player, because my husband is very generous and he had given this guy money to buy it. Being a handicapped man, he used to say, ‘I’m going to die if I don’t have a TV to watch.’ Unfortunately he never got to watch his TV. He was killed that night.”
Odette wiped at her eyes, and said, “That’s a story I’ve always kept inside—about this handicapped guy—because he was so happy with his TV.” She smiled again. “So,” she said. “So. So. So.” It was the only time she wept in telling me her story. She covered her face with one hand, and the fingers of the other tapped a fast pulse against the table. Then she said, “I’m going to get us some sodas.” She came back five minutes later. “Better now,” she said. “I’m sorry. It was this handicapped guy—Dusabi was his name—that upset me. It’s difficult to call this up, but I think of it every day. Every day.”
Then she told me about the rest of that “first” night in April. Jean-Baptiste was impatient to get going. Odette said they had to take her sister, Vénantie, who was one of the few Tutsi deputies in the parliament. But Vénantie kept them waiting. “She was phoning around, phoning everyone,” Odette said. “Finally Jean-Baptiste told her, ‘We’re going to have to leave you.’ Vénantie said, ‘You can’t. How will you feel forever afterward if I’m killed?’ I said, ‘Why won’t you come?’ She said, ‘If Habyarimana’s dead, who’ll kill us? He was the one.’” Then RTLM announced that everybody had to stay in their homes, which was precisely what Jean-Baptiste had feared. He put on his pajamas, and said, “Whoever survives will regret that we stayed for the rest of his life.”
The next day, the family heard shooting in the streets and began to receive news of massacres. “Children called to say, ‘Mother and Father are dead.’ A cousin called with news like that,” Odette said. “We tried to find out how to get to Gitarama, where it was still calm. People always think I’m crazy when I recount this, but I called the governor. He said, ‘Why do you want to come?’” Odette told him her cousin had died in Gitarama and they had to attend the funeral. The governor said, “If they’re dead they won’t be suffering, and if you try to come you might die on the way.”
“ON APRIL 6,” Paul Rusesabagina, the hotel manager, told me, “I was here at the Diplomates, having a drink on the terrace, when Habyarimana was killed. But my wife and four children were at home—we used to live near the airport—and my wife heard the missile which hit the airplane. She rang and told me, ‘I’ve just heard something I never heard before. Try to get home immediately.’”
A military man who was staying at the hotel saw Paul leaving and advised him to avoid his usual route, because there was already a roadblock set up. Paul still didn’t know what had happened. Driving home, he found the streets deserted, and as soon as he entered his house, the phone rang. It was the Dutchman who managed the Hotel des Mille Collines, which was owned by Sabena, the same Belgian company that ran the Diplomates. “Come back to town immediately,” he told Paul. “Your President’s dead.” Paul rang people he knew at UNAMIR to ask for an escort. “They said, ‘No way. There are roadblocks all over Kigali, and people are being killed on the roads,’” Paul told me. “This was one hour after the President was killed—just one hour.”
Nobody, at that moment, was entirely sure who was in charge of the decapitated government, but the roadblocks, the confident tone of the RTLM announcers, and the reports of killing in the streets left little doubt that Hutu Power was conducting a coup d’état. And it was. Although Habyarimana’s assassins have never been positively identified, suspicion has focused on the extremists in his own entourage—notably the semiretired Colonel Théoneste Bagasora, an intimate of Madame Habyarimana, and a charter member of the akazu and its death squads, who had said in January of 1993 that he was preparing the apocalypse. But regardless of who killed Habyarimana, the fact remains that the organizers of the genocide were primed to exploit his death instantaneously. (While Rwanda’s Hutu Power elite spent the night cranking up the genocidal engines, in Burundi, whose President had also been killed, the army and the United Nations broadcast calls for calm, and this time Burundi did not explode.)
In the early evening of April 6, Colonel Bagasora had taken dinner as the guest of the Bangladeshi battalion of UNAMIR. An hour after the President’s death, he was presiding over a meeting of a self-anointed “crisis committee,” a mostly military gathering at which Hutu Power ratified its own coup and, because General Dallaire and the special representative of the UN Secretary-General were in attendance, paid lip service to continuing the Arusha process. The meeting broke up around midnight. By then the capital was already crawling with soldiers, interahamwe, and members of the elite Presidential Guard, equipped with lists of people to kill. The assassins’ first priority was to eliminate Hutu opposition leaders, including the Hutu Prime Minister, Agathe Uwilingiyimana, whose house was one of many that were surrounded at daybreak on April 7. A contingent of ten Belgian UNAMIR soldiers arrived on the scene, but the Prime Minister fled over her garden wall and was killed nearby. Before the Belgians could leave, a Rwandan officer drove up and ordered them to surrender their arms and to come with him. The Belgians, outnumbered, were taken to Camp Kigali, the military base in the center of town, where they were held for several hours, then tortured, murdered, and mutilated.
After that, the wholesale extermination of Tutsis got underway, and the UN troops offered little resistance to the killers. Foreign governments rushed to shut down their embassies and evacuate their nationals. Rwandans who pleaded for rescue were abandoned, except for a few special cases like Madame Agathe Habyarimana, who was spirited to Paris on a French military transport. The RPF, which had remained prepared for combat throughout the stalled peace-implementation period, resumed its war less than twenty-four hours after Habyarimana’s death, simultaneously moving its troops out of their Kigali barracks to secure an area of high ground around the parliament, and launching a major offensive from the “demilitarized zone” in the northeast. The government army fought back fiercely, allowing the people to get on with their murderous work. “You cockroaches must know you are made of flesh,” a broadcaster gloated over RTLM. “We won’t let you kill. We will kill you.”
With the encouragement of such messages and of leaders at every level of society, the slaughter of Tutsis and the assassination of Hutu oppositionists spread from region to region. Following the militias’ example, Hutus young and old rose to the task. Neighbors hacked neighbors to death in their homes, and colleagues hacked colleagues to death i
n their workplaces. Doctors killed their patients, and schoolteachers killed their pupils. Within days, the Tutsi populations of many villages were all but eliminated, and in Kigali prisoners were released in work gangs to collect the corpses that lined the roadsides. Throughout Rwanda, mass rape and looting accompanied the slaughter. Drunken militia bands, fortified with assorted drugs from ransacked pharmacies, were bused from massacre to massacre. Radio announcers reminded listeners not to take pity on women and children. As an added incentive to the killers, Tutsis’ belongings were parceled out in advance—the radio, the couch, the goat, the opportunity to rape a young girl. A councilwoman in one Kigali neighborhood was reported to have offered fifty Rwandan francs apiece (about thirty cents at the time) for severed Tutsi heads, a practice known as “selling cabbages.”
On the morning of April 9, Paul Rusesabagina, who had been trapped in his house by the twenty-four-hour-a-day curfew, saw someone climbing over the wall into his garden. If these people have come for me, he thought, let me die alone before my children and my wife and all the people here are killed. He went out into his yard, and learned that Colonel Bagasora’s “crisis committee” had just appointed a new “interim government,” composed entirely of loyal Hutu Power puppets. This government wanted to make the Hotel des Diplomates its headquarters, but all the rooms at the hotel were locked and the keys were in a safe in Paul’s office. Twenty soldiers had been sent for him. Paul gathered his family, and the friends and neighbors who had taken refuge at his house, about thirty people in all, and they drove off with their escort. They found themselves in a stricken city—“horrible,” Paul said, “our neighbors were all dead”—and they hadn’t gone a mile when their escort suddenly pulled over and stopped.
“Mister,” one of the soldiers said, “do you know that all the managers of businesses have been killed? We’ve killed them all. But you’re lucky. We’re not killing you today, because they sent us to look for you and get you for the government.” Remembering this speech, Paul laughed, a few hard breathy gasps. “I’m telling you,” he said. “I was sweating. I started negotiating, telling them, ‘Listen, killing won’t gain you anything. There’s no profit from that. If I give you some money, you profit, you go and get what you need. But if you kill someone—this old man, for instance, he’s now sixty years old, he has finished his life in this world—what are you gaining from that?’” Parked on the roadside, Paul negotiated in this vein for at least an hour, and before he was allowed to proceed he had given up more than five hundred dollars.
In 1993, when Sabena had named Paul director-general of the Diplomates, he was the first Rwandan ever to have risen so high in the corporate ranks of the Belgian company. But on April 12, 1994—three days after he moved into the hotel with the new, genocidal government—when the Dutchman who managed the Hotel des Mille Collines called Paul to say that, as a European, he had arranged to be evacuated, it was understood that, as a Rwandan, Paul would be left behind. The Dutchman asked Paul, who had worked at the Mille Collines from 1984 to 1993, to take care of the hotel in his absence. At the same time, the Hutu Power government at the Hotel des Diplomates suddenly decided to flee Kigali, where combat with the RPF was intensifying, and install itself at Gitarama. A heavily armored convoy was being prepared for the journey. Paul loaded his family and friends into a hotel van, and when the government convoy began to move, he pulled out behind it, following as if he was a part of it until it rolled past the Mille Collines, where he swung into the driveway of his new home.
It was a strange scene at the Mille Collines, Kigali’s premier hotel, an icon of international business-class prestige, where the staff dressed in livery and a night’s lodging cost a hundred twenty-five dollars—about half the average Rwandan annual income. The guests included a few officers of the Forces Armées Rwandaises and of UNAMIR, and hundreds of local sanctuary seekers—mostly well-off or well-connected Tutsis and Hutu oppositionists and their families, who were officially slated for death but who had, through connections, bribery, or sheer luck, made it to the hotel alive, hoping that the UN presence would protect them.
A few foreign journalists were still at the hotel when Paul arrived, but they were evacuated two days later. Josh Hammer, a Newsweek correspondent who spent twenty-four hours in Kigali on April 13 and 14, recalled standing at a window of the Mille Collines with some of the hotel’s Tutsi refugees, watching a gang of interahamwe running down the street outside: “You could literally see the blood dripping off their clubs and machetes.” When Hammer went out with colleagues to explore the city, they couldn’t go more than two or three blocks before being turned around by interahamwe. At military roadblocks, he said, “They’d let you through, and wave to you, then you’d hear two or three shots and you’d come back and there’d be fresh bodies.” On the day of Hammer’s visit, a Red Cross truck, loaded with injured Tutsis bound for a hospital, was stopped at an interahamwe roadblock, and all the Tutsis were taken out and slaughtered “on the spot.” The distant pounding of RPF artillery shook the air, and when Hammer went to the Mille Collines’ rooftop restaurant, government soldiers blocked the doors. “It looked like the whole military command was in there, plotting strategy and genocide,” he said.
So the journalists left for the airport with a UNAMIR convoy, and Paul remained to take care of a hotel filled with the condemned. Except for the mostly symbolic protection provided by a resident handful of UN soldiers, the Mille Collines was physically undefended. Hutu Power leaders and officers of the FAR came and went freely, interahamwe bands ringed the hotel grounds, the six outside telephone lines of the hotel switchboard were cut off, and as the number of refugees packed into the rooms and corridors came close to a thousand, it was periodically announced that they would all be massacred. “Sometimes,” Paul told me, “I felt myself dead.”
“Dead?” I said. “Already dead?”
Paul considered for a moment. Then he said, “Yeah.”
ON THE MORNING before Paul moved into the Mille Collines, Odette and Jean-Baptiste attempted to leave Kigali. They had been paying three hundred dollars a day in protection money to a trio of neighborhood policemen, and they were nearly out of cash. Odette had signed over several thousand dollars of traveler’s checks, but the cops were suspicious of this form of payment. Odette feared that they might discover her sister, Vénantie, when the money ran out. Vénantie had hidden for three days in a chicken coop that belonged to some nuns who lived next door, then she’d come out, saying she’d rather die. Odette had already learned that at least one of her sisters had been killed in the north, and she understood, too, that most of the Tutsis in Kigali had been massacred. Her friend Jean, who had asked her to take his wife to Nairobi, had gone there by himself to find a house for his family, and his wife had been killed along with their four children. Garbage trucks were plying the streets, picking up corpses.
But the killing hadn’t yet reached the south. Odette and Jean-Baptiste thought that if they could get there they might be safe, only the Nyabarongo River stood in the way, and there was no hope of getting over the bridge just south of Kigali. They decided to try their luck in the papyrus marshes that lined the riverbank—to cross by boat and continue on foot through the bush. In exchange for an escort to the river, they signed over their jeep, their television, their stereo, and other household goods to their police protectors. The police even went and found Odette’s nephew and his wife and baby, who were hiding somewhere in Kigali, and put them in a school for safety. But the nephew was killed the next day, along with all the other men in the school.
The night before leaving Kigali, Odette went to her neighbors, the nuns, and told the Sister Superior of her plan. The nun drew Odette aside and gave her more than three hundred dollars. “A lot of money,” Odette told me. “And she was a Hutu.” Odette gave some of the money to each of her children, who were fourteen, thirteen, and seven years old, and she tucked slips of paper into the children’s shoes with the addresses and phone numbers of family and friends
, and with her and Jean-Baptiste’s bank account numbers—in case, Odette had to tell them, they got separated or killed.
The family rose at four in the morning. The police never showed up. They had taken the last of Odette’s traveler’s checks and vanished. So Jean-Baptiste drove. At that early hour, the roadblocks were mostly abandoned. Vénantie, who was well known as a parliamentarian, disguised herself in the car as a Muslim with scarves wrapped around her face. At a small village near the river, where the mayor was a friend of Jean-Baptiste’s, they arranged for a local police escort—two men in front, one behind, for about thirty dollars a man—and set out on foot, carrying a little water and biscuits and a kilo of sugar through papyrus that grew higher than their heads. At the water’s edge they saw a boat on the far bank and called to the boatman, but the boatman said, “No, you’re Tutsis.”
The marshes were teeming with Tutsis, hiding or trying to cross the river, and lurking among the papyrus, there were also many interahamwe. When Odette heard her daughter crying out, “No, don’t kill us, we have money, I have money, don’t kill me,” she realized the children had been caught.
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