ON THE EVENING of April 6, 1994, Thomas Kamilindi was in high spirits. His wife, Jacqueline, had baked a cake for a festive dinner at their home in Kigali. It was Thomas’s thirty-third birthday, and that afternoon he had completed his last day of work as a reporter for Radio Rwanda. After ten years at the state-owned station, Thomas, who was a Hutu, had resigned in protest against the lack of political balance in news programming. He was taking a shower when Jacqueline began pounding on the bathroom door. “Hurry up!” she shouted. “The President has been attacked!” Thomas locked the doors of his house and sat by the radio, listening to RTLM. He disliked the Hutu Power station’s violent propaganda, but the way things were going in Rwanda that propaganda often served as a highly accurate political weather forecast. On April 3, RTLM had announced that during the next three days “there will be a little something here in Kigali, and also on April 7 and 8 you will hear the sound of bullets or grenades exploding.” Now the station was saying that President Habyarimana’s plane, returning from Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, had been shot down over Kigali and had crashed into the grounds of his own palace. The new Hutu President of Burundi and several of Habyarimana’s top advisers had also been on board. There were no survivors.
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 in 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.
“We ran over,” Odette told me. “Jean-Baptiste said, ‘See, I’m just a Hutu fleeing the RPF,’ and we threw all our money and everything we had at them. As they divided it up, we ran away, back toward the village where we’d left the jeep. Then another group of interahamwe came and spotted my sister. While we were running, they were calling from hill to hill, ‘There’s a deputy with them, you’ve got to get her.’ My sister was older than me and heavier, and we were very tired. We drank from a bottle of fruit syrup, and it gave us strength, but my sister was panting. She had a little pistol with her and Jean-Baptiste was running fast with the kids, and I said, ‘Wait, Jean-Baptiste, if we’re going to die we should die together.’ Then a group of interahamwe pounced on us, and they put grenades to our necks. That was when I heard the shots. I never could look. I never saw my sister’s corpse. They shot her with her own pistol.”
Odette was speaking quickly and she kept right on going: “Oh, I forgot to say that during the crisis before April, Jean-Baptiste had bought two Chinese grenades very cheaply here in the market. I didn’t like it. I was always afraid they’d blow up.” But the grenades had come in handy. When the interahamwe had caught the children, and again when they caught the whole family and Vénantie was shot, Jean-Baptiste brandished the grenades, telling the killers they would die along with his family. “So they didn’t kill us,” Odette said. “Instead, they took us to the village for interrogation, and the mayor, whom we knew, brought some rice and made it look like we were prisoners to protect us.”
By then it was late in the afternoon, and it began to rain—the sort of blinding, deafening, open-spigot rain that dumps over Rwanda on April afternoons—and Jean-Baptiste led the family through it in a crouching run to their jeep. Interahamwe mobbed the car. Jean-Baptiste drove through them and headed for Kigali. He drove fast, stopping for nothing, and twelve hours after leaving their house the family returned to it. That night, they listened to Radio Muhabura, the RPF station, where the names of Tutsis who
had been reported killed were read each day on the air. Partway through the roll call of the dead, they heard their own names.
THOMAS KAMILINDI HAD remained locked in his house for a week. He worked his phone, collecting news from around the country and filing reports for a French radio service. Then, on April 12, he got a call from Radio Rwanda saying that Eliezer Niyitigeka wanted to see him. Niyitigeka, a former radio colleague, had just been appointed Minister of Information in the Hutu Power government, replacing an oppositionist who had been killed. Thomas walked to the station, which was near his house, and Niyitigeka told him that he had to come back to work. Thomas reminded him that he’d quit as a matter of conscience, and the minister said, “OK, Thomas, let the soldiers decide.” Thomas hedged: he wouldn’t take a job under threat but would wait for an official letter of employment. Niyitigeka agreed, and Thomas returned home to learn from his wife, Jacqueline, that, while he was gone, two soldiers from the Presidential Guard had appeared, carrying a list with his name on it.
Thomas wasn’t surprised to learn that he was on an assassins’ list. At Radio Rwanda, he had refused to speak the language of Hutu Power and had led two strikes; he was a member of the Social Democratic Party, which had ties to the RPF, and he was from the south, from Butare. Considering these factors, Thomas was determined to seek a safer refuge than his home. The next morning, three soldiers came to his door. He invited them to have a seat, but the leader of the contingent said, “We don’t sit when we’re working.” The soldier said, “Come with us.” Thomas said he wasn’t budging until he knew where he was going. “You come with us or your family will have trouble,” the soldier said.
Thomas left with the soldiers and walked up the hill, past the deserted American Embassy and along the Boulevard de la Révolution. At the corner, in front of the Soras Insurance Building, across from the Ministry of Defense, a knot of soldiers stood
around a newly erected bunker. The soldiers scolded Thomas for describing their activities in his reports to the international media. He was ordered to sit on the street. When he refused, the soldiers beat him. They beat him hard and slapped him repeatedly, shouting insults and questions. Then someone kicked him in the stomach, and he sat down. “OK, Thomas,” one of the men said. “Write a letter to your wife and say what you like, because you’re going to die.”
A jeep drove up, and the soldiers in it got out and kicked Thomas some more. Then he was given pen and paper, and he wrote, “Listen, Jacqueline, they’re going to kill me. I don’t know why. They say I’m an accomplice of the RPF. That’s why I’m going to die, and here’s my testament.” Thomas wrote his will, and handed it over.
One of the soldiers said, “OK, let’s finish this,” and stood back, readying his rifle.
“I didn’t look,” Thomas recalled, when he told me of his ordeal. “I really believed they would shoot me. Then another vehicle came up, and suddenly I saw a major with a foot up on the armored car, and he said, ‘Thomas?’ When he called me I came out of a sort of dream. I said, ‘They’re doing me in.’ He told them to stop, and he told a sergeant to take me home.”
Thomas is spry, compact, and bright-eyed. His face and hands are as expressive as his speech. He is a radio man, a raconteur, and however bleak his tale, the telling gave him pleasure. After all, he and his family were still alive. His was what passed for a happy story in Rwanda. Still, I had the impression, with him more than with others, that as he told it he was seeing the events he described afresh; that as he stared into the past the outcome was not yet obvious, and that when he looked at me, with his clear eyes a touch hazy, he was still seeing the scenes he described, perhaps even hoping to understand them. For the story made no sense: the major who had spared his life may have recognized
Thomas, but to Thomas the major was a stranger. Later, he learned his name: Major Turkunkiko. What was Thomas to Major Turkunkiko that he should have been allowed to live? It wasn’t unusual for one or two people to survive large massacres. When you “clear the bush,” a few weeds always escape the blade—a man told me that his niece was macheted, then stoned, then dumped in a latrine, only to get up each time and stagger away—but Thomas had been deliberately reprieved, and he could not say why. He shot me a look of comic astonishment—eyebrows high, forehead furrowed, a quirky smile working his mouth—to say that his survival was far more mysterious than his peril had been.
Thomas told me that he had been trained as a Boy Scout “to look at danger, and study it, but not to be afraid,” and I was struck that each of his encounters with Hutu Power had followed a pattern: when the minister ordered him back to work, when the soldiers came for him, and when they told him to sit on the street, Thomas always refused before complying. The killers were accustomed to encountering fear, and Thomas had always acted as if there must be some misunderstanding for anyone to feel the need to threaten him.
Such subtleties should have been irrelevant. An accomplice was an accomplice; there could be no exceptions, and efficiency was essential. During the genocide, the work of the killers was not regarded as a crime in Rwanda; it was effectively the law of the land, and every citizen was responsible for its administration. That way, if a person who should be killed was let go by one party he could expect to be caught and killed by somebody else.
I met with Thomas on a soft summer evening in Kigali—the hour of sudden equatorial dusk when flocks of crows and lone buzzards reel, screaming, between the trees and the rooftops. Walking back to my hotel, I passed the corner where Thomas had expected to be killed. The Soras Insurance Building’s plate-glass portico was a tattered web of bullet holes.
“If I don’t kill that rat he’ll die,” says Clov in Samuel Beckett’s Endgame. But those who commit genocide have chosen to make nature their enemy, not their ally.
ON THE MORNING of April 12, at the same time that the Presidential Guard first came for Thomas at his house, Bonaventure Nyibizi learned that his family was to be killed that afternoon. They had been hiding in and around his house, spending some nights crouched in ditches. Many of their neighbors had been killed, and he told me, “I remember that already on April 10 there was a communique on the radio from the provincial administration calling all the drivers with big trucks, because only four days after the genocide started there were such a lot of dead people here that it was necessary to bring the trucks.”
Bonaventure did not doubt that his family’s luck had run out at home. “So we decided that instead of being killed by a machete, we’d choose to be killed by a grenade or by being shot,” he said. “We took my car and drove outside my compound. We were able to make it up to the church of Sainte Famille. It was at most half a mile, and it was very difficult to drive because there were a lot of roadblocks. But we drove there, and on April 15 they came for us. They killed about a hundred fifty people in Sainte Famille that day, and they were looking for me all the time.”
The Catholic cathedral of Sainte Famille, an immensity of brick, stands right off one of Kigali’s main arteries, a few hundred yards downhill from the Hotel des Mille Collines. Because of its prominence, and its consequent visibility to the few international observers who were still circulating in Kigali, Sainte Famille was one of half a dozen places in the city—and fewer than a dozen in all of Rwanda—where Tutsis who sought refuge in 1994 were never exterminated en masse. Instead, the killing in such places was incremental, and for those who were spared the terror was constant. Sainte Famille was initially protected by policemen, but,
as usual, their resistance to the neighborhood interahamwe and to the soldiers who came hunting for Tutsis quickly collapsed. In the beginning, the killers who staked out the church contented themselves with attacking new refugees as they arrived. The massacre on April 15 was the first massive incursion into Sainte Famille, and it was quite carefully organized by the interahamwe and the Presidential Guard.
Only males were killed on that day, picked out individually from the throng of several thousand in the church and its outbuildings. The killers had lists, and many of them were neighbors of the victims and could recognize them on sight. A young man who had worked for Bonaventure as a domestic was killed. “But I was lucky,” Bonaventure said. “I went inside a small room with my family, and just as I went in and closed the door, Sainte Famille filled with military and militia and police. They started asking for me, but fortunately they did not break down the door where I was. I stayed there with the kids and my wife. There were about twenty people altogether in that small, small place.” Bonaventure had a three-month-old daughter with him, and he said, “Keeping her quiet was the hardest.”
I asked him what the priests had done when the killing began. “Nothing,” he said. “One of them was good, but he was threatened himself, so he went into hiding on April 13, and the other one in charge was very comfortable with the militia. This is the famous Father Wenceslas Munyeshyaka. He was very close to the military and the militia, and he was going around with them. He was not actually denouncing anybody at first, but he would do nothing for the people.”
After the massacre, a junior priest, named Paulin, did help to install Bonaventure in a safer hiding place—the back office of a church garage—where he stayed, alone with a friend, from April 15 until June 20. “He was a Hutu, this priest, but he was kind,” Bonaventure said. “Sometimes he would open the door so
that our wives could bring us water or food. Rumors went around that I had been killed, so all I had to do was stay hidden.”
WALKING HOME FROM his aborted execution, Thomas Kamilindi was told by the sergeant who escorted him that he was still condemned to die. “They’re going to kill you today if you don’t leave,” the sergeant said. Thomas had no idea where to go. He wrote a new will, and gave it to his wife, saying, “I’m leaving, I don’t know where, maybe someday this paper can help you.”
When he stepped outside again, it was raining. He began walking, and wound up at the radio station. “I was afraid,” he said, “because the radio was practically a military camp.” But nobody seemed to mind him there. “I watched television until the evening. I called my wife, and told her I was at the radio, and I spent the night under a table on a mat. I had nothing to eat, but I slept well.” Thomas could not imagine how he would have survived if he were a Tutsi. In the morning, he told the editor-in-chief of the radio that he had nearly been killed. “Do the morning news, and perhaps they’ll think you’re with us,” the editor said.
“So I did the six-thirty a.m. broadcast,” Thomas told me, “but I couldn’t go on like that.” He called around to various embassies, and found that they had all been evacuated. Then he tried the Hotel des Mille Collines: “The guy at the reception recognized my voice, and said, ‘Thomas! You’re still alive. That’s incredible. We thought you were dead.’ He said, ‘If you can get here, you might be OK.’” It was forbidden to go around in a vehicle without escort or papers, so Thomas persuaded a soldier to drive him. He arrived at the hotel without money, but he was given a room. “If people came, we said we’d worry about money later,” a hotel staffer told me. That night as Thomas settled in, his phone rang. It was an army major, Augustin Cyiza, who was also staying in the hotel. Cyiza was sympathetic to the refugees—he eventually deserted the FAR to join the RPF—but Thomas didn’t know that at the time. He went to Cyiza’s room assuming that he would be
killed, or at least arrested. Instead the two men drank beer and talked late into the night, and the next day Cyiza went out and returned with Thomas’s wife and daughter.
Beer saved many lives at the Hotel des Mille Collines. Recognizing that the price of drinks could only go up in the embattled city, the caretaker manager Paul Rusesabagina worked through diverse middlemen to keep the hotel cellars well stocked. This trade, by which he also arranged for enough sweet potatoes and rice to keep his guests from starvation, required extensive dealings with the military command, and Paul took advantage of the contacts. “I was using drinks to corrupt people,” he told me, and laughed, because the people he was corrupting were Hutu Power leaders, and what he meant by corrupting them was feeding them liquor so they wouldn’t kill the refugees under his roof. “I gave drinks and sometimes I even gave money,” he said. Major General Augustin Bizimungu, the commander of the FAR, was one of many regular, unsavory visitors to the hotel whom Paul kept well lubricated. “Everybody came,” Paul said. “I had what they wanted. That was not my problem. My problem was that nobody should be taken out of my hotel.”
Paul is a mild-mannered man, sturdily built and rather ordinary-looking—a bourgeois hotel manager, after all—and that is how he seemed to regard himself as well, as an ordinary person who did nothing extraordinary in refusing to cave in to the insanity that swirled around him. “People became fools. I don’t know why,” he said to me. “I kept telling them, ‘I don’t agree with what you’re doing,’ just as openly as I’m telling you now. I’m a man who’s used to saying no when I have to. That’s all I did—what I felt like doing. Because I never agree with killers. I didn’t agree with them. I refused, and I told them so.” Many Rwandans didn’t agree with the genocide, of course, but many overcame their disagreements and killed, while many more simply saved their own skins. Paul sought to save everybody he could, and if that meant negotiating with everybody who wanted to kill them—so be it.
Shortly before dawn one morning, Lieutenant Apollinaire Hakizimana from military intelligence walked up to the reception desk, rang Paul in his room, and said, “I want you to get everybody out of this hotel within thirty minutes.” Paul had been asleep, and he woke up negotiating. “I said, ‘Mister, do you know that these people are refugees? What security do you guarantee? Where are they going? How are they going? Who’s taking them?’” Lieutenant Hakizimana said, “Did you hear what I said? We want everybody out, and within half an hour.” Paul said, “I’m still in bed. Give me thirty minutes. I’ll take my shower, and then get everybody out.” Paul quickly sent for several of the refugees he trusted most, who were well connected with the regime—including François Xavier Nsanzuwera, the former Attorney General of Rwanda, a Hutu who had once investigated Hakizimana as a leader of Hutu Power death squads. Together, Paul and his friends began working the phone, calling General Bizimungu, various colonels, and anyone else they could think of who might pull rank on the lieutenant. Before the half hour was out, an army jeep arrived at the hotel with orders for Hakizimana to leave.
“They got that boy out,” Paul said. Then he paused for a moment in his memories, and his perspective zoomed out, so that I pictured him peering through his window at the Mille Collines as he said, “And what was around us—around the hotel compound? Soldiers, interahamwe—armed with guns, machetes, everything.” Paul seemed determined to register his own proper size. He hadn’t said, “I got that boy out”—he’d said they did—and by showing me the ranks of killers massed at the hotel gate, he was underscoring the point.
In discussions of us-against-them scenarios of popular violence, the fashion these days is to speak of mass hatred. But while hatred can be animating, it appeals to weakness. The “authors” of the genocide, as Rwandans call them, understood that in order to move a huge number of weak people to do wrong, it is necessary to appeal to their desire for strength—and the gray force that
really drives people is power. Hatred and power are both, in their different ways, passions. The difference is that hatred is purely negative, while power is essentially positive: you surrender to hatred, but you aspire to power. In Rwanda, the orgy of misbegotten power that led to genocide was carried out in the name of Hutuness, and when Paul, a Hutu, set out to defy the killers, he did so by appealing to their passion for power: “they” were the ones who had chosen to take life away and he grasped that that meant they could also choose to extend the gift of retaining it.
AFTER HEARING THE announcement of their own deaths on the radio, Odette and her family stayed in their house. “We never turned on the light and never answered the phone except with a prearranged signal for people who knew us—ring once, hang up, call again.” Two weeks went by like that. Then Paul called from the Mille Collines. He was an old friend, and he was just checking around—to see who was alive, whom he might save. “He said he’d send Froduald Karamira to pick us up,” Odette recalled. “I said, ‘No, I don’t want to see him. If he comes he will kill us.’ But that was Paul. He maintained contact with people like that right to the end.” Paul made no apologies. “Of course I talked to Karamira,” he told me. “I talked to him because everybody was coming to the Mille Collines. I had many contacts and I had my stock of drinks, and I was sending them to get people and bring them to the Mille Collines. It wasn’t only Odette and Jean-Baptiste and their children who were saved in that way. There were so many others.”
On April 27, a lieutenant showed up at Odette’s house to shuttle the family to the hotel in his jeep. Even an army officer could be stopped and have his passengers taken from him by the interahamwe, so it was decided to make three separate trips. Odette went first. “In the streets,” she said, “there were barriers, machetes, corpses. But I wouldn’t look. I didn’t see a corpse in that whole time, except in the river. When we were there in the
marshes, my son said, ‘What’s that, Mother?’ and I said it was statues that had fallen into the river and were floating past. I don’t know where that came from. My son said, ‘No, it’s corpses.’”
When the lieutenant and Odette reached the hotel and found the gate surrounded—not to protect those inside, of course, but to prevent new refugees from entering—she held out a handful of malaria pills and aspirin, and said she was a doctor coming to treat the manager’s children. “Normally,” she told me, “I don’t drink, but when I walked into the hotel, I said, ‘Give me a beer.’ I had a little beer, and got completely drunk from it.”
The lieutenant went to fetch Odette’s children, and as he drove with them toward the hotel, they were stopped. The militia at the roadblock asked the children, “If your parents aren’t dead, or Tutsi, why aren’t you with them?” Odette’s son didn’t hesitate. He said, “My father’s manning a roadblock, and my mother’s at the hospital.” But the killers weren’t convinced. Two hours passed in edgy discussion. Then a car pulled up carrying Georges Rutaganda, the first vice president of the interahamwe and a member of the MRND central committee. Rutaganda recognized the children from earlier times—when he and people like Odette and Jean-Baptiste had moved in the same social universe—and for a moment, apparently, his atrophied soul stirred him to magnanimity. According to Odette: “He told the interahamwe who were hassling those kids, ‘Don’t you listen to the radio? The French said if we don’t stop killing children they’ll stop arming and helping us.’ Then he said, ‘You kids, get in that car and go.’”
So Rutaganda had violated the eighth “Hutu commandment” and showed mercy to Odette’s children, but she felt no warmth for the man. Many people who participated in the killing—as public officials, as soldiers or militia members, or as ordinary citizen butchers—also protected some Tutsis, whether out of personal sympathy or for financial or sexual profit. It was not uncommon for a man or a woman who regularly went forth to kill to keep a few favorite Tutsis hidden in his or her home. Later, such people
sometimes pleaded that they took some lives in order not to attract attention to their efforts to save others. To their minds, it seemed, their acts of decency exonerated the guilt of their crimes. But to survivors, the fact that a killer sometimes spared lives only proved that he could not possibly be judged innocent, since it demonstrated plainly that he knew murder was wrong.
“That the person who cut off my sister’s head should have his sentence reduced? No!” Odette said to me. “Even this Mr. Rutaganda, who saved my children, should be hanged in a public place, and I will go there.” The children were in tears when they reached the hotel. The lieutenant himself was crying. It took a good deal of persuading, on Odette’s part, before he made the final trip and brought Jean-Baptiste and their adopted mulatto child to the hotel. “Mulattoes,” Odette explained, “were seen as the children of Tutsis and Belgians.”