PAUL RUSESABAGINA REMEMBERED that in 1987 the Hôtel des Mille Collines had acquired its first fax machine, and an auxiliary telephone line had been installed to support it. In mid-April of 1994, when the government cut outside service to and from the hotel’s main switchboard, Paul discovered that—“miraculously,” as he said—the old fax line still had a dial tone. Paul regarded this line as the greatest weapon in his campaign for the protection of his guests. “We could ring the King of Belgium,” Paul told me. “I could get through to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of France immediately. We sent many faxes to Bill Clinton himself at the White House.” As a rule, he said, he would stay up until four in the morning—“sending faxes, calling, ringing the whole world.”
The Hutu Power leaders in Kigali knew Paul had a phone, but, he said, “they never had my number, so they didn’t know how to cut it off, and they had other problems to think about.” Paul guarded his phone carefully, but not absolutely; refugees with useful foreign contacts were given access to it. Odette sent regular faxes to her former employers at Peace Corps headquarters in Washington, and on April 29, Thomas Kamilindi used the hotel phone to give an interview to a French radio station. “I described how we lived, with no water—drinking the swimming pool—and how it was with the killing, and how the RPF was advancing,”
Thomas told me. The interview was broadcast, and the next morning, Major Cyiza told Thomas, “You fucked up. They’ve decided to kill you. Get out of here if you can.”
Thomas had nowhere to go. He moved into a friend’s room, and that afternoon he got word that a soldier had arrived at the hotel to assassinate him. Using the house phone, Thomas asked his wife to find out the soldier’s name. It was Jean-Baptiste Iradukunda. “He had been a friend since childhood,” Thomas told me, “so I called him and said, ‘OK, I’m coming,’ and I went. He explained that the military command wanted me dead. I asked who decided this, their names, and who had sent him. He hesitated. Then he said, in effect, ‘I don’t know who’s going to kill you. I can’t do it. But I’m leaving the hotel and they’ll send someone for sure to kill you.’”
“Nobody else came for me,” he said. “The situation normalized. I went out in the corridor again after a while, and we stayed put.”
When I asked Paul about Thomas’s trouble, he laughed. “That interview wasn’t good for the refugees,” he said, and he added, “They wanted to take him out, but I refused.”
I asked Paul how that had worked, why his refusal was heeded.
He said, “I don’t know,” and again he laughed. “I don’t know how it was, but I refused so many things.”
MEANWHILE, ALL ACROSS Rwanda: murder, murder, murder, murder, murder, murder, murder, murder, murder …
Take the best estimate: eight hundred thousand killed in a hundred days. That’s three hundred and thirty-three and a third murders an hour—or five and a half lives terminated every minute. Consider also that most of these killings actually occurred in the first three or four weeks, and add to the death toll the uncounted legions who were maimed but did not die of their wounds, and the systematic and serial rape of Tutsi women—and then you can
grasp what it meant that the Hotel des Mille Collines was the only place in Rwanda where as many as a thousand people who were supposed to be killed gathered in concentration and, as Paul said very quietly, “Nobody was killed. Nobody was taken away. Nobody was beaten.”
Down the hill from the hotel, in his hideaway at the church of Sainte Famille, Bonaventure had a radio, and listening to RTLM, he heard how well the killing was going. He heard the radio announcers’ gentle encouragements to leave no grave half full, and the more urgent calls for people to go here or go there because more hands were needed to complete this or that job. He heard the speeches of potentates from the Hutu Power government, as they traveled around the country, calling on the people to redouble their efforts. And he wondered how long it would be before the slow but steady massacre of refugees in the church where he was hiding caught up with him. On April 29, RTLM proclaimed that May 5 was “cleanup” day for the final elimination of all Tutsis in Kigali.
James Orbinski, a Canadian physician who was one of about fifteen international relief workers still stationed in Kigali, described the city as “literally a no-man’s-land.” He said, “The only thing alive was the wind, except at the roadblocks, and the roadblocks were everywhere. The interahamwe were terrifying, blood-thirsty, drunk—they did a lot of dancing at roadblocks. People were carrying family to hospitals and orphanages. It would take them days to go two or three miles.” And getting to a hospital was no guarantee of safety. When Orbinski visited the hospital where Odette and Jean-Baptiste had worked, he found it littered with bodies. He went to an orphanage, hoping to evacuate the children, and met a Rwandan officer who said, “These people are POWs, and as far as I’m concerned they’re insects, and they’ll be crushed like insects.”
By the end of April, the city was divided across its main valley: to the east, where Orbinski was based, the RPF had control, and
to the west, the city belonged to the government. UNAMIR and the few emergency workers like Orbinski spent hours each day in negotiation, trying to arrange exchanges of prisoners, refugees, and the wounded across the front lines. Their effectiveness was extremely limited. “I went to Sainte Famille every day, bringing medical supplies, making lists,” Orbinski told me. “I’d go back the next day—twenty people killed, forty people killed.”
When Paul recalled how he had used his telephone at the Mille Collines to focus international attention on the plight of his guests, he said, “But, you know, Sainte Famille also had a working phone line, and that priest, Father Wenceslas, never used it. My goodness.”
It was true that the phone worked at the church. Even Bonaventure Nyibizi, in his hiding place, had been aware of it, and one day in mid-May he had been able to sneak out and get access to it. “I called Washington—the USAID mission,” he told me. “They said, ‘You know what the situation is. Whenever you have a chance to leave, contact the nearest mission.’” Hardly a message of hope; but for Bonaventure, to make contact, and to know that others knew he was alive and where, was a comfort.
Why didn’t Father Wenceslas make similar calls? Why hadn’t more people acted as Paul had? “That’s a mystery,” Paul said. “Everybody could have done it. But, for instance, Wenceslas himself wore a pistol, yet he was a priest. I can’t say that he killed anyone. I never saw him killing. But I saw him with a pistol. One day he came to my room. He was talking about what was happening in the country, how people were shooting from Sainte Famille—from his church!—soldiers with armored cars. He said he gave them drinks because they’ve killed people. I said, ‘Mister, I don’t agree with that.’ And my wife said, ‘Priest, instead of carrying your Bible, why do you carry a pistol? Why don’t you put this pistol down and take up your Bible? A priest should not be seen in blue jeans and a T-shirt with a pistol.’”
Later, Odette told me the same story, and she said that Father
Wenceslas had replied, “Everything has its time. This is the time for a pistol, not a Bible.”
Paul remembered the exchange differently. By his account, Father Wenceslas had said, “They’ve already killed fifty-nine priests. I don’t want to be the sixtieth.” Paul’s response was: “If someone comes and shoots you now, do you think that with a pistol you won’t die?”
After the genocide, Wenceslas fled with the help of French missionaries to a village in southern France, where he was assigned to active pastoral duty. In July of 1995, he was arrested and charged under French law with crimes of genocide in Kigali, but his case quickly snagged on legal technicalities. After two weeks in a French jail, he was released to resume his ministry. In January of 1998, France’s Supreme Court ruled that he could be prosecuted after all. He stood charged, among other things, with providing killers with lists of Tutsi refugees at his church, flushing refugees out of hiding to be killed, attending massacres without interfering, sabotaging UNAMIR’s efforts to evacuate refugees from the church, and coercing refugee girls to have sex with him. In 1995, he was asked by two interviewers—a Rwandan whose mother and sisters had been refugees at Sainte Famille and a French journalist—whether he regretted his actions during the genocide. “I didn’t have a choice,” Wenceslas replied. “It was necessary to appear pro-militia. If I had had a different attitude, we would have all disappeared.”
THE LAST RECORDED apparition of the Virgin Mary at the hilltop shrine of Kibeho occurred on May 15, 1994, at a time when the few surviving Tutsis in the parish were still being hunted. In the preceding month, thousands of Tutsis had been killed in Kibeho. The largest massacre there had occurred in the cathedral, and it lasted several days, until the killers got tired of working by hand and set the building ablaze, immolating the living and the dead. During the days before the fire, Father Pierre Ngoga, a local
priest, had sought to defend the refugees and paid for it with his life, while another local priest, Father Thadée Rusingizandekwe, was described by survivors as one of the leaders of several interahamwe attacks. Clad, like the militia members, in a drapery of banana leaves, Father Thadée reportedly carried a rifle and shot into the crowd.
With the church leadership so divided, the May 15 apparition offered a theological resolution to the question of genocide. The exact words attributed to the Holy Mother by the visionary Valentine Nyiramukiza have been lost. But the message was broadcast on Radio Rwanda at the time, and a number of Rwandan priests and journalists—including Thomas Kamilindi, who heard it at the Hotel des Mille Collines—told me that the Virgin was reported to have said that President Habyarimana was with her in heaven, and that her words were widely interpreted as an expression of divine support for the genocide.
The Bishop of Gikongoro, Monsignor Augustin Misago, who wrote a book about the Kibeho apparitions, told me that Valentine’s suggestion that “the killing of Tutsis was approved in heaven” struck him as “impossible—a message prepared by the politicians.” But then, the messages sent by church leaders frequently carried a political edge during the killings. In fact, Bishop Misago was often described as a Hutu Power sympathizer; he had been publicly accused of barring Tutsis from places of refuge, criticizing fellow members of the clergy who helped “cockroaches,” and asking a Vatican emissary who visited Rwanda in June 1994 to tell the Pope “to find a place for Tutsi priests because the Rwandan people do not want them anymore.” What’s more, on May 4 of that year, shortly before the last Marian apparition at Kibeho, the bishop appeared there himself with a team of policemen, and told a group of ninety Tutsi schoolchildren, who were being held in preparation for slaughter, not to worry, because the police would protect them. Three days later, the police helped to massacre eighty-two of the children.
Bishop Misago was a large, imposing man. A portrait of him—dressed, as I found him, in a long, purple-buttoned white robe—hung near a much smaller portrait of the Pope on the wall of the room where he received me at the bishopric. Minutes after I arrived, a major thunderstorm broke. The room grew darker, the bishop’s robe appeared to grow brighter, and his voice rose to a shout against the din of rain on the corrugated-metal roofing. He seemed glad to shout. He was not at all happy about my visit—I had come without an appointment, carrying a notebook—and his conversation was accompanied by a lot of wild gesticulations, in between which he leafed constantly through a tiny pocket calendar without looking at it. He also had the unfortunate habit of laughing a loud, nervous, “Ha-ha-ha!” whenever he mentioned an awkward situation like a massacre.
“What could I do?” he said, when I asked him about the eighty-two dead Tutsi schoolchildren at Kibeho. He told me that he had gone to Kibeho with the commander of the Gikongoro police and an intelligence officer “to see how to restore order and unity.” He said he had no choice but to work with such authorities. “I don’t have an army. What could I do by myself? Nothing. That’s elementary logic.” He had found that the Tutsi students at Kibeho were inadequately protected, and he said, “The conclusion was that the number of police should be augmented. Before, there had been five. Now, they sent about twenty.”
The bishop laughed, and went on: “We returned to Gikongoro, confident that the situation would be better. The unfortunate thing was that among those policemen there were some accomplices of the interahamwe. I couldn’t have known that. These decisions were made in the army. So the director of the school came to Gikongoro to explain the situation and to ask that the police team be changed, and when he got home he discovered that the massacre had happened. You see? Ha-ha-ha! First we were badly informed, and then we were powerless to fix the situation. So, you
are also an adult and able to judge that one does not imagine that a person will kill children.”
In fact, it seemed to me that in the fourth week of the genocide no adult in Rwanda could have imagined that the police were reliable protectors of Tutsis. The bishop insisted that he had been helpless. “You—you Westerners—left and abandoned us all,” he said. “Even the Papal Nuncio left on April 10. It’s not just the poor Bishop of Gikongoro.”
“But you were still a man of influence,” I said.
“No, no, no,” the bishop said. “That’s an illusion.” He laughed his nervous laugh. “When men become like devils, and you don’t have an army, what can you do? All paths were dangerous. So how could I influence? Even the Church—we are not like extraterrestrials who can foresee things. We could have been victims of a lack of information. When one is poorly informed, one hesitates to take a position. And there was powerful official misinformation. As a journalist, when you are not sure, you don’t publish it—you go verify it. The global accusations against the Church are not scientific. That’s ideological propaganda.”
The bishop wasn’t really denying that he’d committed a major blunder at Kibeho. But he didn’t seem to think it was a crime, and although he said he was “embarrassed” to have been taken in by official propaganda, he gave no sign of remorse. He wanted to be thought of as a victim of the same deception that had resulted in eighty-two children being slaughtered. If I understood him correctly, he was saying that he had been a profoundly ignorant man who was duped by demons. Perhaps. But it was curious that he treated my questions about his traffic with those demons as an attack on the institution of the Roman Catholic Church, and when I did ask him about the Church, his response hardly seemed to qualify as a defense.
“To my knowledge,” he said, “no official of the Church publicly declared anything that was happening to be unacceptable.
Monsignor Vincent Nsengiyumva, the old Archbishop of Kigali, is the best example. He made no secret of his friendship with President Habyarimana. Of course, the other bishops and the other clergy disapproved. But, you know, profane society in the West likes very much to make exposes with journalism, film, and TV, while we are in the habit of doing things in secret and quietly without beating the drum or sounding the trumpet. If you spoke out, one could have said that you’d become a heretic.”
It was true that for many Rwandans to go against Hutu Power would have felt like heresy. But Bishop Misago seemed to have second thoughts about his outburst. A few minutes later, he said, “I was tired when you arrived. I was going to lie down. I was a bit tired and a bit agitated, so that may have colored my answers. And then, you ask such questions.”
Clearly, Bishop Misago hadn’t behaved as wickedly as Father Wenceslas. Still, it surprised me that a man with his reputation had stayed in Rwanda after the genocide. A number of priests had been arrested for their conduct in 1994, and an official at the Ministry of Justice in Kigali told me that a strong case could be made for arresting Misago. But, he added, “the Vatican is too strong, and too unapologetic for us to go taking on bishops. Haven’t you heard of infallibility?”
DURING ONE OF his visits to the Hotel des Mille Collines, Father Wenceslas had invited Paul Rusesabagina to join him for a drink at the Sainte Famille church. But Paul never left the hotel, and for that, even Wenceslas should have been grateful, since he had delivered his own mother to Paul for safekeeping at the hotel. In fact, a number of men affiliated with the Hutu Power regime had installed their Tutsi wives at the Mille Collines, and while their presence there surely contributed to the hotel’s overall safety, Paul felt that it reflected shamefully on the men. “Wenceslas knew himself that he wasn’t even able to protect his mother,”
Paul said. “And he was so arrogant that when he brought her, he told me, ‘Paul, I bring you my cockroach.’ Do you understand? He was talking about his mother. She was a Tutsi.”
Wenceslas, Paul told me, was “just a—how do you call it? —a bastard. He didn’t know his father.” But what does that explain? Lots of people who behaved as badly or worse than Wenceslas had fathers, and would never have called their mothers cockroaches, while many people who were ill at ease with their origins didn’t run criminally amok. I wasn’t interested in what made Wenceslas weak; I wanted to know what had made Paul strong—and he couldn’t tell me. “I wasn’t really strong,” he said. “I wasn’t. But maybe I used different means that other people didn’t want to use.” Only later—“when people were talking about that time”—did it occur to him that he had been exceptional. “During the genocide, I didn’t know,” he told me. “I thought so many people did as I did, because I know that if they’d wanted they could have done so.”
Paul believed in free will. He understood his actions during the genocide in the same way that he understood those of others, as choices. He didn’t seem to think that he could be called righteous, except when measured against the criminality of others, and he rejected that scale. Paul had devoted all his diverse energies to avoiding death—his own and others’—but what he feared even more than a violent end was living or dying as what he called a “fool.” Regarded in this light, the option of kill or be killed translated into the questions: kill for what? be killed as a what?—and posed no great challenge.
The riddle to Paul was that so many of his countrymen had chosen to embrace inhumanity. “It was more than a surprise,” he told me. “It was a disappointment. I was disappointed by most of my friends, who immediately changed with that genocide. I used to see them just as gentlemen, and when I saw them with the killers I was disappointed. I still have some friends that I trust. But the
genocide changed so many things—within myself, my own behavior. I used to go out, feel free. I could go and have a drink with anyone. I could trust. But now I tend not to do so.”
So Paul had a rare conscience, and knew the loneliness that came with it, but there was nothing false about his modesty regarding his efforts on behalf of the refugees at the Mille Collines. He hadn’t saved them, and he couldn’t have saved them—not ultimately. Armed with nothing but a liquor cabinet, a phone line, an internationally famous address, and his spirit of resistance, he had merely been able to work for their protection until the time came when they were saved by someone else.
THE FIRST MAJOR evacuation from the hotel was attemped by UNAMIR on May 3. Trucks arrived to take sixty-two refugees, who had been offered asylum in Belgium, including Thomas, Odette and Jean-Baptiste, and their families, to the airport. But as the refugees boarded the trucks, government spies milled through the parking lot, making lists of the evacuees, and the call went out on RTLM to stop the convoy. About a mile from the hotel, a rapidly growing mob of interahamwe and soldiers halted the trucks at a roadblock. The refugees were forced to climb down; some were beaten and kicked. Interahamwe with radios tuned to RTLM listened as the names of well-known evacuees were read, then sought those people out for special abuse. The former Attorney General, François Xavier Nsanzuwera, got the worst of it. With UNAMIR officers looking on, he was knocked to the pavement with a rifle butt. As he lay there, bleeding from the head, several shots were fired at him. The shots missed. But the mob grew more excited and began demanding the right to massacre the evacuees. Rwandan military officers held them off, at the same time refusing to allow the convoy to budge. I’ve heard many accounts of the hours the evacuees spent at the roadblock and not one clear explanation of why, in the end, the convoy was allowed to retreat
back to the hotel, but it was, and Odette spent the evening with a sewing kit, stitching wounds.
Twelve days later, an officer from military intelligence turned up at the hotel and informed Paul that everybody in it would be killed that night. There was no question of relying on UNAMIR for help. Once again, Paul rallied all of his connections, in the government and abroad, and called on every refugee with plausible contacts to do the same. Paul remembers speaking with the director-general of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Paris, and telling him “Mister, if you want these people to be saved, they will be saved. But if you want them to die, they will die today, and you French people will pay in one way or another for the people who are killed in this hotel today.” Almost immediately after this conversation, General Bizimungu of the FAR high command and General Dallaire of UNAMIR came to Paul to assure him that the hotel would not be touched.
Paul made the effort, but the life-and-death decision lay, as always, with the killers and, tellingly in this case, with their French patrons. That night a single bullet crashed through a window of the Mille Collines, as if to say that the hand of death was only temporarily stayed. But by then, the battle for Kigali was raging, and the hotel and several other high-profile houses of “refuge,” such as the church of Sainte Famille, had become bargaining chips. The RPF was holding thousands of government prisoners in a stadium across town, and the RPF command proposed the kind of deal that Hutu Power understood: you kill those, and we’ll kill these. An exchange was negotiated across the front lines. UNAMIR helped to mediate the arrangement, and provided transportation, and it was widely reported at the time that the UN had saved the refugees. But the truth lies elsewhere: they were saved by the RPF’s threat to kill others.
The evacuation proceeded slowly, truckload by truckload, day by day. There were many days when no trucks moved, and even
as some refugees were being trucked to safety, massacres continued at Sainte Famille and elsewhere in Kigali. On June 17, when only a handful of refugees remained at the Mille Collines, Paul went to the Hotel des Diplomates, in search of liquor for General Bizimungu. When he returned to the Mille Collines, he found that a mob of interahamwe had broken into the suite where he was staying with his family. His wife and children hid in the bathroom, while the militia tore up the living room. Paul ran into some of the invaders in the corridor. “They asked me, ‘Where’s the manager?’ I was in a T-shirt and jeans and they think a manager is always in a tie. I said, ‘The manager? You haven’t met him?’ They said, ‘No, where is he?’ I said, ‘He’s gone that way,’ and I went the other way. I met some more of them on the stairs, and they asked, ‘Where’s the manager?’” Paul laughed. Once again, he sent them off in the other direction. Then he went looking for General Bizimungu, who was waiting for his liquor handout. The general instructed one of his sergeants to chase the militia out. As Paul remembered it, Bizimungu said, “Go up there and tell those militia that if they kill someone, I’ll kill them. Even if they beat someone, I’ll kill them. And if they stay in this hotel for the next five minutes, I’ll shoot.”
The next day, Paul and his family joined a UNAMIR convoy to the RPF zone. He had done what he could. But had the RPF not been pounding Hutu Power from across the valley, there would have been no convoy—and probably no survivors.