“Listen, Thomas, ” said the solider after a while. “I have been sent to kill you. But I cannot. I am going to leave now. But somebody else will be coming later and they will not be as hesitant.”
Immediately after Thomas gave the interview, an Army colonel called from the hotel entrance. He was a man I had known for a long time. I went out to say hello, and he wasted no time telling me what he was there to do.
“Paul, I am here to pick up that dog!”
“You are fighting against a dog, colonel?” I asked him with a small laugh. “Let’s go talk about this.”
We went back to my office and I asked a chambermaid to bring us drinks. Sitting in the quiet, and without an audience to encourage him, I could already see that some of the rage had leaked away from his countenance. But he remained adamant: He was going to have the head of Thomas Kamilindi. The interview he had given was an act of treason against the government of Rwanda and the Army.
I began to think that the government leaders were most concerned that they had been embarrassed in front of their French patrons. That they should have cared about an interview describing people drinking from the swimming pool at a time when murder-by-machete was the law of the land tells you something about their mentality. But regardless, the execution order against Thomas was real and I resolved to save his life by any means I could.
I tried flattery first.
“Colonel, ” I began, “you are too high ranking an officer to be concerned with such a small matter. Thomas is a small man.”
“I have orders, Paul.”
“You have orders to kill a dog? That is an insulting job. Don’t you have boys in the militia who are supposed to do that kind of work?”
“It is not a small matter. He is a traitor and must pay.”
I could see that I was getting somewhere, but I switched my argument.
“Listen, colonel. Let’s say you take that dog out with your own hands and kill him. You will have to live with that for the rest of your life. You did not hear this radio interview. You do not know what was said. You are proposing to take a man’s life without a trial.”
“Paul, I have my orders. Where is he?”
“Even if you were to order it done instead of doing it yourself, it would be the same blood on your hands.”
It went on like this for quite some time. I don’t know why he kept talking to me. But the longer he sat there and sipped his Carlsberg the greater the odds were that Thomas was going to survive to see the sun go down.
“Listen, ” I finally told him, after more than two hours had gone by, “this war has made everyone a little bit crazy. It is understandable. You are tired. You need to relax. I have some good red wine in the cellar. Let me bring you a carton. I will have it loaded into your jeep. Go home tonight and have a drink and we will talk more about this tomorrow, when we can come to a compromise.”
Everything I suggested came to pass-almost. I did find some red wine from the cellar to spare. I had it loaded into his military jeep. So far as I know, he did go home and enjoy some of it that night. But the compromise never happened. The colonel did not come back and Thomas was not executed.
I had dozens of conversations like this throughout the genocide, surreal exchanges in which I would find myself sitting across a desk or a cocktail table with a man who might have committed dozens of killings that day. In several cases I saw flecks of blood on their uniforms or work shirts. We would talk as though nothing was out of the ordinary, as if we were negotiating the purchase of new kitchen equipment or discussing an upcoming special event in the ballroom. Human lives almost always hung in the balance during these talks. But they were always lubricated with beer or cognac, and usually ended with my gifting that day’s murderer with a bottle of French champagne or whatever else I could dig out of my dwindling liquor cabinet.
I have since thought a great deal about how people are able to maintain two attitudes in their minds at once. Take the coloneclass="underline" He had come fresh from a world of machetes, road gangs, and random death and yet was able to have a civilized conversation with a hotel manager over a glass of beer and let himself be talked out of committing another murder. He had a soft side and a hard side and neither was in absolute control of his actions. It would have been dangerous to assume that he was this way or that way at any given point in the day. It was like those Nazi concentration camp guards who could come home from a day manning the gas chambers and be able to play games with their children, put a Bach record on the turntable, and make love to their wives before getting up to kill more innocents. And this was not the exception-this was the rule. The cousin of brutality is a terrifying normalcy. So I tried never to see these men in terms of black or white. I saw them instead in degrees of soft and hard. It was the soft that I was trying to locate inside them; once I could get my fingers into it, the advantage was mine. If sitting down with abhorrent people and treating them as friends is what it took to get through to that soft place, then I was more than happy to pour the Scotch.
There is a letter from the American president Abraham Lincoln that helps illustrate what I believed I was doing. Though he is remembered as the man who freed the slaves, his real objective in the civil war was keeping the United States together. And so he wrote to a friend: “If I could preserve the Union and not free any slave, I would do it. If I could preserve the Union by freeing all of the slaves, I would do it. If I could preserve the Union by freeing some slaves, and keeping others in bondage, I would do it.”My only goal was saving the lives of the people upstairs, and questions of my taste in friendship were secondary-if they were relevant at all. If you stay friendly with monsters you can find cracks in their armor to exploit. Shut them out and they can kill you without a second thought. I reminded myself of this over and over.
Another principle helped me in these conversations, and it is this: Facts are almost irrelevant to most people. We make decisions based on emotion and then justify them later with whatever facts we can scrounge up in our defense.
When we shop for a car we make sure to investigate the gas mileage, look at the leg room, peer at the engine, and evaluate the cost, but the decision to buy it always comes down to a feeling in the gut. How will I look behind the wheel? Will it be fun to drive? What will my friends think? We congratulate ourselves later for a shrewd acquisition based on reasons a, b, and c, but the actual decision cannot be put in terms of an equation. People are really never as reasonable as they seem to be-in fact, “reason” is usually an afterthought, nothing more than a cover story for the feelings inside.
The same is true in politics. Let me give you a rather pertinent example. I seriously doubt the leadership of Rwanda really believed that average Tutsis were spies who had melted into the general population. I think they whipped up the flames of fear to create that belief. They were appealing to a dark place in the heart-that unreconstructed part of us that comes down from our ancestors, who lived in constant fear of beasts in the night. There was an emotional reason for people to hate and fear the Tutsi, and that nonsense about traitors in the villages was a set of “facts” grafted into place to justify the violence. And as I have said, the ethnic violence was only a tool for a set of cynical men to hold on to their power-which is perhaps man’s ultimate emotional craving.
It is a dismal principle. But I could use it to save lives.
When I took that colonel into my office, poured him some beer, and puffed up his ego it was not about the facts of the matter at all. It was about his insecurity in his position and his need to feel like an important person. I created a web of words in which the choice I did not want to see him make-killing Thomas-was running counter to his emotional needs. I made him believe that such a loutish task was beneath him. And he bought it, even though he probably had the power to snap his fingers and have me and other troublemakers chopped to bits within twenty minutes. It is not that the colonel was a stupid man. Even the best of us can be slaves to our self-regard.