They kept coming and coming. From houses in Kabeza to besieged churches in Nyamirambo, they heard on the radio trottoir about the safe haven at the Mille Collines.
One of them was a man named Augustin Hategeka, who had run from his home with his pregnant wife when the killings broke out. They had taken refuge in a patch of forest and ate scavenged food for several days. Augustin had stood guard, watching for killers as she gave birth to their new son in the shade of a bush. Not knowing if he would live, they named him on the spot: Audace, French for “brave.”With the help of some Hutu friends, the family found temporary refuge in St. Paul ’s pastoral center and I sent Army soldiers to fetch them to the Mille Collines. I met them at the entrance and made sure the baby was washed in hot water and covered in clean sheets.
I had known Augustin before the killings broke out and over the next several days we talked to each other about the things we had witnessed. Our conversation went something like this:
“My neighbors started killing my neighbors, ” he told me. “I saw people I have known for years taking out machetes and screaming orders. Old people were murdered. Children were murdered. I heard screams.”
“I know, ” I told him. “The same thing happened in Kabeza.”
“They chopped innocent people to pieces in the street. They cut the tendons in their legs so they could not run away.”
“It is disgusting.”
“I thought I knew these neighbors of mine, ” he told me.
“I don’t think anybody knows anybody anymore, ” I told him.
We looked at one another across my desk. I knew what each of us was thinking: Could we even trust each other? I know for my part that I trusted nobody completely anymore. To relax my suspicions could mean death for me and everybody I was trying to protect. I had heard too many horrid stories by that point. Rwanda had gone insane.
I remember another guest, whom I will here call Jane, who had worked as a nurse alongside my wife. Her story was not out of the ordinary for Rwanda that spring. She had been married to a man named Richard, a stout man with eyeglasses who worked as a civil servant. He was a quiet man, one of those people you don’t really notice in a group. That anyone would have considered those people a threat was ludicrous, Jane was of mixed race and the family had been marked for elimination. They tried to lie low in their house. A squad of Interahamwe broke inside and began to do their work. Jane managed to scramble into the kitchen and hide underneath a few sacks of charcoal. She stayed there while her husband and two children were cut into pieces in the other room. How she managed to remain quiet I will never know. She stayed under the coal for several hours and then crawled out to see the bodies of her family strewn about the front room. She fled from the house and, with the help of a neighbor, found her way to St. Paul ’s Church. We sent a car with policemen to pick her up. Her eyes were completely empty; it seemed the life had been washed out of them forever. I recognized the look. It was all over the hotel.
In all of this, I was fortunate to have a handful of soldiers who wore the blue helmet of the United Nations. I have previously expressed my disgust with the UN as a collective body, but those individuals serving in its name were capable of bravery. The men in my hotel displayed courage in going out onto the streets of Kigali to fetch the condemned. They were chauffeurs through hell. One in particular, a captain from Senegal named Mbaye Daigne, became legendary for his ability to dodge the Interahamwe. His companion, Captain Senyo of Ghana, displayed equal bravery at plucking refugees from their houses. It was a task that probably violated the ridiculous mission parameters handed down from New York, but these rules deserved to be broken.
These soldiers never used the hotel van; that would have been inviting death, because everybody in town knew that we were a haven for refugees. They used instead a white jeep with the UN logo. Rwandan soldiers also helped rescue people. One day they went out to find a prominent politician who had been hiding in a private house. On the way to the hotel they were stopped at a roadblock manned by an especially savage bunch of militia. There were corpses stacked up on either side, the hacked-up remains of people who had produced the wrong kind of identity card. The car got an unusually thorough search and they discovered the refugee hiding in the back.
“Where are you bringing this cockroach?” they demanded.
The soldier thought quickly. “We are taking him to the ministry of defense, ” he said. “Now let us pass before the Army starts to wonder where we are.”
That was good enough for the militia and our refugee made it inside the Mille Collines without further incident. I suppose it was fortunate for us there were no cell phones in Rwanda in 1994, before the widespread use of cell phones. As we have seen, the violence was inherently full of chaos and mistakes. The chain of command was often vague and the orders were sometimes confusing. In such an environment it was therefore possible to make a convincing bluff that you were working for somebody in authority without anyone able to check your story. If there had been cell phones I think many who escaped death would have been killed instead. But that is not to say that the phones would have all worked for evil. I have said before that tools of murder can be turned into tools of life. If we had had cell phones in Rwanda, the Interahamwe would have been more efficient, but we also would have been able to coordinate more rescues right under their noses.
I used my secret fax phone many times to get a bead on where a given refugee might be hiding. One of them was my friend Odette Nyiramilimo, and her husband, Jean-Baptiste Gasasira, and their children, who I hoped was still in her house. In the first days of the genocide they had traded their family car, their stereo, their television, and other goods to some policemen in exchange for a ride south of Kigali, to where they thought they might be safe. But the policemen reneged, leaving my friends to try and flee through the marshes on their own. They were captured by Interahamwe and led in for interrogation, which they managed to escape. But in the chaos of war somebody made a mistake and put their names on the list of people who had been eliminated. Odette and Jean-Baptiste heard their own names being read on the rebel army’s radio station as among those who had been killed. This took the heat away temporarily and, not knowing where else to go, they went back to their house and stayed out of sight, afraid even to answer the telephone. I rang and rang again. But one day when their food was almost gone, the phone started ringing.
“Don’t pick it up!” ordered Jean-Baptiste.
“It’s all the same, ” said Odette. “We are going to die of hunger here anyway.” She answered the phone and it was me on the other end.
She could not have been more surprised. “We thought you were dead!” she said.
“I thought you were dead, too, ” I answered. “But don’t go anywhere. I’m going to organize a rescue.”
“Who are you going to send?”
“Froduald Karamira.”
I meant it as a small joke, for he was a businessman who was notorious for his role in the massacres, but Odette missed my humor. “No, he will kill us all!” she said, and I made up a proverb on the spot: “If you want your goods to be safe, give them to a thief.” Though she was in tears, she laughed. It was good to hear.