I am a hotel manager.
EIGHT
WAKING UP BEFORE THE SUNRISE has been my habit ever since I was a boy. I seem biologically incapable of sleeping in. Before the killing started that predawn quiet was one of my favorite times of the day. I would slip out of bed gently, so as not to wake Tatiana, and go out into the yard and putter around at various tasks. There was a radio on the outside ledge and I would listen to the news. I suppose it is that bred-in-the-bone Rwandan love for news. Besides, a hotel manager needs to know the gossip. This was one of the only times in the day I would have all to myself.
During the genocide I yearned to have one of those quiet mornings in the yard, when the news was just soccer scores and road closings instead of incitements to murder and lists of the dead. I still woke up in the hour before dawn, in a room jammed with people, and I craved that time when I was all alone. So I developed an early-morning ritual of visiting my favorite spot in the whole hotel.
To get there you take the stairs to the top floor. The rooftop restaurant and the conference rooms are down the hall to the right. You turn left off the staircase and enter the second unmarked door on the south side of the hallway. Behind this is another door, but this one is locked. You open it with a key that only the manager and the chief of security possess. You go up another flight of metal stairs, and there you are on the roof, with the whole of the city of Kigali spread out before you.
The hotel was built on the slope of Kiyovu Hill and the panorama is gorgeous. Even in the midst of war and death this aerie of mine had a peaceful aspect if you didn’t look at any spot too closely and focused just on the hills and the sky. To look at the streets for longer than a few seconds was to see homes with broken windows, wrecked vehicles, roadblocks, and corpses everywhere. Better to focus on the distance than the details.
To the west, along the line of the far mountain ridge, you could see the road that snaked away down the valley. It led eventually to the city of Gitarama, where the crisis government held its seat. To the north was the area held by the rebel army. In the middle was Amahoro Stadium, where I knew there were over ten thousand refugees crammed inside, sleeping on the soccer field. It was a larger version of the Mille Collines, only with a different ethnic majority and living conditions that were far worse than what we had. There was nothing to cover anybody from the rain. Those who were wounded had no real medical care and their cuts grew infected and gangrenous. There was nowhere for people to relieve themselves and so the field became a stinking heath.
Between the army lines was the no-man’s-land. There is a saying in Rwanda: “The elephants fight, but it is the grass that suffers.” Caught between the armies, we were the grass. When I came here at night I could see the flashes of gunfire and the red tracer bullets whizzing across the sky. But early mornings were calmer, the mortar shelling quiet and the popping of gunfire only occasional, heralding not a clash between troops but the killing of a lone victim or his family.
These mornings on my roof, with the sky melting to blue from purple, I took the time to prepare myself for what I knew was coming. I was going to die. I had done far too much to cross the architects of the genocide. The only question would be the exact time, and the method of my death, and that of my wife and our children.
I dreaded machetes. The Interahamwe were known to be extremely cruel with the people they chopped apart; first cutting tendons so the victims could not run away, then removing limbs so that a person could see their body coming apart slowly. Family members were often forced to watch, knowing they were next. Their wives and their children were often raped in front of them while this was happening. Priests helped kill their congregations. In some cases, the congregations helped kill their priests. Tutsi wives went to sleep next to their Hutu husbands and awoke to find the blade of a machete sawing into their neck, and above them, the grimacing face of the man who had sworn to love and cherish them for life. And Tutsi wives also killed their husbands. Children threw their grandparents down pit toilets and heaved rocks on top of them until the cries stopped. Unborn babies were sliced from their mothers’ wombs and tossed about like soccer balls. Severed heads and genitals were on display. The dark lust unleashed in Rwanda went beyond friendships and beyond politics and beyond even hate itself-it had become killing for killing’s sake, killing for sport, killing for nothing. It raged on, all around the hotel, on the capital’s streets and in the communes and in the hills and in every little spidery valley.
There was a stash of money in the hotel safe. The money was for a last bribe, something to pay the militia to let me and my family be shot rather than face a machete.
Seven time zones away, in the United States, the diplomatic establishment was tying itself up in knots. Everybody wanted to avoid saying a certain word.
A Pentagon study paper dated May 1, 1994, sums up the prevailing attitude. The author was suggesting a way for the United States to take limited action in Rwanda without getting in too deep. “Genocide investigation: Language that calls for an international investigation of human rights abuses and possible violations of the genocide convention-Be Careful. Legal at State was worried about this yesterday-Genocide finding could commit [the U.S. government] to actually ‘do something.’” So the pressure was on. There had to be a way to call what was happening by something other than its rightful name.
It is not as though there was an information blackout. The U.S. government-and, in fact, most of its citizens who watched the news-knew what was taking place in Rwanda. Romeo Dallaire had made himself available to anyone who wanted to interview him by telephone, and had taken to calling the slaughter “ethnic cleansing.” The BBC’s courageous reporter Mark Doyle was granted access to the hopeless UN mission and filed a story every day about the ongoing slaughter. Journalists slowly realized this was more than just another African civil war. And by the end of May the broadcasts of the nightly television news and the newspapers in America were full of accounts of mass murders and bodies floating down Akagera River toward Lake Victoria. But even with this incontrovertible evidence the U.S. government would not let itself admit that what was happening was a genocide. This played right into the official lies of the génocidaires: The killings were a spontaneous uprising of grief among the villagers at the assassination of the president and not something that had been carefully planned.
The official U.S. State Department phrasing was nothing less than bizarre: “Acts of genocide may have occurred.”When spokeswoman Christine Shelley was asked how many acts of genocide it takes to equal a genocide she did a clumsy dance by saying that it could not be determined if the violence was directed toward a certain ethnic group-never mind that five minutes of listening to RTLM would have told them all they needed to know. “The intentions, the precise intentions, and whether or not these are just directed episodically or with the intention of actually eliminating groups in whole or in part, this is a more complicated issue to address, ” she said. “I’m not able to look at all of those criteria at this moment and say yes, no. It’s something that requires very careful study before we can make a final determination.”