All in all, I would call this a very good Rwandan no.
The peculiar avoidance of the word genocide was for a reason. The word is actually a relatively new one in the English language. It was coined by a Polish-born lawyer named Raphael Lemkin who then helped persuade the United Nations to pass a resolution, in 1948, expressly forbidding the destruction of a group of people because of their religion, nationality, or ethnicity. Lemkin had been horrified by the Turkish slaughter of the Armenians during World War I, but was even more appalled that it seemed to be no crime in the conventional sense. Nations could not be held accountable for murder in the same way people could. Furthermore, there was nothing legal or otherwise that separated the random killing of civilians from the attempt to eliminate an entire race.
Grappling for a way to express the magnitude of the Nazis’ plans for and actions against the Jews during World War II, Lemkin decided that we needed a new word to embody the concept. It had to be short and easy to pronounce and convey a certain horror. After some experimentation he chose genocide, blending the Greek word for “race” (genus) with the Latin word for “kill” (cide). The word caught on and was quickly added to Webster’s New International Dictionary. UN member states signed a treaty in 1948 threatening criminal penalties for the leaders of any regime found to have conducted an extermination campaign against a particular religious or racial group. But the United States dragged its feet, fearing the encroachment of a world government telling it how to act. It was not until 1986 that the U.S. Senate finally ratified the agreement. By then genocides had been carried out in Cambodia, in Nigeria, in Pakistan, in Burundi, and in many other places on the globe.
But this is characteristic. As Harvard University scholar Samantha Power has pointed out, the world’s foremost superpower, America, has almost never acted to stop a race of people from being exterminated, even when confronted with overwhelming evidence.
Lemkin’s idea was romantic and idealistic: That it is in the interests of the entire interconnected human family to see that no one part of it is wiped out. And yet ever since, the short-term interests of national sovereignty have always carried the day. So it was with Rwanda, where “acts of genocide may have occurred” but no actual genocide that anyone really cared to see. If U.S. officials actually spoke the word out loud they might have been morally and legally compelled to act under the terms of the 1948 treaty. Few officials in Washington wanted that with a midterm congressional election around the corner. Everyone in the Clinton administration was mindful of the disaster in Somalia that had occurred the previous October, when eighteen Army Rangers were killed in the Black Hawk Down incident that seemed to symbolize everything that could go wrong with peacekeeping missions. Even though our situation was radically different in origin and nature, anything that called for a commitment of American troops to Africa was anathema in the halls of the U.S. State Department. And, of course, there was no natural resource in Rwanda that anybody cared about either-only human beings in danger.
I still wonder how policy officials from that time can sit down at the table with their families and have any appetite for food, or go to sleep at night, knowing that they failed to act. Human beings were sacrificed for political convenience. This would be enough, I think, to turn any reasonable man into a prisoner of his own conscience for the rest of his life.
Even a proposal to jam the frequencies of RTLM was rejected, on the grounds that the Army National Guard airplane required for the overflights cost eighty-five hundred dollars an hour to fly. If that plane had been kept aloft for every second of the genocide it would have worked out to about twenty-four dollars for each life taken that might otherwise have been saved.
Before the killing in the hotel could start they would have to get rid of me. I was standing between them and the prize targets inside. We had senators, doctors, ministers, priests, maids, peasants, housewives, intellectuals. Inside the Mille Collines was the remnant of what might be called the “Tutsi aristoc-racy”-the living embodiment of the phantom enemy that the hate radio was preaching against-as well as a good contingent of moderate Hutus who did not agree with the genocide. The hotel was becoming a holy grail of the killers, a giant resting place of cockroaches they were eager to wipe out for good. I was convinced we would be invaded by the militia any day. I knew also that that would mark the day of my death. We were all condemned prisoners, but we did not know the date of our execution, and we woke up every morning wondering if we were in our last few hours of consciousness.
In the early morning of April 23 I went to bed at around 4:00 A. M. I had spent several hours on the phone in the office, getting nowhere, as usual. I quietly unlocked the door of the suite so as not to wake up the other occupants, and fell into the spot that Tatiana had saved for me on the bed. I knew nothing but blackness for two hours and then I felt my wife pushing me. “There is someone on the phone that wants you, ” she said. You could still make phone calls at that point, and it was the reception desk asking for me.
A man whom I’ll call Lieutenant Mageza came on the line. I knew him, but his voice sounded like cold marble. “Are you the manager?” he asked.
I was still fighting my way out of a deep sleep and my answer was thick.
“Yes. What is it?”
“I have an order from the Ministry of Defense for you to evacuate the hotel within thirty minutes, ” he said.
That woke me up.
“You want me to evacuate the hotel?”
“If you do not I will do it for you.”
“What do you want me to tell the guests? Where are they going to go? Who is taking them? What security has been organized?”
The lieutenant was having none of it. “Do you not understand what I am saying? This hotel must be evacuated within thirty minutes. Tell the people here to ‘go as they came.’” He used an expression in Kinyarwanda that means, in effect, if they came by car, they will leave by car. If they came on foot, they will leave by foot. The vehicles that had brought most of the guests were long gone, of course, and so most would have to simply walk away. This spelled certain death for nearly everybody in the hotel. But I didn’t get the impression that the lieutenant was concerned.
I made an instant guess while I sat there in my underwear. If I was wrong, more than a thousand people would die. But I couldn’t dwell on it; I had to take action. And my suspicion was that this lieutenant had not been ordered to do the killing himself. The idea was to shoo us out and let the street militia do the actual murdering. It would be less systematic, and many would surely get away, but it would eliminate the government’s long-standing problem of the Mille Collines.
I decided then to-as the American phrase goes-kiss his ass.
“Yes, I understand what you are saying right now. I appreciate you informing me of the situation. I will comply with what you say. But can I please just have half an hour to get myself awake and get showered before I do what you want? Then I will begin the evacuation.”
“Thirty minutes, ” he said, and hung up.
I did not wash. I did not even put my pants on. I ran five flights up to the roof and looked down at the street. What I saw opened a hole in my stomach. The militia had the place completely surrounded. There were hundreds of them holding spears, machetes, and rifles. It would be a killing zone here in an hour.
I raced down the stairs and back into my room, where I quickly calculated global time. It was early to be calling Europe, but far too late to be calling the United States, which had been worthless anyway. There was only one thing I could think to do: Get on the phone with somebody in the Rwandan Army who outranked the lieutenant and could order him to rescind his evacuation order. I pulled out the black binder and started calling all my generals. Though it was early in the morning I was able to reach several, and I described the threat with what I hoped was the right amount of urgency. Those that I reached knew that the Mille Collines was being set up and were not willing to say who had given the order. I was still phoning for help when a knock came at the door from a reception clerk. Somebody wanted to see me out front, he said. I started to dress, thinking it was probably the last time I would ever put on a pair of pants or button a shirt. Why hadn’t I taken more pleasure out of these mundane tasks of everyday life?