Words are the most powerful tools of all, and especially the words that we pass to those who come after us. I will never forget that favorite saying of my father’s: “Whoever does not talk to his father never knows what his grandfather said.” So I decided to write this book for the sake of the historic record.
I am a Rwandan, after all, and I know that all things pass away but history. History never dies. It is what defines us as a civilization, and we live out our collective histories every day, in ways both good and evil. Over and over people kept telling me that what I did at the Mille Collines was heroic, but I never saw it that way, and I still don’t. I was providing shelter. I was a hotel manager doing his job. That is the best thing anyone can say about me, and all I ever wanted. And that’s really the best I have to give.
ELEVEN
IN A VILLAGE SOUTH OF KIGALI is a church that is no longer a church. The compound is surrounded with a low stone wall and the ground is covered with weeds. The building itself is shaped like an auditorium; the walls are of red brick. The floor is poured concrete. The stained-glass windows are cracked and broken. Spatters of grenade fragments are in the walls and the tin ceiling is shot though with hundreds of bullet holes. On sunny days you can see shafts of thin light streaming through, and the spots they make on the floor look like a constellation of stars.
This is the former parish church in the community of Nyamata. The name means “place of milk.” The church had been renowned as a safe haven during Rwanda ’s past troubles. When the killings started in the spring of 1994 the Tutsis of the region were encouraged to hide in the sanctuary. The refugees locked the iron gates and prayed while their friends and neighbors eagerly struggled to break inside to murder them. On April 14 the Presidential Guard was called in from Kigali and they threw grenades at the gates, blasting them into shards. The ordinary people and the soldiers flooded in and thousands of people were massacred.
The building has since been seized from the Vatican. It is now an official memorial to the genocide, but it functions also as a crypt. There are burlap bags full of skulls in a side room. Some of them bear a slice where a machete chopped into the brain. Out in the backyard is an open tomb with thousands of skeletons, with the skulls arranged in neat rows, the bones stacked up on wooden shelves. Most of them were found in the sanctuary, where the bodies were stacked three deep, but others were recovered from mass graves and pit toilets around the village. The altar is covered with a bloodstained cloth. The back wall has stains on the bricks left by the children whose heads were smashed against it. Quietness reigns.
Standing out front is a sign draped with a purple cloth. It bears a pledge in four languages: “Never Again.”
We all know these words. But we never seem to hear them.
What happened? Hitler’s Final Solution was supposed to have been the last expression of this monstrous idea-the final time the world would tolerate a deliberate attempt to exterminate an entire race. But genocide remains the most pressing human rights question of the twenty-first century.
Each outbreak has its differences on the surface. In Cambodia slaughter was done in the name of absurd political dogma; in Bosnia the killings erupted after the fragmenting of a multiethnic federation; the Kurds in Iraq were gassed when they demanded independence from a dictator; and today in Sudan innocent people are dying because they occupy oil-rich territory coveted by the ethnic majority.
Rwanda had its own unique set of circumstances. We had a radio station that broadcast vicious racial humor-“jokes” that sounded more and more like commands with each telling. We had bad leadership concerned more for its own survival than the needs of the people. We had a long history of grabbing impunity, in which people were allowed to get away with the most flagrant property crimes and job discriminations so long as they were committed against Tutsis. We had a history of tit-for-tat massacres in the countryside that were never investigated. And we had a hungry and desperate population that was taught to see the midnight murder of their neighbors as a potential economic windfall.
Look closely at each of the world’s recent genocides, however, and the surface differences burn away. The core of genocide is always the same. They erupt under the cover of a war. They are the brainchildren of insecure leaders eager for more power. Governments ease their people into them gradually. Other nations must be persuaded to look away. And all genocides rely heavily on the power of group thinking to embolden the everyday killers.
This last factor is the most powerful commonality of all, and without it no genocide could take place.
Let me explain what I mean. We were all born with a powerful herd instinct and it can force otherwise rational people to act in inexplicable ways. I would never have believed this to be true if I hadn’t seen my own neighbors-gentle, humorous, seemingly normal people-turn into killers in the space of two days. Ordinary citizens, just like you and me, were bullied and cajoled into doing things they would never have dreamed possible without the reinforcing eyes of the group upon them. And in this way murder becomes not just possible but routine. It even gets boring after a while.
The French reporter Jean Hatzfeld earned the trust of ten imprisoned Rwandan murderers, and they described to him the workaday business of human slaughter. “In the end, a man is like an animal; you give him a whack on the head, and down he goes, ” said one. “In the first days someone who had already slaughtered chickens-and especially goats-had an advantage, understandably. Later, everybody grew accustomed to the new activities and the laggards caught up.”
Said another: “At the start of the killings, we worked fast and skimmed along because we were eager. In the middle of the killings, we killed casually. Time and triumph encouraged us to loaf around. At first we could feel more patriotic or more deserving when we managed to catch some fugitives. Later on, those feelings deserted us. We stopped listening to the fine words on the radio and from the authorities. We killed to keep the job going.”
It is no surprise to me at all that the young teenagers in the refugee camps could have been organized into Interahamwe chapters in the winter of 1993. Something magical happens to you when you join a group, a feeling I can only describe as freedom. I felt it myself on various soccer teams when I was growing up. I also felt it when I joined the staff of the Hotel Mille Collines. It is possible to lose oneself in the purpose of the collective effort; we embrace this feeling of being dissolved into something bigger because at our cores we are lonely. We are trapped inside our own skulls. But we thirst for that unity, that lost wholeness that we imagine we had before we were born. That feeling of warm acceptance we get inside a group is addictive; it is one of the most powerful human urges. And when your individuality is dissolved into the will of the pack you then become free to act in any way the pack directs. The thought of acting otherwise becomes as abhorrent as death. We fear the group will withdraw its acceptance from us and we will be cast out and the love will die. We would do almost anything to keep this from happening. Tyrants understand this. They try to point these groups like spears in any direction that serves their aims. If nobody can find it within themselves to stand outside the group and find the inner strength to say no, then the mass of men will easily commit atrocities for the sake of keeping up personal appearances. The lone man is ridiculed and despised, but he is the only one who can stand between humanity and the abyss.