This is why I say that the individual’s most potent weapon is a stubborn belief in the triumph of common decency. It is a simple belief, but it is not at all naive. It is, in fact, the shrewdest attitude possible. It is the best way to sabotage evil.
Let me tell you the most important thing I learned about evil. Evil is a big, ugly, hulking creature. It is a formidable enemy in a frontal attack. But it is not very smart and not very fast. You can beat it if you can slip around its sides. Evil can be frustrated by people you might think are weaklings. Quiet, ordinary people are often the only people with the real ability to defeat evil. They can give it the Rwandan no.
I was a good-natured fellow with the guests who came into the hotel, no matter if they were good friends or odious hate mongers. This was in my nature. There are very few people with whom I could not sit and enjoy a glass of cognac. Except in extreme circumstances it very rarely pays to show hostility to the people in your orbit. And so when evil dropped by for a drink I was able to have a conversation. I could find its weaknesses and seek out its soft spots. I could see the vanity and the insecurity and even the ghost of common decency inside the minds of killers that would allow me to save lives. I could quietly flip evil’s assets against itself. What happened at the Mille Collines was the most extreme form of pragmatism. We would go to any length and do whatever it took to save as many lives as possible. That was the basic ideology. That was the only ideology. There was nothing particularly special about this-it only seemed like the normal thing to do.
I looked into the abyss during the genocide, and the abyss looked back and we were able to reach a compromise that was actually no compromise at all. The swimming pool in which babies might have been drowned was turned into a village well. Policemen who might have been directing death squads were instead posted at my front gate to help me keep out the killers. The hotel itself was supposed to have been a gathering place where refugees could be lured with false promises and then killed as a bunch. But it never happened. Tools of death became reappropriated. They were now tools of life.
I remember reading this in the Bible when I was a young man: “What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.” Our time here on the earth is short, and our chance to make a difference is tiny. For me the grinding blocks of history came together in such a way that I was able to take what fragile defense I had and hold it in place for seventy-six days. If I was able to give much it was only because I had some useful things from my life to give. I am a hotel manager, trained to negotiate contracts and provide shelter for those who need it. My job never changed, even in a sea of fire.
Wherever the killing season should next begin and people should become strangers to their neighbors and themselves, my hope is that there will still be those ordinary men who say a quiet no and open the rooms upstairs.
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
There have been several excellent accounts of the Rwandan genocide and the authors of this book did not hesitate to mine them for context and detail. These other works are gratefully acknowledged here.
The most rigorous and complete autopsy is Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda by Alison Des Forges (New York: Human Rights Watch and International Federation of Human Rights, 1999). Des Forges and a team of researchers used Rwandan government documents from that period to produce a 771-page report of unparalleled authority. Philip Gourevitch’s We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda (New York: Picador, 1998) is a work of distinguished reportage and unforgettable writing. Shake Hands with the Deviclass="underline" The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda by Romeo Dallaire (New York: Avalon, 2004) is a cri de coeur that also happens to be a fine work of journalism. Season of Blood: A Rwandan Journey by Fergal Keane (London: Penguin Books, 1995) has a good section on Rwanda ’s murky politics of ethnicity. Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak by Jean Hatzfeld, and translated by Linda Coverdale (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005) explores the motivations for mass murder from the most authoritative source possible: the killers themselves. Two quotes in the last chapter were drawn from Hatzfeld’s impressive and troubling work.
Justice on the Grass: Three Rwandan Journalists, Their Trial for War Crimes, and a Nation’s Quest for Redemption by Dina Temple-Raston (New York: Free Press, 2005) contains an excellent dissection of RTLM’s role in inciting the massacres. A portion of a broadcast is quoted from Temple-Raston’s work. The United Nations’ report on the disaster, entitled “Report of the Independent Inquiry into the Actions of the United Nations During the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda, ” by a committee led by Ingvar Carlsson, Han Sung-Joo, and Rufus M. Kapolati and dated December 15, 1999, is a blunt condemnation of the various missteps in New York that cost the lives of approximately half a million people. The Key to My Neighbor’s House by Elizabeth Neuffer (New York: Picador, 2001; London: Bloomsbury, 2001) asks penetrating questions about justice in the aftermath of genocide, and Samantha Power’s A Problem from Helclass="underline" America and the Age of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 2002; London: Flamingo, 2004) is an indictment of the West’s tendency to fold in the face of evil. A memo from the U.S. State Department is drawn from Power’s book. Some of the information about the forgotten heroes of 1994, as well as some colonial history, was drawn from materials at the excellent Gisozi Genocide Museum in Kigali.
Land of a Thousand Hills: My Life in Rwanda by Rosamond Halsey Carr with Ann Howard Halsey (New York: Viking Penguin, 1999; London: Viking/Allen Lane, 1999) is the autobiography of Mugongo’s orphanage director, who is a treasure of Central Africa and a sharp observer of politics and people. Finally, Keir Pearson and Terry George’s masterful screenplay for the movie Hotel Rwanda, reprinted in their book Hotel Rwanda: Bringing the True Story of an African Hero to Film (New York: Newmarket Press, 2005) ensured that the events at the Hotel Mille Collines would be known throughout the world.
A NOTE ON THE AUTHORS
Paul Rusesabagina was the manager of the Hotel des Diplomats and later of the Hotel des Mille Collines in Kigali, Rwanda, during the Rwandan genocide. He is a recipient of the US Presidential Medal of Freedom and the National Civil Rights Museum’s 2005 Freedom Medal.
He left Rwanda in 1995 and now lives with his family in Belgium.
Tom Zoellner is a freelance journalist and writer, who has worked as a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle. He lives in New York.
