Authors: Paul Rusesabagina
There were two main reasons why the Hotel Mille Collines was left alone in those early days even while churches and schools
became abattoirs.
The first was the initial confusion—and even timidity—of the militias. Raiding the hotel would have been a fairly high-profile
operation and one that surely would have angered a lot of people in power. The Mille Collines had an image of being linked
with the ruling elite and was viewed as something not to be tampered with. This mind-set was not set in stone, however, and
I’m sure it would have changed as the genocide wore on and the killers grew bolder.
The second reason we were able to get some breathing room is one I have already mentioned. We had five policemen standing
outside thanks to my new friend, Commander Habyarimana. As fragile as this protection was, it was still much better than what
we got from the UN, which amounted to just about nothing. They had a force of 2, 700 troops stationed in Rwanda when the president
was assassinated, and the majority of them had been evacuated along with all the foreigners. But about 500 peacekeepers were
to be left in the country—God knows why—and 4 of them were staying as guests at the Mille Collines. They were well meaning
but useless.
On April 16 I sent General Dallaire a letter informing him of our situation and asking him for some additional soldiers to
safeguard our refugees. I heard later that he ordered the Bangladeshis to come help us but that their commander flat-out refused.
Dallaire then rescinded his order. This was appalling to me, and I was not even a military man. This incident underlined what
a later United Nations report termed “grave problems of command and control” within the mission and heightened my feeling
that Dallaire could have and should have done more to put his men in between the killers and their victims.
This is not a condemnation of Romeo Dallaire as a person. I always liked him and felt he had a compassionate heart and a strong
sense of morality. He had acted with honor and determination under extremely bad circumstances—and with a shameful lack of
support from his bosses on the UN staff and on the Security Council. Early in the genocide he had insisted that with just
five thousand well-equipped soldiers he could have stopped the killings, and nobody has ever doubted his judgment. Dallaire
had also proved himself to be a shrewd commander of the media during the crisis, granting multiple radio interviews in an
attempt to get the world to pay attention to what was happening here. I would gladly share a cognac with him today, and I
would hope we could also share a laugh. But I still feel he should have disobeyed his foolish orders from New York and acted
more aggressively to stop street murders from taking place. There is no doubt he would have taken more casualties and turned
the UN into a third belligerent in the civil war, but I am convinced this action would have slapped the world in the face
and forced it to do something about the unspeakable carnage here. At the very least it would have forced the UN to beef up
its peacekeeping force and send us real fighters instead of inept draftees from nations who seemed more interested in collecting
their per diem payments from the UN instead of doing anything meaningful.
If he did not have the stomach to do this then I think he should have made a spectacle out of resigning in protest of his
hopeless job description. This, too, would have drawn some outrage to what was shaping up to be the most rapid genocide in
world history. That he stayed in his job like a good soldier was a signal of a trust that the UN strategy of nonengagement
was going to be a workable policy even though it appears despicable in retrospect.
In my opinion the UN was not just useless during the genocide. It was
worse
than useless. It would have been better off for us if they did not exist at all, because it allowed the world to think that
something was being done, that some parental figure was minding the store. It created a fatal illusion of safety. Rwanda was
left with a little more than five hundred poorly trained UN soldiers who weren’t even authorized to draw their weapons to
stop a child from being sacrificed right in front of them. A total withdrawal would have been preferable to this farce.
The
grounds of the Mille Collines were surrounded by a fence of bamboo and wire. It was about six feet high and intended by the
architect to provide a visual sense of a snug compound, all the better for nervous foreign visitors to feel like their hotel
was an island of safety embedded in the street grid of Kigali. If you pushed on the fence hard enough it would fall over.
It provided an illusion of protection, nothing more.
From the corridor windows of the west wing, and from some of the room balconies, you could see over the top of this fence
and also through the gaps. There were figures passing back and forth all day long on the other side, like backstage players
making shadows on a curtain. Most were carrying spears and machetes. Some stopped to peer at us through the fence before moving
on.
All the refugees, including my wife and children, were terrified of these shadows behind the bamboo. Tatiana’s family was
living in a small town near the city of Butare, where the killings had not yet started but were imminent. She was terrified
for them, terrified for herself and our children and me, and I cannot say I blame her. Everyone in the hotel felt a similar
sense of dread. I felt terribly exposed here, but I did not see an alternative. If we left it would be a sign to the killers
that the Mille Collines was being surrendered. Besides, where else could we go? Nowhere in Rwanda was safe.
This belief of mine was the subject of a bitter fight between us. My wife confronted me in the parking lot and insisted we
drive to safety in my home area of Murama. To back up her argument she enlisted my friend Aloise Karasankwavu, an executive
with the Commercial Bank who was also in fear of his life. He was a persuasive speaker, and we jousted.
“In all of history there has never been a war brought to that little town, ” he told me. And in a sense he was right—at least
in my own memory. The uprisings of 1959 and 1973 had created a lot of prejudice in my hometown, but they had never resulted
in massacres. But there was no guarantee that blood wasn’t being spilled there right now, without our knowledge.
“My friend, the whole country has gone mad, ” I told him. “Do you think Murama will be spared?”
“You are being misled by the Europeans, Paul. Even the
mwami
used to bring his cows there for safekeeping during times of trouble. Throughout history it has always been a refuge.”
“Aloise, even if that were true, how do you think you are going to get there? By flying? There are hundreds of roadblocks
out there. You will be stopped and possibly killed.”
I looked at my wife, whose eyes were red and miserable. I only wished we had stayed in Brussels a week ago. I wanted to go
to Murama as badly as she did—I still had brothers and sisters living there and I was tremendously worried for them—but I
knew it would be risking death to go out onto the roads.
I am not necessarily proud of what I did next, but it happened. I lost my temper.
“Listen, ” I told her, “you have a driver’s license. You know how to drive.”
I held out the keys to the Suzuki jeep.
“Take these, ” I told her. “
You
go to Murama.”
She looked back at me with furious eyes. We loved each other fiercely, but she was a Tutsi and I was a Hutu. This trivia of
ancestry had never mattered the slightest bit in our marriage, but it mattered to the killers around us, and I loathed Rwanda
more than I ever had before because of it. Once again I hated myself for being a lucky Hutu. Many years before Tatiana’s father
had taken the precaution of changing the whole family’s identification cards to read “Hutu, ” but she might have been recognized
by someone at a roadblock. We both knew this.
I was, of course, not going to surrender the keys to my wife under any circumstances. I only wanted to make a point. But it
was a harsh one, and perhaps too harsh. I was trying to highlight our need to stay where we were and wait for the bloodletting
to stop. But my wife was hurt by my words.
Aloise later took his wife and children and hitched a ride out of town, trying to get to Murama. He did not make five kilometers.
The militia forced them all out of the car and separated him from his family. Amazingly, nobody was killed. Aloise went on
foot to the village of Nyanza, and later on to Murama.
I would learn it was extremely fortunate that we decided not to leave the capital.
The Mille Collines grew more and more crowded. The rumor had spread through town that the hotel was a safe haven from the
killers. This was far from the truth, but hope becomes a kind of insanity in times of trouble. Those cunning or lucky enough
to dodge the roadblocks were welcomed inside, even though the hotel stood every chance of becoming a killing zone without
warning.
We charged no money for rooms. All the usual rules were irrelevant; we were now more of a refugee camp than a hotel. To take
cash away from anyone would also be to strip them of money they might need to bribe their way out of being murdered. Some
guests of mine who were wealthy came to me with a proposal that they would sign a letter of guarantee promising to pay Sabena
when the trouble was over, and I accepted this. But nobody was asked for money.
One exception to this rule was liquor. Those who could afford it were allowed to buy cocktails and bottles of beer—never invite
a man without one, even in a crisis—and I used the proceeds to help buy food. It was one way of passing the hat. I also asked
my bosses at Sabena to send me more cash and they were able to smuggle two hundred thousand Rwandan francs to me with the
help of a humanitarian organization that I should not name here. Room, however, was our greatest asset, and one that could
not have a price tag attached. I guarded it closely and had to fight for it on one occasion. I have already mentioned my battle
with the reception staff. One of them—Jacques, my problem employee—had taken it upon himself to live in the manager’s apartment
with his girlfriend. They were in there alone, and wasting crucial space. Other recalcitrant employees had followed his example
and were claiming the choicest suites for themselves. In my mind, nobody had this prerogative. We needed to conserve and share
everything we had, and that included the most precious thing we had to offer.
So I went to their room and knocked.“I have two choices for you, ” I said. “Either you can move to smaller rooms or you can
have some new neighbors.” After that I felt free to assign other refugees to sleep in the rooms they had been hogging for
themselves. That put a quick end to their party. It also freed up yet more accommodations for those people who kept finding
their way to the Mille Collines from the mayhem outside the fence. I resolved that nobody who could make it here would be
turned away.
I cannot say that life was normal inside that crowded building, but what I saw in there convinced me that ordinary human beings
are born with an extraordinary ability to fight evil with decency. We had Hutu and Tutsi sleeping beside each other. Strangers
on the floor, many of whom had witnessed their families being butchered, would sometime sleep spoon style just to feel the
touch of another.
We struggled to preserve routines. It helped keep us sane. The bishop from St. Michael’s parish, a man named Father Nicodem,
was one of our guests and he started holding regular masses in the ballroom. There was no such thing as privacy, but occasionally
the occupants of a room would clear out to give a husband and a wife some room to make love. Several women became pregnant
during the genocide, a way of fighting death with life, I suppose.
There was even a wedding. A seventeen-year-old girl was pregnant and her father was a very traditional Muslim who wanted nothing
more than to see her married so the child would not be born outside wedlock. The bishop agreed to perform the sacrament in
the ballroom. She was married right there to her boyfriend, and nobody thought to question the difference in faiths.
I suppose it is natural to want a form of government, even in times of chaos (perhaps
especially
in times of chaos), and so five of the guests agreed to serve as a kind of high council to mediate disputes between the residents.
I met regularly with them as a sort of chairman. You might have called the Hotel Mille Collines a kind of constitutional monarchy
in those days, because I reserved the right to make all the final judgments on matters of day-to-day living. My kingship came
not from a heavenly birthright but from the personnel department of the Sabena Corporation sent via fax from Brussels.
In mid-April we lost our water and electricity. The killers had cut all of our utility lines in an attempt to make us uncomfortable.
Perhaps they thought we would all drift away and then they could finish us off outside. It confirmed for me what I already
knew—that they had designs to murder us—but it also gave me a bit of hope. The militia still did not want to risk an overt
massacre at the hotel. We ran our emergency generator for a while with smuggled gasoline, but it eventually broke down, and
so most of our time was spent in darkness.
Life immediately became even harder. The absence of electric lights created a mood I can only describe as disintegrating.
How secure those lights had somehow made us feel! Everybody knew the killers liked to do their work in the dark, and the darkness
inside the hotel made it feel like a permanent midnight. The absence of light created a sense of decay around the world, which
appeared to be running down on its axis, its center breaking apart into mindless pieces. Our last days would be spent in shadows.
Each room held an average of eight frightened and brutalized people. They slept fitfully in the humid dark and often awoke
to the sounds of a neighbor shouting or whimpering in a dream. There were mothers who cried out for sons who they would never
see again, husbands who wept in secret for their disappeared wives. And though few people wanted to say it out loud, I think
most shared my belief that we would all wind up dead ourselves when the militias outside finally decided to raid the Mille
Collines. Those hotel rooms were like death-row prison cells, but we knew they were all that kept us from joining the ranks
of the murdered for one more day. I worried there would be no more space, but we kept finding ways to fit more people inside
our walls. I suppose it is like the story of the oil not running out in the Temple of Jerusalem. There was always more room.
I think I would have ordered my guests to start lying on top of one another if it would have meant saving a few more lives.
And I don’t think anybody inside the Mille Collines would have objected.