Authors: Paul Rusesabagina
Belgium has a very generous social service net for its citizens, and even for the recent immigrants, but I felt very strongly
that I did not want to live on public assistance or take any kind of handout. I was restless and eager to go to work. Since
managing a hotel was not in the cards for me anymore, I decided to become another kind of manager. I had a little cash saved
up from the Diplomates contract and I used twenty thousand dollars of it to buy a Nissan car and a permit to run a taxi company.
The city of Brussels requires you to take an exam to be a taxi driver and I passed on the first try. I was now a company with
one employee: myself. There is a saying in Rwanda: “If you want to own cows you must sleep in the fields with them.” In other
words, money comes only with long workdays. So I started going to work at 5:00 A. M. and coming home at 7:00 P. M. The streets
in Brussels are tangled like spaghetti, and many switch their names after only a few blocks, but I quickly learned the major
arteries and then started to master the side streets. I cruised all over the city dozens of times in a day, usually with a
stranger in the backseat, a businessperson usually, or somebody with dealings at the European Community headquarters.
Most of the people who were in my cab for more than half an hour became my friends. Quite a few were talkative people and
would want to know the name of my home country. When I told them “Rwanda” it usually led into conversations about the genocide,
which most everyone had heard about. I was occasionally not in the mood to talk about it, but on most days I was, and I would
answer their questions as best I could. There were just a handful of passengers, on very long rides, who got to hear me tell
the story of the Hotel Mille Collines, and they always left my cab in silence.
Sometimes very early in the mornings, when the sun was not yet up, I would cruise on the cobblestones of the Place des Palais,
past the antique lamps in front of the neoclassical Royal Palace where King Leopold II had lived in the early part of the
twentieth century. His monarchy had been propped up and financed by the occupation of the Congo and the fantastic profits
from rubber exports. But his agents had used terrible force to collect the rubber from the Africans and had instituted an
economy that was slavery in all but name. They were known for chopping the hands from able-bodied men who failed to make their
quotas. Their colleagues had not been so systematically brutal in Rwanda, but they were the instigators of the divide-and-conquer
strategy that turned Hutu against Tutsi, brother against brother, all for the sake of profit.
The profits had come to this marbled jewel of a city, and I circled around it in my taxicab, alone, looking for anyone who
might need a ride.
There is not much left to tell about my new life in Belgium. My wife and I made some friends from Rwanda—fellow postgenocide
immigrants like us—and they have their own stories to tell. When the evening is late and the empty glasses multiply on the
coffee table, we will sometimes talk about what we have seen with each other, and there will be crying and gentle embraces.
We have friends among other Rwandans who have lived here a long time and were fortunate enough to be elsewhere when the killing
started. One thing is unique among these expatriates: We haven’t the slightest regard for each other’s status as a Hutu or
a Tutsi. I think the shared experience of being a stranger in a semistrange land makes us all just Rwandans, and for that
I am proud of my countrymen.
About fifteen thousand of us now make the old colonial capital our home, and there are a few specialty stores where we can
buy goods that remind us of where we came from. We go to each other’s baptisms, marriages, and funerals and it is enormously
good for us to hear Kinyarwanda and drink beer with others who understand us in a way that the Belgians never can. These events
usually go on well into the evening and are accompanied by hours of talk, laughter, and dancing. I suppose these are ordinary
enough rituals for an immigrant, but it means so much to me to feel that connection with my old country.
But as Rwanda will always be with me, so too will the genocide. It is as much a part of me as the shade of my eyes or the
names of my children; it is never far from my thoughts and I cannot talk for more than one hour with a fellow Rwandan before
one or both of us will begin to tell a story or make a reference to what happened during those three months of blood in 1994.
It is the darkest bead on our national necklace, and one we all must wear, no matter how far we have traveled to get away.
Killers still walk free in Rwanda and in the world, and through my mind. I remember one evening in Brussels, at a banquet
after someone’s wedding, when I saw a familiar face in the crowd. It was a man I hadn’t seen in years, a Hutu neighbor of
mine from the Kabeza neighborhood where my family and I had lived. I had seen him in the opening days of the genocide wearing
an Army uniform and carrying a machete. It seems likely that he participated in some murders, or at a minimum did nothing
to stop them. And here he was, free and healthy and wearing a business suit. There was nothing I could do about it, either.
I stared into my drink. My wife wondered why I had suddenly gone quiet, but I could not tell her until we had gone home. I
did not want to talk to this man. I never wanted to see him again, and so far I have not.
These banquets we have together frequently take place in the rented basements of various churches around Brussels. Church
is not an uncomfortable place for me to be, but I rarely go to worship on my own. My wife is still a faithful Catholic, but
I am what you might call a lapsed Seventh-day Adventist. It was enormously disappointing to me that so many priests and pastors
caught the hateful virus in 1994 and refused to do anything for those who were begging them for help. The church remained
mostly silent when it should have been speaking out in a loud voice. Its failure to stand strong in this critical hour was
equivalent to complicity. It still disturbs me that houses of prayer could have been transformed into killing zones.
I still believe in a kind of Higher Power that is the origin of all we see around us, but I am not one who prays much anymore.
I felt that God left me on my own during the genocide. I have many troubling questions that I fear will go unanswered until
the day I die. I share this yearning in the heart with many other Rwandans. Was God hiding from us during the killing? It
used to be that God and I shared many drinks together as friends. We don’t talk much anymore, but I would like to think that
we can one day reconcile over an
urwagwa
and he will explain everything to me. But that time is not yet here.
Some of those people who lived through the genocide with me have gone on to what might be called happiness, or at least a
future without too much pain or fear. Odette Nyiramilimo became close to the new government and was appointed to secretary
of state for the Department of Social Affairs. She is now a senator in the Parliament of Rwanda. Her husband, Jean-Baptiste,
reopened his clinic in the heart of Kigali and continues to see patients every day. My journalist friend Thomas Kamilindi
took a job with the British Broadcasting Company as a correspondent in Rwanda, where his honest and unflinching news reports
continued to irritate those in power. He recently accepted a fellowship at the University of Michigan.
For others, the future was bleak. My other journalist friend Edward Mutsinzi, who swore a blood oath in Room 126 to protect
my children, was captured and tortured by RPF soldiers shortly after the liberation of Kigali. For some reason, they thought
he had useful information. They beat him to a pulp and left him for dead. A squad of Australian soldiers attached to the United
Nations found him lying in the dirt and helped save his life. He lives today in Belgium, blind and unable to work. Another
man who swore that oath with me, John Bosco Karangwa, grew sick and died in 2001. His wife and children live nearby and I
visit them when I can.
Aloise Karasankwavu, the bank executive who tried to persuade me to flee with him to Murama, wanted to help rebuild my country
at the end of the civil war. He had just passed an exam to be the director of one of the nation’s largest banks, BCDI, when
he was thrown in jail on bogus charges of helping carry out the genocide. He died in his cell one night of suspicious causes.
No autopsy was performed.
The top architects of the genocide have mostly been rounded up and taken before the International Criminal Tribunal in Tanzania.
The colonel accused of planning the genocide, Theoneste Bagosora, is still on trial as I write this. So is the head of the
national police, Augustin Ndindiliyimana. My friend Georges Rutaganda, the vice president of the
Interahamwe
and the main supplier of beer and toilet paper to the Mille Collines, was sentenced to life imprisonment for crimes against
humanity in 1999. He was specifically charged, among other things, with organizing the massacre at the Official Technical
School where the killings began minutes after the UN jeeps disappeared down the road. As for the priest who wore a gun instead
of his robes, Father Wenceslas Munyeshyaka, he now lives in exile in France. A judge there brought charges against him in
1995 for the crime of genocide. His case is still caught in the slow gears of the French judicial system and may never be
resolved.
I have no idea what happened to that neighbor of mine I called Marcel, the clerk I saw wearing a military uniform and carrying
a machete on the morning of April 7, 1994. As far as I know, he has melted back into a normal life and is now going to work,
paying his taxes, and raising his children.
General Romeo Dallaire suffered emotional stress and was voluntarily relieved of his command the month after the end of the
war. Back in Canada, he wrestled with posttraumatic stress disorder and was found one night in 1997 curled in a fetal position
under a park bench, drunk and incoherent. Dallaire has since found a new life as an author and a lecturer and is now a fellow
at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. His old boss, Kofi Annan, is now the secretary-general
of the United Nations.
President Bill Clinton stopped over in Rwanda on March 25, 1998, and offered an apology for America’s failure to intervene.
He stayed for approximately three hours and did not leave the airport.
The daughters of Tatiana’s brother now live in our home in Brussels. We raised them as our own children and they are both
healthy and doing well in school. They have no memories of the violence and the awful ordeal they had been through, for which
I am grateful. But they will never know their parents. My brother-in-law and his wife vanished without a trace after that
first night when the president was assassinated. We can only assume they were slaughtered and their bodies are now in an anonymous
mass grave somewhere. I hope their ending came without much suffering, and I also hope that wherever they are they might know
what lovely girls their babies would one day become.
Our relatives in Rwanda tried the best they could to begin life anew. They still raise cows and bananas in the hills near
Nyanza. We decided not to remove my mother-in-law and her grandchildren from the banana pit where they had been buried, but
placed a memorial stone on top of it instead. I can only hope they are resting in peace wherever they are. The house knocked
over by the militia was never rebuilt. A pile of rubble stands there today and weeds grow over it. As for my own family, I
have lost four of my eight siblings. One died of illness, one died in a car accident, and two were killed by the rebel army.
For a Rwandan family, this is a comparatively lucky outcome.
My children sometimes ask me why it all happened and I don’t have any final answers for them. The only thing I am able to
do is to keep talking to them about what they have seen and how they feel about it. I will listen to them for hours and hours
into the night, and sometimes they listen to me and my own bad memories. Roger and I both know, for example, what it is like
to face a former friend across the divide of ethnicity. And all of us know what it is like to see people we knew stacked in
heaps by the side of the road and to feel that awful helplessness in the face of evil. I did not grow up with any understanding
of modern psychology, but I do feel the best way to get rid of bad memories is to speak them out loud and not keep them fermenting
inside. It is the best therapy. Words can be instruments of evil, but they can also be powerful tools of life. If you say
the right ones they can save the whole world. I thank God that my own father never had to experience the genocide and see
the hatefulness in the heart of his country, but I also think he would have known how to use words against the darkness that
comes and keeps coming long after the killing is over.
With hard work and a lot of early mornings I earned enough money to buy a second taxi—this one was a Mitsubishi—and hire another
driver. The cash flow was slow but steady, and I eventually accumulated enough capital to branch out. I felt strongly that
I wanted to invest in Africa. But Rwanda was not a possibility because I could not travel freely there. Through some friends
I learned of an opportunity to buy into a trucking company in the nation of Zambia, a former British colony many miles south
of Rwanda. It is an English-speaking country, so I am able to do business there easily. We now have a fleet of four trucks
that haul canned goods, beer, soda, and clothing to rural villages from the capital city of Lusaka. Our trucks can haul most
anything imaginable, and it always makes me happy to sign a contract with an international aid organization bringing something
to a needy area.
My income was good enough for us to buy a slim postwar town house just fifty meters outside the city limits of Brussels proper.
It is something of a joke among my friends that I take such pride in this geographical detail, for it allows me to say I live
in a “suburb of Brussels.” After so much angst as a young man over the idea of living in a city I have finally come to rest
in suburbia. Diane married a man who works for a company that manufactures hospital equipment and Lys married a self-employed
businessman. Roger has gone to work for Accor hotels and may one day become a manager like his father. Tresor is still in
school. In the afternoons I drive him to his soccer games and we practice his English in the car. It is getting quite good.
I keep trying to lose weight, but I have a taste for steak and potatoes and the French wines whose names and qualities I first
learned in college. My doctor has told me to stop drinking so much coffee because it makes my blood pressure go up. Most of
the time I listen, but sometimes I sneak a cup more than I should. Pictures of my family are on the fireplace mantle, and
there is a basketball hoop mounted in the backyard.