Authors: Paul Rusesabagina
In a February 1994 article headlined “Final Attack, ” Ngeze wrote:“We know where the cockroaches are. If they look for us,
they had better watch out.” Other features were not as subtle.
“What weapons shall we use to conquer the cockroaches once and for all?” queried the caption of one illustration. The answer
was pictured to the side: a wood-handled machete. Children were clearly enemies, too. “A cockroach cannot give birth to a
butterfly, ” proclaimed one story. Another diatribe went like this: “We say to the cockroaches that if they lift up their
heads again, it will no longer be necessary to fight them in the bush. We will start by eliminating the
internal
enemy [my italics]. They will be silenced.”
This farce of a paper had a small circulation but an enormous reach. Copies were sent out to the villages and passed around
gleefully. It seemed a welcome break from the usual tired and boring news out of the capital. Here at last, said many people,
is a paper that really says the ugly truth—that the Tutsis are going to kill us when they invade.
Before it stopped publishing two months before the genocide
Kangura
editorialized: “We must remark to the cockroaches that if they do not change their attitude and if they persevere in their
arrogance, the majority people will establish a force composed of young Hutu. This force will be charged with breaking the
resistance of the Tutsi children.”
What the newspaper did not say was that just such a force had already been put into place and was busily preparing itself
to murder children throughout Rwanda.
In early November 1993, a shipment of cargo was trucked into Kigali. The wooden crates bore import papers announcing that
they had been received from China at the seaport at Mombasa in Kenya. Inside were 987 cartons of inexpensive machetes. This
was not enough to cause alarm by itself. The machete is a common household tool in Rwanda, used for all manner of jobs—slicing
mangoes, mowing grass, harvesting bananas, cutting paths through heavy brush, butchering animals.
If anybody had been paying attention, however, the shipment might have seemed curious when matched with other facts. The recipient,
for example, was one of the primary financial backers of the hate-mongering radio station RTLM. Those cartons from China,
too, were but a small part of what amounted to a mysterious wave. Between January 1993 and March 1994, a total of half a million
machetes were imported into my country from various overseas suppliers. This was a number wildly out of line with ordinary
demands. Somebody obviously wanted a lot of sharp objects in the hands of ordinary Rwandans. But nobody questioned the sudden
abundance of machetes—at least not publicly.
If those imports were quiet, the formation of the youth militias was obvious. It was hard to miss those roving bands of young
men wearing colorful neckerchiefs, blowing whistles, singing patriotic songs, and screaming insults against the Tutsis, their
sympathizers and members of the opposition. They conducted military drills with fake guns carved from wood because the government
could not afford to give them real rifles. They were known as the
Interahamwe,
which means either “those who stand together” or “those who attack together, ” depending on who is doing the translating.
Habyarimana’s government formed them into “self-defense militias” that operated as a parallel to the regular Rwandan army
and were used to threaten the president’s politicial enemies. They were also a tool for building popular support for the ruling
regime under the all-embracing cloak of Hutu Power. The ongoing civil war brought a whole new flock of members. Most of the
new recruits came from the squalid refugee camps that formed a ring around Kigali. It is difficult for me to describe just
how terrible the conditions were inside these camps: no decent food, no sanitation, no jobs, no hope. There were several hundred
thousand people crammed into these tumbledown wastelands, most of them chased away from their homes in the countryside by
the advancing RPF army. Kigali itself held about 350, 000 people at the time—a city about the size of Minneapolis, Minnesota—and
the strain on the infrastructure was very great. These refugees saw plenty of reasons to be angry at the rebels—and, by unfair
extension, angry at each individual Tutsi. Plus, the militias were
fun,
in the same way that the hate radio was fun. They brought a sense of purpose and cohesion to an otherwise dreary life. It
was like being in the Boy Scouts or a soccer club, only there was a popular enemy to hate and a lot of built-up frustration
to vent. The boys were also hungry and full of the restlessness of youth. It was easy to get them to follow any orders imaginable.
The groundwork for the genocide went even deeper. In the fall of 1992 mayors in each of Rwanda’s hundred little communes were
asked by the president’s political party to compile lists of people—understood to be Tutsis and people who were threatening
to Habyarimana—who had left the country recently or who had children who had left. The implication was that these people had
joined the ranks of the RPF. These lists could then be used to identify “security threats” in times of emergency. Tutsis throughout
the country suspected their names were being entered into secret ledgers. Many tried without success to have their identity
cards relabeled so that they would appear to be Hutu.
I used to be in the habit of stopping off at a bar near my home after work and buying a round for some of my friends from
the old Gitwe days. One afternoon when I wasn’t there, a man wearing the uniform of a soldier tossed a grenade in the door
and sped off on a motorcycle. The bar was destroyed. I started going straight home after that. The minister of public works,
Félicien Gatabazi, was gunned down by thugs as he was entering his house. A taxi driver witnessed the assassination; she was
shot as a precaution the next day. Her name was Emerita and she had been one of the freelance drivers who competed for fares
in the parking lot of the Hotel Mille Collines. At least one hundred other innocent people would be killed in this fashion
by the increasingly violent teenagers of the
Interahamwe
and also rebel soldiers who had infiltrated Kigali. People didn’t want to stand at bus stops or taxi stations anymore because
the crowds were targets for grenade throwers.
A scary incident happened on the road. My wife, Tatiana, was driving our son to school when she was forced off the road by
a man in a military jeep. He walked over to her door, took off his sunglasses, and bid her to roll down her window.
“Do you know me?” he asked.
“No, ” said my wife.
“My name is Étincelles, ” he said. It was the French word for “explosions, ” apparently his nom de guerre.
He went on: “Madam, we know your home. We know you have three big German shepherds in the yard for protection, as well as
two gate guards. The Youth of the Democratic Republic Movement has said they plan to kidnap you. They will be trying to get
ransom money from your husband. So I am telling you, if anybody should try to pull you over, don’t stop. Keep driving, even
if you have to run somebody over. Do it for your own safety. I am telling you all of this because I come from the same part
of the country as your husband and I don’t want to see any harm come to you.”
When my wife told me about this I searched my memory for anyone from my village who might be calling himself Étincelles. I
couldn’t think of who it might be. To this day I have no idea if this was an actual kidnap plot or just an attempt to scare
us. Regardless, we no longer felt comfortable living at home after that, and so I moved us all into a guest suite at the Diplo-mates.
It felt awful to be governed by fear, but these were very dangerous times. I did not want anybody coming through my windows.
Life went on, even in the surreal twilight of that spring. At nights on the terrace I would share beers with the leaders of
the militia movement, trying to keep quiet as I heard them talking of events in the neighboring country of Burundi. The president
there, Melchior Ndadaye, had been assassinated by Tutsi officers in his own army. A series of reprisal killings followed.
The international community had little to say about these massacres. Was it true the Tutsi were planning to do a similar thing
here: take power and then start a campaign of genocide against the Hutu? I heard it said more than a few times over glasses
of Carlsberg or Tuborg: “It may come down to kill or be killed.”
During that dangerous time I did something that had the potential to be my death warrant. The RPF leadership was looking for
a place to give a press conference and every public venue in town had rejected them. When they approached me about a room
at the Diplomates, I agreed to host them, and I charged them the standard rate of five hundred dollars. It wasn’t the profits
I cared about. I really believed they deserved to have equal access like anybody else. It was not my place to discriminate
based on ideology or what people would think of me. But I heard later that the government was unhappy with me. I suppose,
in retrospect, it was like the incident with Habyarimana’s silly medals. These were symbolic stands, and probably foolish,
but ones I thought were worth the risk.
I have said that those first months of 1994 were like watching a speeding car in slow motion heading toward a child. There
was a thickness in the air. You could buy Chinese-made grenades on the street for three dollars each and machetes for just
one dollar and nobody thought to ask why. Many of my friends purchased guns for themselves in the name of home protection.
This was something I refused to do, despite the urging of my wife. In one tense conversation she told me I was acting like
a coward for not acquiring a firearm. “You know that I have always said I fight with words, not with guns, ” I told her. “If
you want to call me a coward for this, then I guess that is what I am.” She stared back at me, hurt and silent.
A few days later, I took her and our little son, Tresor, along with me to a manager’s meeting in Brussels that I had been
scheduled to attend. With the other children at boarding school in Rwanda, it was just the three of us, and we made a little
vacation out of it. We traveled by train through Luxembourg, Switzerland, and France. Walking amid the gray monuments and
plazas, drinking the yeasty beer, and eating the starchy tourist food made it possible—almost—to forget the slow boil back
at home.
After three weeks, I had to return to my job, and we arrived in Kigali on the red-eye on the morning of March 31. At that
hour the city was quiet, the militias were mostly asleep and the tension that I had come to associate with Rwanda was at low
ebb. The rolling green hills had never looked so good or so welcoming. Perhaps things were finally calming down. The United
Nations had sent twenty-seven hundred troops to Rwanda a few months earlier to enforce the Arusha peace agreement, and it
seemed the visible presence of the blue helmets was finally making a difference in keeping the militias contained. The UN
seemed capable of maintaining the peace. They had given us hope.
It had been so long since we had been to our house that we decided to go straight there instead of to our suite at the Diplo-mates.
For the first time in almost two years we felt good about the future.
I STILL REMEMBER
the sunset on that night of April 6, 1994. There was no rain. The sky was hazy with spring moisture and dust and the slanted
dying light made the bottoms of the clouds turn blood orange. The colors deepened and darkened as the sun went lower, reaching
for the hillcrest in a nimbus of purples, violets, and indigos, the colors of oncoming night. Around town some people paused
to watch, cocking their heads to the west. It was a moment of beautiful stillness.
I have been told that it is common for people to mark exactly where they are when they learn of death on a grand scale. I
have met Americans, for example, who can tell me in detail which suit they were putting on or what highway they were driving
down at the time of the suicide jet attacks on the World Trade Center. Perhaps it is a way to link our own small presence
to the great bloodstained currents of history for just a moment. I suppose this is also a way of feeling a part of an overwhelming
fatal event, a slight flirtation with the finality that awaits us all—a rehearsal for our own deaths, you might say.
I know with certainty that you will find nobody living in Rwanda today who does not remember what they were doing in the early
evening hours of April 6, 1994, when the private jet of President Juvenal Habyarimana was shot down with a portable missile
as it approached for landing at Kigali Airport.
As it happened, I was in my usual place for that time of day. I was eating a dinner of panfried fish on the terrace of the
Diplomates Hotel. Sitting next to me was my brother-in-law. We were celebrating a small victory—I had helped his wife get
a job as a saleswoman for a Dutch car dealer named NAHV.
The airport is about ten miles away and so we heard nothing out of the ordinary. Less than a minute after the crash, however,
the waiter came over with a house telephone. It was my wife on the line.
“I have heard something I have never heard before, ” she told me. “Get home as fast as you are able.”
I couldn’t have known it then, but phones were ringing all over the city and would continue to ring all night long.
On the way out to the parking lot we talked to an Army major who had been listening to his radio. Roadblocks were going up
all over town, he told us, though he could not explain why. Don’t take the Gikondo road, he said. Take the one that leads
past the Parliament. Oddly, this was where the rebel army had its local stronghold. My brother-in-law shook hands in the parking
lot and we urged each other to be careful. I could not have known it then, but I was shaking his hand for the last time.
I drove on the Boulevard of the Organization of African Unity through Kigali, which was unnaturally deserted. The power had
been cut off and all the street lamps were off. There was virtually nobody on the streets. I saw glimpses of cooking fires
flickering behind adobe walls, an occasional face mooning out from the shadows. It occurred to me that a coup d’état might
be taking place, or perhaps the long-awaited RPF invasion. But I was calm. For some reason it did not occur to me to be frightened.
I drove slowly and carefully, but passed no other drivers. Kigali was like a city battening down before the arrival of a hurricane.
It was 8:35 P. M.
The killing could have ended right there. It all could have been stopped quite easily at this early stage with just a small
fraction of the police department of any midsized American city. Rwandans have always shown respect to authority figures—it
is part of our national personality—and a brigade of international soldiers would have found it surprisingly easy to keep
order on the streets of Kigali if they had had the guts to show they meant business about saving lives. But they didn’t.
A force of twenty-seven hundred United Nations peacekeeping soldiers was already inside the country. But they were ill equipped
and under strict orders from UN headquarters not to fire their weapons except in defense of themselves. “Do not fire unless
fired upon” was the mantra. The recent U.S. disaster in Somalia, in which eighteen Army Rangers had been killed by street
mobs, had made the idea of “African peacekeeping” a poisonous concept in the minds of many diplomats in the American State
Department and the UN Security Council. They saw nothing to gain from it and everything to lose.
The leader of the UN troops in Rwanda was a lantern-jawed general from Canada named Romeo Dallaire. None of us knew it at
the time, but he was handcuffed by a lack of resolve from his bosses in New York. He and his troops also had no idea what
they had gotten into. In terms of background intelligence, Dallaire had only a map of Rwanda ripped out of a tourist guide
and an encyclopedia entry hastily photocopied from the Montreal Public Library. But he got a quick and nasty education about
Rwanda after an informant from a high level of the Hutu Power movement sneaked over to the UN compound one night, that winter.
This man, later nicknamed “Jean-Pierre, ” came with a story that would have seemed incredible to anyone who hadn’t been watching
the frog slowly boiling for the last year. Up to seventeen hundred
Interahamwe
members had apparently been trained to act as an extermination squad against civilians. There were secret caches of arms scattered
all around Kigali—stores of Kalashnikovs, ammunition, and many more of those damnably cheap grenades—to supplement the militia’s
arsenal, which consisted largely of traditional Rwandan weapons like spears and clubs. Jean-Pierre himself had been ordered
to register all Tutsis and opposition elements living in a certain area, and he strongly suspected it was being prepared as
a death list. Those who were planning the genocide expected there to be some half-hearted resistance from the UN at the beginning,
said Jean-Pierre. And there was a strategy to cope with this—a brutal attack aimed at Belgian soldiers serving with the UN
mission. It was thought that the Europeans would have no stomach for taking casualties and quickly withdraw their troops,
leaving Rwandans to shape their own destiny.
In disregard of his UN superior in Rwanda, Jacques-Roger Booh-Booh, Dallaire had not sat on this news. On January 11, 1994,
he had sent a cable to his superiors in New York informing them of his intention to raid the arms caches. It would have put
only the tiniest dent in the amount of sharp-edged killing weapons being stockpiled around Rwanda, but I believe that it would
have inflicted a devastating psychological blow to the architects of the genocide. They would have seen that somebody was
paying attention and that genocidal actions would be met with reprisals. But the response Dallaire received from his UN bosses
nicely summarized just about every cowardly, bureaucratic, and incompetent step this organization was to make in a nation
on the brink of mass murder. Stockpiling of weapons may have violated the peace accords, Dallaire was told, but going after
them was “beyond the mandate” of the United Nations. He was instead encouraged to take his concerns to a man who surely would
be the last one in the world to care: President Habyarimana.
The UN official who directed General Dallaire to take this deferential action was the chief of peacekeeping, Kofi Annan, who
would one day serve as secretary-general.
Jean-Pierre’s warnings were effectively brushed off. Nobody from the UN ever heard from him again.
So it did not stop.
The guards opened the gate for me at my house, and I walked through my front door to the sound of a ringing telephone. It
was Bik Cornelis, the general manager of the Hotel Mille Collines—my counterpart at Sabena’s other luxury hotel. He was a
colleague and a friend, and not one to waste time when something was pressing.
“Paul, ” he said, “your president and the president of Burundi have been murdered.”
“What?”
“Their plane was shot down with a rocket just a few minutes ago and they are both dead.”
My wife and I stared at one another from across the living room while I tried to digest the meaning of these words. The only
clear thought I could manage was that Tatiana must have heard the sounds of a plane exploding. I had no idea what that must
have sounded like.
“All right, ” I said to Bik. “What does this mean?”
“I don’t know, ” he said. “We don’t know what is going to happen. But I think you’d better go back to the Diplomates. We don’t
know what will follow this.”
“All right, ” I said. “But I don’t think I should go alone. I’m going to call for a UN escort.”
“Whatever you think is best, ” he said. “I will be in touch.”
We hung up and I told my wife the news while I dug in my pants pocket for a phone number. Tatiana looked as if she might faint.
There was no need for us to discuss the gravity of the situation. We both knew Rwanda’s history. Murders at the top are usually
followed by slaughters of everyday people. And since I was such a political moderate and she was a Tutsi we were both in trouble.
How much time would we have before there was a knock at the door?
I picked up the phone.
The leaders of the UN troops had always been cordial to me on their frequent visits to the hotel, and they often said things
like, “If there’s anything you need, please call the compound and we’ll see what we can do for you.”This seemed like a good
time to play that card. I was put on the line with the commander of the Bangladeshi troops that made up the largest contingent
of the United Nations’ mission in Rwanda. I had heard rumors about their poor training and lack of equipment, but they were
wearing the uniform of the UN, which carried a kind of magical protection for them. Unlike nearly everybody else, they could
pass roadblocks without harassment by the militia.
“I need a military escort to the Diplomates Hotel, ” I told him. “Can you help me?”
His voice sounded very far away, as if he was speaking from down a long hallway.
“People have already started killing other people, ” the major told me. “They are stopping people at roadblocks and asking
them for identification. Tutsis and those in the opposition are being killed with knives. It is very dangerous to go outside.
I don’t think I can help you.”
“Well, what am I supposed to do if they come here looking for me?” I asked.
“Does your house have two doors?”
“Pardon me?”
“Does your house have more than one way to get inside?”
“Yes, of course. There is a front door and a backdoor. Why?”
“It is very simple. If the killers come looking for you through the front door, just leave through the backdoor.”
I thanked him for this advice and hung up.
It seemed that this was going to be all the help we would get from the United Nations tonight. I resigned myself to staying
at home that night and hoping that nobody would come through either door.
My next phone call was to my friend John Bosco Karangwa, who was someone I could always count on for a good laugh. I knew
he would be at home alone—his wife was in Europe for medical treatment. John and I had been in the moderate political party
together—the Democratic Republican Movement, or MDR—and we shared a mutual dislike for Habyarimana. John hated him with a
special passion. To tease John Bosco I sometimes referred to the president as his “uncle.” Even though I knew Habyarimana
was a criminal, he had been ruling Rwanda for more than twenty years, and it seemed surreal that he was gone.
“Your uncle has been killed, ” I told John Bosco.
“What?” he said. “Are you sure?”
“Yes. They shot down his plane about an hour ago.”
“Let me confirm this before I start celebrating, ” he said.
We shared a little laugh, and then I got serious with him. I hated thinking about my friends according to their ethnicities
or loyalties, but now was no time for reflection. A crude equation was now in effect. John Bosco was in the political opposition
party and the assassination could spell only very bad things for him.
“Bosco, you could be killed tonight, ” I told him. “I want you to stay inside, keep your lights off, and let nobody inside
your door.”
I am happy to tell you that I received John several days later as a refugee inside my hotel. He had been in hiding in his
house as he had promised. A friend had delivered his younger brother’s three children into his care because the brother and
his wife had been murdered. When I finally saw John Bosco, he hadn’t spoken above a whisper for days. We made no more jokes
about the death of the president.
Pieces of the story started filtering in from the radio that night. President Habyarimana had been flying back from Tanzania,
where he had been negotiating how to implement some provisions of the Arusha peace agreement. On the plane with him was the
new president of Burundi, Cyprien Ntaryamira; the chief of staff of the Rwandan Army, Déogratias Nsabimana; and nine other
staff members and crew. At approximately 8:30 in the evening, as the plane was approaching the airport, two shoulder-launched
missiles were fired from near a grove of banana trees in the Masaka neighborhood. One of them struck the fuselage of the president’s
Mystere-Falcon 50 jet, which had been a treasured gift from French president François Mitterrand. The fuel tank exploded and
the fragments of the plane rained down over the Masaka commune. Some of it landed on the lawn of the presidential palace.
There were no survivors.
It remains a mystery to this day who fired these missiles. One credible theory is that the rebel army had learned of the president’s
flight plan and decided to take down the plane as a military tactic. We may never know for sure. But whoever did it must have
known that the immediate effect on Rwanda would be catastrophic.
With the death of its president the nation of Rwanda was officially decapitated. Members of the
akazu
gathered around a conference table at Army headquarters and allowed Colonel Théoneste Bagosora—the father of the
Interahamwe
—to effectively take charge of the country. Romeo Dallaire was at this meeting and he urged the new crisis committee to allow
the moderate prime minister, Agathe Uwilingiyimana, to take power, as she should have. They refused, calling her a traitor.
But she was a problem they would not have to suffer for long.