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.
Later that night Agathe called the UN detachment and asked for more security. She wanted to go to Radio Rwanda in the morning to tell the nation not to panic, that a civilian government was still in charge. How little she understood. Rwandan Army soldiers were already surrounding her home in the dark shadows of the jacaranda trees. When fifteen UN soldiers arrived in the hour just before dawn they were welcomed with a burst of gunfire that shredded the tires and wrecked the engines of two of their jeeps. The prime minister, frightened and screaming, climbed over her back wall into the house of a neighbor.
I was listening to the buildup of this disaster being broadcast live on Radio France International. It was preposterous and macabre and pitiful and terrifying. Agathe’s hiding place in the toilet was discovered and she was led outside in the midst of a cheering mob. There was a brief argument among the Rwandan soldiers over whether she should be taken prisoner or executed on the spot. The squabble ended when a police officer, who had been training to be a judical officer, stepped forward and shot the prime minister in the head at close range. The bullet tore away the left side of her face and she bled to death right there on the terrace in front of her house.
The UN soldiers, meanwhile, were persuaded to give up their weapons and led to Army headquarters near the heart of downtown, right across the street from the Hotel Diplomates, as it happened. Five of the soldiers were from Ghana and they were allowed to go free. Ten of them had the misfortune of being from Belgium -the colonial master country, the ones who had glorified the Tutsis and made them like kings. RTLM had been passing the sentence for the last few hours: The Belgians were already “suspected” of being the ones who had shot down the president’s plane. This was in conflict with the line that was already becoming like gospel on radio trottoir-that it was the RPF rebels who had sneaked into Kigali with a shoulder missile and hidden in the weeds near the airport, waiting for the wink of Habyarimana’s French jet in the eastern sky. But it was no matter. Logic was out the window. The Belgians and the rebels must have worked together. Of course.
A crowd of excited Rwandan soldiers set upon the Belgians and began clubbing them, some of them to death. A few of them managed to grab a loaded rifle and take refuge in a small concrete building near the camp entrance. They managed to fend off their attackers for a terrified hour before their holdout was stormed. They were tortured and mutilated horribly, their tendons sliced so they could not walk.
The secret plan to get the peacekeepers to leave-the one the UN knew about four months in advance-was being carried out according to the letter.
I tried not to listen to RTLM in those first hours, but it could not be avoided. Given the choice between listening to filth and missing potentially crucial information, I will choose the filth every single time.
But it was even worse than I could have imagined. The radio was instructing all its listeners to murder their neighbors.
“Do your work, ” I heard the announcers say. “Clean your neighborhood of brush. Cut the tall trees.”
I would hear variations on these phrases echoing countless times over the next three months. The “tall trees” was an unmistakable reference to the Tutsis. “Clean your neighborhood of brush” meant that rebel army sympathizers might be hiding among Tutsi families and so the entire family should be “cleaned” to be on the safe side. But somehow the worst phrase of all to me was “Do your work.” It made killing sound like a responsibility. Like it was the normal thing to do.
Here at last were the bones under the skin. All the anti-Tutsi rhetoric put out on the air over the previous six months had blossomed into what they were now actually saying out loud: Kill your neighbors. Murder your friends. Do not leave the graves half full. Fantasy had become reality. Theft of life was now mandatory. This seemed to be the consensus of the national village, a sickening version of justice on the grass.
The mass murders were under way in Kigali. The Intera-hamwe militias started setting up some roadblocks, which were often no more than a few bamboo poles set on milk cartons in the road, or sometimes the burned-out hulk of an automobile. Eventually, the roadblocks would be made of human corpses. Every carload of people that came by was subject to a search and a check of those identity papers that listed ethnicity. Those who were found to be Tutsis were dragged to one side and chopped apart with machetes. The Presidential Guard paid visits to the homes of prominent Tutsis, opposition people and wealthy citizens. Doctors were pulled out of their homes and shot in the head. Old women were stabbed in the throat. Schoolchildren were hit on the head with wooden planks and their skulls cracked open on the concrete with the blow of a boot heel. The elderly were thrown down the waste holes of outhouses and buried underneath a cascade of rocks.
Thousands would die that day, the first citizens of what would become a nation of the murdered.
I looked out the next morning at a street that had been transformed.
There was the usual smoky tang of morning mist in the air, the usual dirt street and adobe walls and gray April sky, but it was a scene I could barely recognize. People whom I had known for several years were wearing military uniforms and several were carrying machetes dripping with blood. Quite a few had guns.
There was one in particular who I will call Marcel, though that is not his real name. He worked in a bank. Marcel had a reputation for a gentle approach in a business that can sometimes be hard-hearted. His specialty was helping uneducated people work their way through complicated financial transactions, and I never once knew him to lose his temper. He seemed to be a gentleman who respected himself. But here he was, wearing a military uniform and apparently ready to kill-if he hadn’t already.
“Marcel, ” I remember saying, “I didn’t know you were a soldier.”
I was trying to keep the irony out of my voice, but he gave me a blank look through his banker’s spectacles.
“The enemy is among us, ” he told me. “The enemy is within us. This is very clear. Many of the people we have been mixing with are traitors.”
I thought it best to end the conversation there and went back into my house. Marcel watched me go. I could hear gunfire all around us, though not a heavy concentration from one place, as from a military battle. The rounds were cracking all around periodically, almost lazily, in every direction.
What I did not tell Marcel-what I was not about to tell anybody-was that there were up to thirty-two of the enemy already packed inside my house. These were neighbors who knew they were on the lists of the Interahamwe. There was Muhigi and his family, as well as Michel Mugabo. There were also people like me who had refused, for one reason or another, to buy one of the cheap firearms on the street prior to the eruption of mass murder. Why they thought I might be able to protect them was beyond me, but it was my house they flocked to. We put the visitors up in the living room and the kitchen and tried to stay quiet.
It occurred to me later: I had seen this before. My father had opened our tiny hillside home to refugees during the Hutu Revolution of 1959. I had been a young boy then, a little older than my son Tresor. My father’s favorite proverb came back to me: “If a man can keep a fierce lion under his roof, why can he not shelter a fellow human being?”
Earlier on that endless morning we had lost track of our son Roger. In the chaos of getting all our frightened visitors comfortable my wife and I had failed to keep a vigilant eye on the children. At the time, Lys was sixteen, Roger was fifteen, Diane was thirteen, and little Tresor was not even two years old. We had instructed them all quite sternly not to go outside under any circumstances, but in the early morning Roger could not resist a check on the welfare of our neighbors. He had gone over the wall, as he would in normal times, to see his next-door friend, a boy who everybody called Rukujuju, which means “boy who sleeps in the ash.” I suppose it sounds like a mean thing to call a child, but it was one of those nicknames that must be understood as loving teasing. In any case, the boy never seemed to take offense.
Rukujuju had been hacked apart with a machete. He lay facedown in the backyard in a small pool of his own blood. Nearby lay the bodies of his mother, his six sisters, and two neighbors. Some of them were not yet dead and were moving around slowly. Roger blundered back over the wall and went immediately into his room. He did not speak for the next several days.
These neighbors had joined others who had been slaughtered around us. The woman who lived in the house behind ours was named Leocadia. She was an elderly widow who used to totter over to my house to gossip with Tatiana. Her son was unmarried, a source of some concern for her. She was a Tutsi, but it didn’t matter to any of us. Not until today.
I heard the sounds of a commotion at her front door and peered over the wall. There was a band of hyped-up Intera-hamwe there, holding guns and machetes. There was no time to think through my decision. I leaped over the wall and dashed to get help from my neighbor who I knew was a soldier in the Rwandan Army, but not a hardliner.
“Please, ” I told the soldier who opened the door to me.
“They are going to kill this old woman. Come over and save her.” Leocadia was dead, but without any apparent wounds. By the time we arrived with his colleague, it was already too late. She died of a heart attack. I do not want to know what the last thing she saw might have been.
What was I going to do? It seemed terribly strange to be thinking about work, but my mind kept drifting back to my responsibilities as the general manager of the Hotel Diplomates. It has since been suggested to me that this is one of the ways that people cope with things too horrible to understand-they gladly throw themselves into the little tasks of normal life as a way to distract themselves from the abyss. Perhaps this is what I was doing; I am not sure. But I can tell you that while the corpses of my neighbors stacked up around me I was obsessed with figuring out how to return to the hotel where I felt I belonged. The manager of the nearby Hotel Mille Collines, Bik Cornelis, was a white man and a citizen of the Netherlands who had told me he would almost certainly be evacuated on the first available flight. This would leave not one but two hotels without any leadership during the bloodshed. I had promised the Sabena Corporation that I would do my best to look after both properties when he left. It seemed vital that I live up to my word on this matter. I was apparently useless here at home, anyway.
In the middle of the day on April 7 I finally succeeded in getting through on the telephone with Michel Houtard, the director of the hotels division of the Sabena Corporation. He was a European gentleman of the old landed-gentry school, courtly and generous. He came on the line and I could hear genuine concern in his voice. We had a conversation in French.
“Paul, we are hearing very bad reports of violence breaking out all over Kigali. Are you in any danger?”
“Not at the moment, but I am trapped in my house. Some of my neighbors have been killed. The roads are too dangerous to travel and I have not been able to arrange a military escort to the hotel.”
“Can we help in any way?”
“I’m not sure. If I can get to the hotel I will contact you from there and let you know the situation. The radio news has been sketchy. I have to tell you that I am not very well informed about what is going on.”
“Well, I want to let you know that we will be trying to do all we can from here to ensure the safety of you and all the employees.”
It was strange: While we spoke, I could not help but see the city of Brussels, where Tatiana and I had been just the week before. I pictured flocks of pigeons bobbing their heads in parks, gray mansard roofs, statues of dead aristocrats on horseback, chocolates under glass, pastel-painted town houses, bars full of carefree young people drinking Jupiler pilsner. It had been spring there and the trees were just coming into bud. It seemed like another existence altogether.
I really should have been dead. In retrospect it is a miracle that my name was not on the lists of the undesirables that the Presidential Guard were sent out to eliminate in the first two days. I had been an irritant to Habyarimana and a member of the moderate party. I had been the one who hosted that conference at the Diplomates called by the hated RPF. Furthermore, I was married to a Tutsi “cockroach” and had fathered a baby-my son Tresor-of mixed descent. They had every reason to behead me. Somebody had recently scrawled a number in charcoal on the outer wall of my house-it was 531. I could only guess that it was a code, and an easy way for the death squads to find me.
Every time I saw soldiers walking down my street I assumed it would be my door they would come knocking upon. My plan was to keep working the phones and hope that the military or the UN could find time to get me and my family an escort to the Diplomates. But the radio made it sound as if all hell was breaking loose in Kigali and it was not clear when the troubles would ebb.
On the morning of April 9 they finally came for me. Two Army jeeps tore into my front yard and a squad of soldiers piled out. The captain walked up to me and poked a finger in my face. He was sweating heavily and had angry eyes. I saw immediately that this conversation could very well end with him shooting me in the face. I looked at him with the calmest expression I could manage.
“I hear you are the manager of the Hotel Diplomates, ” he told me. “We need you to open up the hotel. We want you to come with us.”
Here was my chance. I told him I would be happy to accompany him to the hotel, if only my family could come. What I didn’t tell him was my extremely liberal interpretation of the word family. This was my excuse to load my neighbors and family into the hotel van and my neighbor’s car. I would call them my “uncles, ” “aunts, ” “nephews, ” and “nieces” if challenged. I gave my own car keys to another neighbor named Ngarambe.
“This car could save your life, ” I told him quietly.
We followed the Army caravan on the road out of Kabeza but went only a mile before the captain waved me to pull over at a spot on the road where dead bodies were piled on both sides. It was the scene of a slaughter.
The captain came over to me with a rifle.
“Do you know that all the managers in this country have already been killed?”
“No, ” I said.
“Even if you do not know, this is how it is. And you, traitor, are lucky we aren’t killing you. We have guns and we’re going to kill all the cockroaches in the hotel bar and in your house. You are going to help us.”
The captain held out the rifle and nodded toward the people huddled in the cars. His message was clear: These people were to be killed right now. And I was chosen to be their killer. It would be my rite of passage.
But I noticed something. He would not look me in the eye.
In that one small turn of the face, I saw that there might be some room for me to maneuver. I saw that I had a small chance to save the lives of my family and neighbors. All I needed to do was find the right words. Everything now depended on my words.
I looked at the Kalashnikov rifle this army captain was offering me-bidding me to wipe out the cockroaches like a good patriotic Hutu-and then I began to talk.
“Listen, my friend, I do not know how to handle a gun, ” I told him. “And even if I did, I do not see what would be accomplished by killing these people.”
Surrounding us on every side were the bodies of people who had been freshly murdered. They had been pushed out of the roadway. A few of the lucky ones had been shot, but most had been hacked apart by machetes. Some were missing their heads. I saw the intestines of one man coming out of his belly like pink snakes. This captain had taken me to this spot on the road on purpose, I thought, and was counting on all the bodies and the blood to send a clear message. You will join these corpses if you don’t follow our orders, he wanted me to understand. But he would not look me in the eye when he asked me to kill and that’s how I understood-somehow-there was a crack in his resolve that I could exploit. I wasn’t yet sure how or why, since he and his men could have clearly killed me on the spot without consequence or remorse.
I went over to one of the cars where my neighbors were huddled. I purposely selected the frailest old man I could find and asked the captain: “Look, is this really the enemy you are fighting?” I pointed out a baby in a mother’s arms, and said it again, trying to push all the panic out of my voice: “Is this baby your enemy? I don’t think this is what you want to do. You are what? Twenty-five years old? You are young. Do you want to spend the rest of your life with blood on your hands?”
When I saw this argument wasn’t going anywhere, I switched tactics. I aimed lower this time. Morality wasn’t working; maybe greed would.
“My friends, ” I said, “you cannot be blamed for this mistake. I understand you perfectly. You are tired. You are hungry. You are thirsty. This war has stressed you.”
I wanted just one thing to leap into his mind: cash. But I wasn’t sure this was going to work either. I had only a few minutes to size him up and wasn’t sure where his ultimate interests lay. Maybe he was more hardline than I had thought. I found myself wishing I could put a cognac in front of him to loosen him up. Everything now came down to how well I was reading this man-if the promise of money would be enough to tempt him away from the murders he had been ordered to commit. I was like a Mephistopheles trying to corrupt him. It was a role I was only too happy to play if he would only spare the lives of the people behind me.
“I have another solution, ” I told him. “I know how to solve this problem. Let us talk otherwise.”
We began to talk in terms of cash. It seems strange to say, but putting a price on lives was like a kind of sanity compared to the murders he had been suggesting. At first the captain demanded that each Tutsi cockroach pay every one of his soldiers 200, 000 Rwandan francs in exchange for their lives. This was roughly the equivalent of $1, 500 American per person-many times more cash than an average Rwandan will ever see in their lifetimes. But this was negotiation. You always start with the crazy price and then work downward.
“My friends, ” I said, “even you do not have this much money. You cannot expect these people to be carrying that kind of sum. But I can get it for you. I am the only person who can do this here. It is in the safe of the hotel and you will never be able to open it without me. Drive me to the hotel and I will pay you the money.”
I hustled the refugees into the manager’s house of the Diplomates. In a way, we were going straight into the dragon’s den-these were the men who were ordering Hutu citizens to pick up kitchen knives and machetes and kill anybody in Rwanda suspected of being a descendant of the Tutsi clans or one of their allies. But I knew I would be safe here. Despite the captain’s bluster, I had sized him up as a basically small man. He would not kill me in the presence of his superiors.
I told the captain to stay where he was-I now felt confident enough to command him-and got his money out of the safe. It was the price we had finally agreed on: a million Rwandan francs for everyone. It was the end of the week when we always had a stockpile of liquid cash. It was supposed to have been converted into foreign currency and wired to the corporate office in Belgium. Now it was going into the pockets of killers, but I think it was the best use of that cash anybody could have imagined.
I went and paid off the captain. He drove away with his death squad and I never saw him again.
It was later suggested to me that I could have broken my agreement with this killer, simply refusing to pay the money once I and my neighbors and family were safely inside the Diplomates. But this was inconceivable. He would have remembered me and surely taken revenge, for one thing. And I had given him my word. Even if it was loathsome to reward him for being a potential killer and to measure human lives in cash, I never make promises I cannot keep. It is bad policy. There is a saying in Rwanda: With a lie you can eat once, but never twice.
He left me with something valuable, too. He told me that I was not powerless in the face of the murderous insanity that seemed to have descended over my country in the last seventy-two hours.
With that brief refusal to meet my eyes, he told me that I might be able to negotiate with evil.
I soon discovered the true reason why I had been brought to the Diplomates and not killed. It was solely because of the keys I had been holding. The interim government of Rwanda -a rump committee of the very same men who had organized the militias-had taken over all the rooms as a temporary headquarters of the new government. But they needed the keys. Once I had opened the suites and the bar, my life was expendable. I tried my best to keep myself and my family out of sight and they seemed to forget about me in the chaos, for which I was deeply grateful.
The rebels soon learned what was happening at the Diplo-mates and started firing mortar shells at the hotel, which was all too exposed on the hillside. They had an easy shot from their stronghold near the Parliament building. Bullets started whizzing through the windows and I couldn’t go into my office because it faced the direction of fire. The crisis government hastily started packing supplies and papers into boxes and prepared to decamp to the city of Gitarama, about fifty kilometers southwest. They also looted bedspreads, pillows, television sets, and other items from their rooms, but it seemed best not to complain about this small larceny. There was my own life to think about. I made a show of preparing to evacuate with them and they seemed not to mind-although what they would want with a hotel manager I have no idea.
It did not matter: I had a secret plan in mind. My family and I would pretend to follow the military train, but then split off almost immediately. We would use the cover of the government convoy as a safe way to get to Sabena’s other luxury property, the Hotel Mille Collines. This was a place I knew very well from my time there in the 1980s and there were four hundred refugees who had taken shelter there. Barely a half mile of hillside separated the two properties; I could have walked it in ten minutes during peaceful times. But it would have been inviting death by machete to do it now while the Interahamwe were running about. We would have to leave my neighbors hidden inside the cottage-it was too dangerous to try to move them out now-but I resolved not to forget them. I would simply have to come back later and rescue them by other means. But I wasn’t sure I could even save my family, or myself. I would be leaving the Diplomates, where I was technically still the manager, and going over to the Mille Collines, where I had plenty of friends and a long work history but was technically not the boss. What kind of reception was I going to get over there? I had no idea what would happen.
On the morning of April 12 the government leaders started their trip to the emergency capital and I rolled out with them behind the wheel of a Suzuki jeep. On that brief five-minute trip I kept seeing patches of red on the dirt of the shoulder. Days later I would see trucks that would normally have been used to haul concrete blocks or other construction material. They would be stacked high with dead bodies: women, men, children, many of them with stumps where their arms and legs had been. Somebody with the city sanitation department apparently had the foresight to clean them off the roadways and take them for burial in mass graves all over Kigali.
For now, though, there were only the bloodstains on the side of the road.“Don’t look, ” I said to my children and my wife. But I had to keep my eyes open to drive.