ONE OF THE MOST HONEST CONVERSATIONS I had during the genocide happened near the end of it.
General Augustin Bizimungu, the Army chief of staff, came to see me in my room. It was one of the few times in those few months that I didn’t need anything from him. Neither did he want anything from me. And we drank and talked for several hours.
He looked awful. There were folds of darkened skin hanging under his eyes. He seemed to have aged twenty years since the time before the killing started. We talked about the rebel army advancing from the east. They had been making slow but steady progress toward Kigali aiming to link up with their detachment dug in at the parliament building. RPF leader Paul Kagame had fewer troops but while in exile he had instilled an impressive level of discipline and commitment into his army. Not for nothing was the international press calling him “the Napoleon of Africa.”
There was now some talk of a swap between the warring armies: The rebels would release the Hutu refugees in Amahoro Stadium if the Rwandan Army would let the people inside the hotel go over to the rebel side. These discussions filled me with hope, but they also terrified me. Getting free from the constant threat of slaughter seemed like a kind of heaven, but to label the hotel as a rebel prize seemed incredibly dangerous. I was afraid it would only boost our attractiveness as a target for the doped-up militias, who were a law unto themselves and followed the orders of the Army only when they felt like it. Bizimungu slumped in his chair as we talked, his drink barely touched beside him.
“Listen, general, ” I finally said. “You are now the leader of a bunch of killers and looters and rapists. Are you sure you can win?”
His reply astonished me.
“Paul, I am a soldier, ” he said. “We lost this war a long time ago.”
Perhaps he had an inkling of what would be in store for him: a human rights tribunal and lifetime imprisonment in a jail cell. Or perhaps he had grown tired of all the murders around him. I am not certain what he was thinking then, but I saw that he could no longer hide the aura of defeat around him and his soldiers. I also knew that we were drawing near to the end of the war.
The restoration of a sane world was something I had dreamed about. I would likely die in the transition from chaos back to order, but at least it would all be over.
On May 3, the United Nations attempted to evacuate the Hotel Mille Collines.
The Army and the rebels had struck a deal: A few dozen refugees from the stadium would be swapped for an equal number of refugees from the hotel. They would be taken to the airport and whisked out of the country.
There was a terrible catch for us, though. Only those refugees who could secure invitations from people living abroad would be allowed to leave the hotel. This seemed very unfair to me. As a practical matter those people most likely to have overseas contacts were the rich and the powerful. The Tutsi and moderate Hutu peasants we had with us had virtually no chance of leaving. But these were the conditions that had been negotiated by the armies and I was in no position to argue. This rule, I think, came from the African love of bureaucracy and process. Even in the best of times there were many senseless permissions that had to be acquired to get anything done, and this culture of paperwork did not change even during the genocide. By that point, however, my friends and I had become specialists in the art of forgery, and we created fake letters for a number of those who had no overseas friends.
This put me in an awkward position, for I happened to be one of those privileged few who could legitimately arrange for transport out of the country for me and my family. Out. There seemed to be no more seductive concept: out of this phantasmagoria of knives and blood, out of the dark rooms that smelled like feces and sweat, out of this entire pointless conflict and the idiotic life-or-death ethnic definitions and away from the power-drunk fools with their empty smiles and machetes and into a safe place of clean sheets and air-conditioning and warm baths and no worry about anything at all that mattered. Out.
I could have it. I could have it tomorrow.
But I could not. I really could not. I knew that if I took this opportunity to leave I would be removing one of the only remaining barriers in between the militias and the guests. Nobody here would be left to present themselves-however flimsily-as a middleman standing in between the killers and the refugees. Nobody else had those years of favors and free drinks to cash in. I could donate my black binder to somebody else, but it would be useless to them. If I left and people were killed I would never be at peace. My food would never taste good again; I could never enjoy my freedom. It would be as though I had killed those people myself. The refugees had even come to me and said, “Listen, Paul. We are told you are leaving tomorrow. Please let us know so that we can go to the roof of the hotel and jump because we cannot bear to be tortured with machetes.”
But one thing I did for myself: I used my contacts with the Sabena Corporation to secure invitations out for my whole family. I was not so courageous a man that I could bear to see my family in danger any longer. I sincerely hoped that I would not be depriving anybody more needy through this action, but it was what I felt was the best choice under terrible circumstances. If I saw my wife or children murdered when I knew I once had the chance to see them to safety my life would be ruined. This was the most painful decision I have ever made in my life. I had decided to stay and face whatever would come.
Beyond this I had no control over who would be staying or leaving. This was a profound relief, because I did not want to have that decision over life or possible death. On May 2, I, with the refugee committee, presented a list to the United Nations soldiers of all those refugees who had obtained invitations via my fax telephone. Handing over that list made me extremely uncomfortable. To begin with, the whole idea of lists now had an evil connotation in Rwanda. We suspected that by handing over such a list, we would be informing the militias who was leaving and who was staying. This could have put their lives in danger. But I had no choice but to deliver the required list. All I could do was hope that the UN would not let it leak to the killers.
Around midnight, I found my wife and children awake in our room. I previously had not had the courage to tell them I would not be going with them in the evacuation, but the time had arrived. I pretended my children were asleep and not listening and I told my wife, “I had made a different decision. I am remaining with the refugees. You are leaving.”
Everyone then raised their voices and talked as if they were one person.
“What about you? You keep talking about us.”
“Listen. I am the only person here who can negotiate with these killers outside.”
“But how can you stay?”
“If people inside this hotel are killed, I will never be able to sleep again. I’ll be a prisoner of my own conscience.
“Please, ” I told them. “Please accept and go.”
The next day, at approximately 5:30 P. M., I saw my wife and children off at the roundabout in front of the hotel. They and the other fortunate guests were loaded into UN trucks while I watched from under the canopy near the door. I even helped them climb inside. I tried to be almost casual about it, telling them I would see them soon, as if they were off to the grocery store, but inside my heart was breaking. I said nothing special, nothing climactic, because that would have upset everybody, me most of all. I watched the first truck go by, and then the second. In Rwandan culture it is never acceptable for a man to cry, but I came very close that evening. I made it through those awful minutes the same way I made it through the entire genocide: by losing myself in the details of work.
I was then forty years old. Everything I had in life was pulling away in those trucks, and it was my decision to stay and face probable execution. I knew that I was taking all the responsibility now. That gave me a little peace.
Out in the front courtyard, many people had their transistor radios turned on RTLM, and I heard the names of my wife and children being read aloud, along with the other refugees who had just pulled away. “The cockroaches are escaping, ” said the announcer. “Stop all the cockroaches from leaving the Mille Collines. Put up roadblocks. Do your work. Do not leave the grave half full.”
The list had leaked. Somebody from the hate radio had apparently stolen it or bought it from the United Nations or the Rwandan Army. I even saw a correspondent from RTLM standing in the parking lot.
There are no good words to describe what it is like to hear an execution order broadcast for your own family, and to know that you played a role in putting them in death’s hands. Their beautiful names-Tatiana, Tresor, Roger, Lys, Diane-were a profanity in that announcer’s mouth. I felt as if he was raping them with his voice. I hated him, hated RTLM, hated the genocidal power brokers, hated the stench of the hotel, hated the dank hallways, and hated the pride I once had in my country and my job. I hated that I was utterly powerless to save my family. I wanted to follow the jeeps in my own car, but the roadblocks would surely catch me alone and I would die like the other eight hundred thousand. All I could do was frantically work the phones.
When she was able to speak again Tatiana told me what happened.
The first convoy of sixty-three refugees was escorted by eight soldiers wearing the blue helmets of the UN. They were stopped at a roadblock two kilometers away from the hotel, at a place called Cyimicanga, where some men from the Interahamwe were standing alongside a few observers from the Rwandan Army. All the evacuees in the trucks were ordered out onto the roadside dirt. The street boys at the barricades had been given Kalashnikovs, and one of them fired an opening shot into the dirt near the feet of a refugee named Immaculate. It also happened to come perilously close to a soldier. A second shot struck and killed a member of the Presidential Guard.
“They are going to kill us!” somebody screamed, and that caused the militia to get even angrier. They used their rifle butts to start beating the refugees. Men were slugged in the gut, women were slapped across the face, children were kicked. A few used their machetes to cut open the skin on the forearms of some of the captives: It was the usual sick prelude to a total dismemberment. My wife was worked over particularly hard; she was thrown into a truck with a back so twisted she could barely move.
The UN soldiers, meanwhile, were disorganized. Some were bravely trying to insert themselves between the militia and their intended victims, but my wife told me the Bangladeshis put their hands in the air like stick-up victims. It would have been almost funny if it hadn’t been such a signal for the militia to do as they pleased. This fiasco at the roadblock would have made a perfect metaphor for the ineptitude of the UN, but the last two months in Rwanda had created so many of those images that they hardly seemed worthy of note anymore.
My son Roger was approached by a boy he had known from school, a former classmate and friend. “Give me your shoes, you cockroach, ” said the boy.
Roger obeyed without protest and gave over his tennis shoes to his old friend, who was now a killer with a machete. They had once played soccer together. I suppose it was an echo of the meaningless gulf that had opened that day in 1973 between myself and my best friend, Gerard. My son was now experiencing much the same thing, only now he was the unlucky one.
Ah Rwanda, why?
The only thing that saved the caravan was the bitter argument between the Army and the militia. They were beginning to open fire on each other. Some of the UN soldiers saw their chance. They picked up the refugees in the dirt, threw them into the trucks like lumber, and roared off back toward the Mille Collines before the militia could regroup.
I ran out to the roundabout to meet them coming back and found my wife lying in a puddle of blood on the floor of one of the trucks. She was moaning slightly.
“Can you move?” I asked. She shook her head.
I was nearly blind with a red whirling of fury and relief and fright, but I had a job to do and I forced myself to stay in control. We took the wounded off the trucks and led them back into the hotel they had thought they were escaping. We called for Dr. Gasasira and another doctor named Josue, who began to bandage up the cuts imediately. The Mille Collines was full of people screaming and crying and hugging one another. I took Tatiana up to our room, 126, and made sure she was resting on the bed. Her eyes were blank with shock. The children were unhurt but completely quiet.
Once I was sure that our wounded were all being tended to, I rushed to my office. There was no time to spare. We needed more protection immediately. It was now clear that the government and the militias knew the identities of many of the high-profile refugees we were hiding. They might not chance an all-out invasion of the Mille Collines, but they might begin a series of individual assassinations. I was terrified that their bloodlust had been aroused beyond the point of control. I had already taken the precaution of finding an outdated guest list to give to any killer who might come asking for it at the reception desk. I had also ordered the room numbers pried off the doors to further confuse anyone who came in here looking for a specific target. But more protection was crucial. I called everyone I knew who was still alive. And then I called them again, insisting we have more policemen posted outside.
It seems strange to say, but it was a relief to be doing something, even if it seemed like I was getting nowhere. It was one big extended Rwandan no from all my military friends and, of course, the UN. Not until our last night in the hotel was I finally given five Tunisian soldiers from the UN contingent to safeguard the parking lot, and by then it was too late to make a difference.
We did not have long to rest. On the morning of May 13 at 10 A. M. I was visited in my office by a Rwandan Army intelligence agent named Lieutenant Iradakunda. I had known him only slightly, but my impression had been that he was a less than loyal supporter of the ongoing genocide. My suspicions were confirmed when he took me aside to a quiet area.
“Listen, Paul, ” he said. “We are going to attack you today at 4:00 P. M.”
“Who?” I asked. “How many?”
“I do not know details.”
“Are they coming to kill or are they coming to clear it out?”
“I do not know details. Don’t ask me for a solution. But I am telling you this as a friend: 4:00 P. M.” And with that he turned and left.
I had only a few hours. I went straight to my office and began calling names in my book, pleading with them to lobby the Interahamwe to call off the raid. If that was impossible, could I at least get some more protection from policemen or the military? It was clear that I would have to invoke some international pressure to stop the raid, and so I started pestering the White House, the Quai d’Orsay, the Belgian government-anybody I could think of.
One of the calls I made, of course, was to my bosses at Sabena, who shared my panic and pledged to raise hell with the French government. This “French connection” was a key pressure point that already saved us from disaster many times. I was going to press on it once more-hard. Let me explain.
The Hutu Power government maintained close ties to France throughout the genocide. It was the French who had provided military training and armaments to most of the Rwandan Army and smuggled French guns kept flowing in through neighboring countries even after Habyarimana’s plane was shot down. Even the Interahamwe knew who their friends were. They were under strict instructions not to harm or harass any French nationals who came through their roadblocks. Belgians, meanwhile, were supposed to be murdered on sight. It was the height of idiocy to think that a lost tourist necessarily supports or even agrees with every tangled fine point of the foreign policies of their home nation, but that was what passed for logic in Rwanda during those times.
A general panic in the hotel would have been disastrous, so I told only a few refugees of the upcoming deadline. I dialed the world, with the clock ticking down. We had a few weapons in the hands of our policemen. We had some cash. Some drinks. But I didn’t think it would be enough to bribe our way out of a wholesale raid. When four o’clock arrived I stood near the entrance and waited. And nothing happened. No mobs were gathered behind the bamboo fence. Perhaps the leadership was late in arriving. Or perhaps the lieutenant’s information was off by an hour. Five o’clock ticked by. And then six. The sun went down and there was nothing but quiet. I did not relax. It seemed that one of my telephone pleas had gotten through-I could not be sure which one-but it may have only purchased a temporary stay.
At about 10:00 P. M., a rocket-propelled grenade smashed into the south wall just above the second floor. It tore a hole in a staircase wall and blew out the glass in Rooms 102, 104, and 106, but nobody was injured. I braced for an invasion, but that single shot was all that came. I immediately got on the secret phone with General Dallaire and told him we were being attacked. But no further rounds were fired. Dallaire showed up about half an hour later with a squad of subordinates and looked at the damage. They were joined by a Congolese soldier who had earned my lasting disrespect after I saw him try to buy a four-wheel-drive car from a refugee.
I can still see this group milling about the swimming pool deck, trying to decide where the missile had come from. One pointed to the headquarters of the gendarmerie down the valley. Another pointed off toward the RPF lines. They argued and gestured, apparently unable to make up their minds.
About half an hour later they left with a shrug. Would there be more rockets fired at us? There was no way to tell. There wasn’t anything I could do to prevent it from happening; all I could do was try to keep my cool when and if it happened. Nearly delirious with fatigue after what had been one of the longest days of my life, I crawled into bed beside my wounded wife and fell into a dark unconsciousness.
To my huge surprise things became quiet for a few weeks after that. Once again my premonitions of my death were mistaken. We still saw the killers moving on the sidewalks behind the bamboo, but there were no invasions and no random violence. No more missiles were fired. We counted down the days until May 26, when the United Nations, the Army and the rebels wanted to make a second try at an evacuation. This time they would send us not to the airport but to a hill behind the rebel lines.
My friends made several attempts to convince me to sign up for it. No way, I said. There were hundreds of refugees who would not be evacuated and they still needed my protection, for the same reasons I had cited when I refused to go along with the first evacuation. And this time I would not allow Tatiana and the kids to go either. I did not trust the UN. My wife was now able to sit up in bed, and even walk around a bit, but she was shaken and frail and frightened of every bump in the hallway. I also felt that even if they got out safely it would be a sign to the Interahamwe that I trusted the rebels to take better care of my wife and children. That would be pushing things far too far. I had been skating on paper-thin ice for so long, but even my oldest friends in the highest ranks of the Army would not be able to stomach that sign of treachery. They would not be there to help when the militias came in. Their continuing friendship was my one lifeline, even though it was as thin as a sewing thread.
“But these thugs know you are the one who has been protecting everybody, ” said Odette. “They will surely kill you.”
“I would never be able to face myself again if anybody dies, ” I told her. “And if my wife and my children go with you they will see that I have taken a side. They will not hesitate to come kill me.”
The night before the evacuation four families gathered in Room 126. We were all old friends. In the room were: Odette and Jean-Baptiste and their four children; John Bosco Karangura and his three children; journalist Edward Mutsinzi and his wife and child; and Tatiana and me and our four children.
We were going to do a pacte de sang-a blood oath. It is one of the most powerful bonds you can form with someone in Rwanda. It is the same igihango game I played as a boy, except the stakes are higher and the friendship is not a secret one. You are supposed to cut yourself in the stomach along with your friend and drink the other person’s blood from your hands. Few people took that physical step anymore, not since the advent of AIDS, but you could still make a verbal pledge. Other than the promise you made to marry somebody, it was the most solemn vow you could make.
“Listen to me, ” said Jean-Baptiste. “Listen to me all the children here. Look around. You see all the adults in here. We have decided from here onward to become brothers and sisters. If your parents should be killed, then the adults in the room tonight, then they become your parents. Get away from danger and find them if you can. Everyone in here has promised to raise the orphans as their own children. And if all the adults should be killed, then the oldest child will take care of everyone.”
We did not cut our bellies and mix our blood, but we all sipped from a glass of red wine as a symbol of the promise we had made. We all stood up, many of us crying, and shook hands. There were bitter tears in the room that night, but also love. We had been through a sea of fire and we clung to one another, not knowing if we would ever see one another again or even be breathing after the next twelve hours. I am a hotel manager and I don’t usually think in terms of such finalities, so I can only say that when death is all around and life is draining away by the second, that is when humanity can be so sweet and so fine.
The evacuation started much like the first, with stony good-byes that did not match the emotion of the previous night. I watched my friends pull away and went back inside. This convoy was much better organized than the first, and the militias had been ordered to keep their distance. Several hundred were moved out that day, leaving the Mille Collines still jammed with people, but feeling oddly empty.
“Most of the traitors have gone to join the cockroaches, ” said the radio. But the threat never stopped. On June 17, early in the morning, the killings flared up at the Sainte Famille Church, which was barely half a kilometer away from us, just down the hill. It is one of Kigali ’s premier Catholic churches, and was a major site of refuge. There were at the entrance to the hotel dozens of people snatched inside its redbrick walls. The RPF had staged a daring rescue one night, leaving those left behind vulnerable to attack. From the roof I could see the crowds of militias circling like insects around a light. I was afraid the violence would inevitably spill over on the hotel. After two and a half months of nonstop slaughter this was the one place in Kigali where nobody had died. It was, for that reason, a kind of trophy.
During this particular crisis I finally blew my cool. It happened when I was talking in the lobby with the mayor of Kigali, a man I had known for years. He was also a colonel in the Army and someone in a position to help us.
“The militia are killing people at Sainte Famille Church, ” I told him. “Surely they will also kill refugees here. I want soldiers with a lot of strength here to protect us.”
“Paul, I tell you I cannot spare any more police to help you. It is not possible.”
“Do you not understand the situation here? This is what has just happened. You can see it all from my roof if you want. The militia has attacked innocent civilians. It will happen again.”
“There is nothing I can do.”
“Listen, my friend” I said, feeling my anger welling up inside. Anybody who knows me will tell you that when I start to call a person “my friend” it usually means I am feeling the opposite.
“Listen to me now, ” I repeated. “One day all this will be over, and on that day you and I will have to face history. What will they say about us? Are you willing to say that you denied protection when it mattered and that innocent people died because of it? Are you sure this is the answer you want to give history?”
I don’t know what made me choose those particular words. As a failed pastor I suppose I should have invoked God, as in, Listen, my friend, when we die we will have to give an account to heaven. But somehow it seemed more appropriate to remind him of history’s indelible record.
I have told you that Rwandans have a special ear for their own history; we take it seriously in a way that few other nations do. It is what caused us to pick up arms against ourselves and kill each other. Perhaps this registered with my friend the mayor. In any case, he was offended by what I had said. He turned away without another word and stalked out of the Mille Collines. He left me standing alone and frightened. I worried that I had lost a key friend, and my friends were all that were keeping us alive.
That same day, at noon, I had an appointment to see General Bizimungu, who was at the Diplomates. It was one of the few times I ventured outside the grounds of the Mille Collines since I had arrived there nearly seventy days earlier. The trip was only five minutes long but it wound past the heaps of corpses and bloodstains on the road that seemed like natural parts of the scenery now. I met the general in the lobby and took him immediately down to the wine cellar, where I knew there would be some remaining stocks of Bordeaux and Côtes du Rhône or something else I could give him. It was now my habit. If I survived the genocide, I thought ruefully, it would be a long time before I could interact with anyone in a position of power without feeling the urge to stockpile a favor with him.
We talked about the war and he repeated the mournful prediction that he had made in my hotel room. The government was losing. They could hold the lines temporarily, but their supplies were running low. The rebels had too much momentum and superior military. They would be flooding into Kigali before long and would perhaps put all the leadership on trial for war crimes. But in the midst of all the murder and insanity, the government of Rwanda had continued to do business as if everything was functioning normally.
It occurred to me that this wine cellar had also been the scene of a strange conversation I had had with General Augustin Ndindiliyimana of the National Police force several weeks earlier. He was the one who had dismantled the roadblock for me on April 12, and a man whose continued friendship was helping keep us alive. I had come down here with him to look for a drink and he took the opportunity to tell me something absurd. He had just been appointed our nation’s ambassador to Germany.
“Are you going to go?” I asked him.
“If the RPF agrees, ” he said. This surprised me. He was speaking about the rebel army as if it was already the government of Rwanda.
Bizimungu shared this dim view of his own fortunes, and as we talked amid the dusty bottles of wine, I wondered how much longer he was going to be able to hang on.
Our surreal conversation was interrupted by the arrival of one of the general’s staff who came with an urgent message: “The militia has entered the Mille Collines.”
So this was it. My worst nightmare was coming true and I wasn’t even there to see it happen. My children. My wife. My friends. All those people.
“General, let’s go back to the Mille Collines, ” and he did not hesitate to come with me. It seemed that he was just as eager to be there as I was. On that drive through downtown Kigali it came to me quite calmly that this was almost surely the end of my life, the last day I would ever exist. I regarded this probability without a great deal of interest. I had contemplated my own death so many times in the last two and a half months that it had lost whatever power it had once had to upset me. All I wanted to do anymore was the work in front of me; I had lost the desire for everything else. At some point in that strange twilight of the genocide I had taken leave of myself as a sentient person. My only existence anymore was in my actions. And when those actions were halted it would be no more remarkable than the mindless tug of gravity terminating the roll of a child’s rubber ball. Death no longer frightened me.
But I still thought I might be of some use.
When we passed the roadblock near the front of the hotel I saw that nearly every one of the killers was gone-a very bad sign. The driver sped us to the front entrance. I heard General Bizimungu deliver an order to the sergeant with us. I’ll never forget what he said:
“You go up there and tell those boys that if one person kills anyone I will kill them! If anybody beats anyone I will kill them! If they do not leave in five minutes I will kill all of them!”
I ran inside the hotel, feeling as though I were underwater, and discovered the reception desk unmanned. But I heard shouting and crashing upstairs. One of the Interahamwe was in the corridor. He was dressed in ragged clothes and holding onto a rifle. He stared at me. I was wearing a plain white T-shirt and black pants.
“Where is the manager?” he demanded of me.
“I think he went that way, ” I said, pointing down a corridor. And then I strode off in the opposite direction. I could always give that Rwandan no with the best of them.
Once I was out of his sight I slipped upstairs. The militia had broken down several room doors, to make sure they had discovered everyone. The door to 126 had also been smashed open. So they had found my family.
I went inside the room, wondering if I would see their corpses. But the room was untouched. There did not appear to be any signs of a struggle. I went inside the bathroom and something motivated me to peek behind the shower curtain. There they all were, clustered in the arms of my wife, staring back at me.
Relief flooded over me, but I had to see what was happening to the others. I told them to stay put without making a peep, dashed down the stairs, and ran down that spiral staircase near the bar and out to the back lawn, where I saw all my guests on their knees near the swimming pool. This quiet square of water had once been the shadow capital of Rwanda and now it appeared to be the site of an imminent massacre. The militia was strutting around, demanding that everybody put their hands in the air. One of the men waved his machete in the air. I saw one of my receptionists among the militia-I had always suspected him of being a spy.
They had herded everyone to the swimming pool. By that point I thought it was generally understood that everyone inside the Mille Collines was a refugee from the militia and thus had reason to be killed. Why the need for formalities? Why not just start the killing machine? The only thing I could imagine was that they were aiming to shove the dead bodies into the swimming pool to foul the water for any refugee who might have escaped their notice.
Whatever the reason, the delay saved us all.
I saw Bizimungu inside the hotel, chanting his angry command. He emerged onto the pool deck now, enraged, his khaki and camouflage well pressed, his pistol drawn, his face taut with anger. Bizimungu was known as a quiet man, almost timid by military standards, but I had seen him angry a few times before and his temper was volcanic. He roared out his order again: “If one person kills anyone I will kill them! If anybody beats anyone I will kill them! If you do not leave in five minutes I will kill all of you!”
There was a moment of surprise. The militiamen looked at one another, as if seeking the approval of the group for whatever actions would follow. The lives of hundreds hung in their uncertainty. They could easily have disobeyed him. Bizimungu was a powerful man with powerful allies, but there had been hundreds of mutinies against Army officers during the genocide-thousands of unapproved murders. And this was the Hotel Mille Collines: the citadel of Belgian arrogance, the luxurious island of privilege, the best redoubt of cockroaches anywhere in Rwanda. Didn’t the general see what kind of prize he was giving up?
I saw surly looks on the faces of several of those boys. Their lust had been rising and now it had been denied. They were primed to kill and this traitor general had put a stop to it. I could tell they now wanted to turn their fury onto him. But they didn’t. They lowered their machetes and began to file out.
General Augustin Bizimungu now sits in a jail cell. He will probably be there the rest of his life.
After the genocide he fled to Zaire, and then into faraway Angola. He was captured by local police there and brought before the International Criminal Tribunal that was organized to prosecute war crimes committed during the genocide of 1994. Bizimungu was charged with supervising the arming and training of the militias. As I write this, he has not yet been convicted. He is now held in Arusha, the same city in Tanzania that had hosted the ill-fated peace talks that led to the final outbreak of hostilities between the Rwandan Army and the rebels.
I have been criticized for my friendship with him during the genocide, but I have never apologized for it. “How could you have stayed close to such a vile man?” I am asked, and my answer is this: I do not excuse whatever he may have done to promote the genocide, but I never heard him agree with any of the bloodshed when he was in my presence. I had to stay close to him because he could help me save lives. I would have stayed close with anyone who could help me do that.
He is a man who cannot be judged in stark terms. Like almost all men, there are hard places and soft places inside and the final verdict can never be a simple one. There is a saying in Rwanda: “Every man has a secret corner of his mind that nobody will ever know.” And I do not think I know enough about Bizimungu’s secret corner to judge him. He may well have done terrible things in Rwanda before and during the genocide, but I know that he stepped in for me at crucial moments to save the lives of innocent people when it was of no conceivable benefit to him.
If I had ended that friendship, I do not think I would be here to write these words today. There are also at least 1, 268 people who survived the killing partly because of the instructions of Bizimungu. In my book that counts for something.
The aborted slaughter at the Mille Collines was what it took to convince all parties that the hotel must be cleared out without further dithering. The United Nations, the rebels, and the Rwandan Army conferred and decided to do it that very day. They assigned us those five Tunisian soldiers to guard the parking lot for the last night. It made me furious that they were given to us long after we needed them, but there was no point in making a scene. On that afternoon I busied myself with making sure everybody was out of their rooms safely. There was a line of jeeps and trucks outside, the third such time that an evacuation convoy had been assembled there, but I had a feeling this would truly be the last one.
I made a last check of the hotel where I had spent seventy-six of the longest days of my life. Though I had been convinced I would die inside of it I felt affection for the place. When I was a young man it was where I had found my true occupation. I had met some of the most generous people in my life within its walls. Sabena gave me a job when I needed one and taught me things I never would have learned otherwise. They showed me how to respect myself by respecting others. When the killing started the hotel had saved people. It had projected the image of an ultimately sane world that kept the murderers at bay. I am not a particularly sentimental man, but I felt the odd urge to stroke it like a pet dog.
I made sure that the hotel was empty of everybody who wanted to go. Some employees had asked to stay, and I let them. I couldn’t tell how many had been spies for the militia all along. By that point I was beyond caring. It was time to leave. When the UN convoy pulled away I was in the backseat of the last jeep. I hid under a plastic tarp for fear that the militias would recognize me and shoot at me as we drove by the roadblocks. The Mille Collines had been one of the very few places in Kigali where nobody was killed.