Philip Gourevitch - We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families

“Mister,” one of the soldiers said, “do you know that all the managers of businesses have been killed? We’ve killed them all. But you’re lucky. We’re not killing you today, because they sent us to look for you and get you for the government.” Remembering this speech, Paul laughed, a few hard breathy gasps. “I’m telling you,” he said. “I was sweating. I started negotiating, telling them, ‘Listen, killing won’t gain you anything. There’s no profit from that. If I give you some money, you profit, you go and get what you need. But if you kill someone—this old man, for instance, he’s now sixty years old, he has finished his life in this world—what are you gaining from that?’” Parked on the roadside, Paul negotiated in this vein for at least an hour, and before he was allowed to proceed he had given up more than five hundred dollars.

In 1993, when Sabena had named Paul director-general of the Diplomates, he was the first Rwandan ever to have risen so high in the corporate ranks of the Belgian company. But on April 12, 1994—three days after he moved into the hotel with the new, genocidal government—when the Dutchman who managed the Hotel des Mille Collines called Paul to say that, as a European, he had arranged to be evacuated, it was understood that, as a Rwandan, Paul would be left behind. The Dutchman asked Paul, who had worked at the Mille Collines from 1984 to 1993, to take care of the hotel in his absence. At the same time, the Hutu Power government at the Hotel des Diplomates suddenly decided to flee Kigali, where combat with the RPF was intensifying, and install itself at Gitarama. A heavily armored convoy was being prepared for the journey. Paul loaded his family and friends into a hotel van, and when the government convoy began to move, he pulled out behind it, following as if he was a part of it until it rolled past the Mille Collines, where he swung into the driveway of his new home.

It was a strange scene at the Mille Collines, Kigali’s premier hotel, an icon of international business-class prestige, where the staff dressed in livery and a night’s lodging cost a hundred twenty-five dollars—about half the average Rwandan annual income. The guests included a few officers of the Forces Armées Rwandaises and of UNAMIR, and hundreds of local sanctuary seekers—mostly well-off or well-connected Tutsis and Hutu oppositionists and their families, who were officially slated for death but who had, through connections, bribery, or sheer luck, made it to the hotel alive, hoping that the UN presence would protect them.

A few foreign journalists were still at the hotel when Paul arrived, but they were evacuated two days later. Josh Hammer, a Newsweek correspondent who spent twenty-four hours in Kigali on April 13 and 14, recalled standing at a window of the Mille Collines with some of the hotel’s Tutsi refugees, watching a gang of interahamwe running down the street outside: “You could literally see the blood dripping off their clubs and machetes.” When Hammer went out with colleagues to explore the city, they couldn’t go more than two or three blocks before being turned around by interahamwe. At military roadblocks, he said, “They’d let you through, and wave to you, then you’d hear two or three shots and you’d come back and there’d be fresh bodies.” On the day of Hammer’s visit, a Red Cross truck, loaded with injured Tutsis bound for a hospital, was stopped at an interahamwe roadblock, and all the Tutsis were taken out and slaughtered “on the spot.” The distant pounding of RPF artillery shook the air, and when Hammer went to the Mille Collines’ rooftop restaurant, government soldiers blocked the doors. “It looked like the whole military command was in there, plotting strategy and genocide,” he said.

So the journalists left for the airport with a UNAMIR convoy, and Paul remained to take care of a hotel filled with the condemned. Except for the mostly symbolic protection provided by a resident handful of UN soldiers, the Mille Collines was physically undefended. Hutu Power leaders and officers of the FAR came and went freely, interahamwe bands ringed the hotel grounds, the six outside telephone lines of the hotel switchboard were cut off, and as the number of refugees packed into the rooms and corridors came close to a thousand, it was periodically announced that they would all be massacred. “Sometimes,” Paul told me, “I felt myself dead.”

“Dead?” I said. “Already dead?”

Paul considered for a moment. Then he said, “Yeah.”

ON THE MORNING before Paul moved into the Mille Collines, Odette and Jean-Baptiste attempted to leave Kigali. They had been paying three hundred dollars a day in protection money to a trio of neighborhood policemen, and they were nearly out of cash. Odette had signed over several thousand dollars of traveler’s checks, but the cops were suspicious of this form of payment. Odette feared that they might discover her sister, Vénantie, when the money ran out. Vénantie had hidden for three days in a chicken coop that belonged to some nuns who lived next door, then she’d come out, saying she’d rather die. Odette had already learned that at least one of her sisters had been killed in the north, and she understood, too, that most of the Tutsis in Kigali had been massacred. Her friend Jean, who had asked her to take his wife to Nairobi, had gone there by himself to find a house for his family, and his wife had been killed along with their four children. Garbage trucks were plying the streets, picking up corpses.

But the killing hadn’t yet reached the south. Odette and Jean-Baptiste thought that if they could get there they might be safe, only the Nyabarongo River stood in the way, and there was no hope of getting over the bridge just south of Kigali. They decided to try their luck in the papyrus marshes that lined the riverbank —to cross by boat and continue on foot through the bush. In exchange for an escort to the river, they signed over their jeep, their television, their stereo, and other household goods to their police protectors. The police even went and found Odette’s nephew and his wife and baby, who were hiding somewhere in Kigali, and put them in a school for safety. But the nephew was killed the next day, along with all the other men in the school.

The night before leaving Kigali, Odette went to her neighbors, the nuns, and told the Sister Superior of her plan. The nun drew Odette aside and gave her more than three hundred dollars. “A lot of money,” Odette told me. “And she was a Hutu.” Odette gave some of the money to each of her children, who were fourteen, thirteen, and seven years old, and she tucked slips of paper into the children’s shoes with the addresses and phone numbers of family and friends, and with her and Jean-Baptiste’s bank account numbers—in case, Odette had to tell them, they got separated or killed.

The family rose at four in the morning. The police never showed up. They had taken the last of Odette’s traveler’s checks and vanished. So Jean-Baptiste drove. At that early hour, the roadblocks were mostly abandoned. Vénantie, who was well known as a parliamentarian, disguised herself in the car as a Muslim with scarves wrapped around her face. At a small village near the river, where the mayor was a friend of Jean-Baptiste’s, they arranged for a local police escort—two men in front, one behind, for about thirty dollars a man—and set out on foot, carrying a little water and biscuits and a kilo of sugar through papyrus that grew higher than their heads. At the water’s edge they saw a boat on the far bank and called to the boatman, but the boatman said, “No, you’re Tutsis.”

The marshes were teeming with Tutsis, hiding or trying to cross the river, and lurking among the papyrus, there were also many interahamwe. When Odette heard her daughter crying out, “No, don’t kill us, we have money, I have money, don’t kill me,” she realized the children had been caught.