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

I met with Thomas on a soft summer evening in Kigali—the hour of sudden equatorial dusk when flocks of crows and lone buzzards reel, screaming, between the trees and the rooftops. Walking back to my hotel, I passed the corner where Thomas had expected to be killed. The Soras Insurance Building’s plate-glass portico was a tattered web of bullet holes.

“If I don’t kill that rat he’ll die,” says Clov in Samuel Beckett’s Endgame. But those who commit genocide have chosen to make nature their enemy, not their ally.

ON THE MORNING of April 12, at the same time that the Presidential Guard first came for Thomas at his house, Bonaventure Nyibizi learned that his family was to be killed that afternoon. They had been hiding in and around his house, spending some nights crouched in ditches. Many of their neighbors had been killed, and he told me, “I remember that already on April 10 there was a communique on the radio from the provincial administration calling all the drivers with big trucks, because only four days after the genocide started there were such a lot of dead people here that it was necessary to bring the trucks.”

Bonaventure did not doubt that his family’s luck had run out at home. “So we decided that instead of being killed by a machete, we’d choose to be killed by a grenade or by being shot,” he said. “We took my car and drove outside my compound. We were able to make it up to the church of Sainte Famille. It was at most half a mile, and it was very difficult to drive because there were a lot of roadblocks. But we drove there, and on April 15 they came for us. They killed about a hundred fifty people in Sainte Famille that day, and they were looking for me all the time.”

The Catholic cathedral of Sainte Famille, an immensity of brick, stands right off one of Kigali’s main arteries, a few hundred yards downhill from the Hotel des Mille Collines. Because of its prominence, and its consequent visibility to the few international observers who were still circulating in Kigali, Sainte Famille was one of half a dozen places in the city—and fewer than a dozen in all of Rwanda—where Tutsis who sought refuge in 1994 were never exterminated en masse. Instead, the killing in such places was incremental, and for those who were spared the terror was constant. Sainte Famille was initially protected by policemen, but, as usual, their resistance to the neighborhood interahamwe and to the soldiers who came hunting for Tutsis quickly collapsed. In the beginning, the killers who staked out the church contented themselves with attacking new refugees as they arrived. The massacre on April 15 was the first massive incursion into Sainte Famille, and it was quite carefully organized by the interahamwe and the Presidential Guard.

Only males were killed on that day, picked out individually from the throng of several thousand in the church and its outbuildings. The killers had lists, and many of them were neighbors of the victims and could recognize them on sight. A young man who had worked for Bonaventure as a domestic was killed. “But I was lucky,” Bonaventure said. “I went inside a small room with my family, and just as I went in and closed the door, Sainte Famille filled with military and militia and police. They started asking for me, but fortunately they did not break down the door where I was. I stayed there with the kids and my wife. There were about twenty people altogether in that small, small place.” Bonaventure had a three-month-old daughter with him, and he said, “Keeping her quiet was the hardest.”

I asked him what the priests had done when the killing began. “Nothing,” he said. “One of them was good, but he was threatened himself, so he went into hiding on April 13, and the other one in charge was very comfortable with the militia. This is the famous Father Wenceslas Munyeshyaka. He was very close to the military and the militia, and he was going around with them. He was not actually denouncing anybody at first, but he would do nothing for the people.”

After the massacre, a junior priest, named Paulin, did help to install Bonaventure in a safer hiding place—the back office of a church garage—where he stayed, alone with a friend, from April 15 until June 20. “He was a Hutu, this priest, but he was kind,” Bonaventure said. “Sometimes he would open the door so that our wives could bring us water or food. Rumors went around that I had been killed, so all I had to do was stay hidden.”

WALKING HOME FROM his aborted execution, Thomas Kamilindi was told by the sergeant who escorted him that he was still condemned to die. “They’re going to kill you today if you don’t leave,” the sergeant said. Thomas had no idea where to go. He wrote a new will, and gave it to his wife, saying, “I’m leaving, I don’t know where, maybe someday this paper can help you.”

When he stepped outside again, it was raining. He began walking, and wound up at the radio station. “I was afraid,” he said, “because the radio was practically a military camp.” But nobody seemed to mind him there. “I watched television until the evening. I called my wife, and told her I was at the radio, and I spent the night under a table on a mat. I had nothing to eat, but I slept well.” Thomas could not imagine how he would have survived if he were a Tutsi. In the morning, he told the editor-in-chief of the radio that he had nearly been killed. “Do the morning news, and perhaps they’ll think you’re with us,” the editor said.

“So I did the six-thirty a.m. broadcast,” Thomas told me, “but I couldn’t go on like that.” He called around to various embassies, and found that they had all been evacuated. Then he tried the Hotel des Mille Collines: “The guy at the reception recognized my voice, and said, ‘Thomas! You’re still alive. That’s incredible. We thought you were dead.’ He said, ‘If you can get here, you might be OK.’” It was forbidden to go around in a vehicle without escort or papers, so Thomas persuaded a soldier to drive him. He arrived at the hotel without money, but he was given a room. “If people came, we said we’d worry about money later,” a hotel staffer told me. That night as Thomas settled in, his phone rang. It was an army major, Augustin Cyiza, who was also staying in the hotel. Cyiza was sympathetic to the refugees—he eventually deserted the FAR to join the RPF—but Thomas didn’t know that at the time. He went to Cyiza’s room assuming that he would be killed, or at least arrested. Instead the two men drank beer and talked late into the night, and the next day Cyiza went out and returned with Thomas’s wife and daughter.

Beer saved many lives at the Hotel des Mille Collines. Recognizing that the price of drinks could only go up in the embattled city, the caretaker manager Paul Rusesabagina worked through diverse middlemen to keep the hotel cellars well stocked. This trade, by which he also arranged for enough sweet potatoes and rice to keep his guests from starvation, required extensive dealings with the military command, and Paul took advantage of the contacts. “I was using drinks to corrupt people,” he told me, and laughed, because the people he was corrupting were Hutu Power leaders, and what he meant by corrupting them was feeding them liquor so they wouldn’t kill the refugees under his roof. “I gave drinks and sometimes I even gave money,” he said. Major General Augustin Bizimungu, the commander of the FAR, was one of many regular, unsavory visitors to the hotel whom Paul kept well lubricated. “Everybody came,” Paul said. “I had what they wanted. That was not my problem. My problem was that nobody should be taken out of my hotel.”

Paul is a mild-mannered man, sturdily built and rather ordinary-looking—a bourgeois hotel manager, after all—and that is how he seemed to regard himself as well, as an ordinary person who did nothing extraordinary in refusing to cave in to the insanity that swirled around him. “People became fools. I don’t know why,” he said to me. “I kept telling them, ‘I don’t agree with what you’re doing,’ just as openly as I’m telling you now. I’m a man who’s used to saying no when I have to. That’s all I did—what I felt like doing. Because I never agree with killers. I didn’t agree with them. I refused, and I told them so.” Many Rwandans didn’t agree with the genocide, of course, but many overcame their disagreements and killed, while many more simply saved their own skins. Paul sought to save everybody he could, and if that meant negotiating with everybody who wanted to kill them—so be it.