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

Shortly before dawn one morning, Lieutenant Apollinaire Hakizimana from military intelligence walked up to the reception desk, rang Paul in his room, and said, “I want you to get everybody out of this hotel within thirty minutes.” Paul had been asleep, and he woke up negotiating. “I said, ‘Mister, do you know that these people are refugees? What security do you guarantee? Where are they going? How are they going? Who’s taking them?’” Lieutenant Hakizimana said, “Did you hear what I said? We want everybody out, and within half an hour.” Paul said, “I’m still in bed. Give me thirty minutes. I’ll take my shower, and then get everybody out.” Paul quickly sent for several of the refugees he trusted most, who were well connected with the regime—including François Xavier Nsanzuwera, the former Attorney General of Rwanda, a Hutu who had once investigated Hakizimana as a leader of Hutu Power death squads. Together, Paul and his friends began working the phone, calling General Bizimungu, various colonels, and anyone else they could think of who might pull rank on the lieutenant. Before the half hour was out, an army jeep arrived at the hotel with orders for Hakizimana to leave.

“They got that boy out,” Paul said. Then he paused for a moment in his memories, and his perspective zoomed out, so that I pictured him peering through his window at the Mille Collines as he said, “And what was around us—around the hotel compound? Soldiers, interahamwe —armed with guns, machetes, everything.” Paul seemed determined to register his own proper size. He hadn’t said, “ I got that boy out”—he’d said they did—and by showing me the ranks of killers massed at the hotel gate, he was underscoring the point.

In discussions of us-against-them scenarios of popular violence, the fashion these days is to speak of mass hatred. But while hatred can be animating, it appeals to weakness. The “authors” of the genocide, as Rwandans call them, understood that in order to move a huge number of weak people to do wrong, it is necessary to appeal to their desire for strength—and the gray force that really drives people is power. Hatred and power are both, in their different ways, passions. The difference is that hatred is purely negative, while power is essentially positive: you surrender to hatred, but you aspire to power. In Rwanda, the orgy of misbegotten power that led to genocide was carried out in the name of Hutuness, and when Paul, a Hutu, set out to defy the killers, he did so by appealing to their passion for power: “they” were the ones who had chosen to take life away and he grasped that that meant they could also choose to extend the gift of retaining it.

AFTER HEARING THE announcement of their own deaths on the radio, Odette and her family stayed in their house. “We never turned on the light and never answered the phone except with a prearranged signal for people who knew us—ring once, hang up, call again.” Two weeks went by like that. Then Paul called from the Mille Collines. He was an old friend, and he was just checking around—to see who was alive, whom he might save. “He said he’d send Froduald Karamira to pick us up,” Odette recalled. “I said, ‘No, I don’t want to see him. If he comes he will kill us.’ But that was Paul. He maintained contact with people like that right to the end.” Paul made no apologies. “Of course I talked to Karamira,” he told me. “I talked to him because everybody was coming to the Mille Collines. I had many contacts and I had my stock of drinks, and I was sending them to get people and bring them to the Mille Collines. It wasn’t only Odette and Jean-Baptiste and their children who were saved in that way. There were so many others.”

On April 27, a lieutenant showed up at Odette’s house to shuttle the family to the hotel in his jeep. Even an army officer could be stopped and have his passengers taken from him by the interahamwe, so it was decided to make three separate trips. Odette went first. “In the streets,” she said, “there were barriers, machetes, corpses. But I wouldn’t look. I didn’t see a corpse in that whole time, except in the river. When we were there in the marshes, my son said, ‘What’s that, Mother?’ and I said it was statues that had fallen into the river and were floating past. I don’t know where that came from. My son said, ‘No, it’s corpses.’”

When the lieutenant and Odette reached the hotel and found the gate surrounded—not to protect those inside, of course, but to prevent new refugees from entering—she held out a handful of malaria pills and aspirin, and said she was a doctor coming to treat the manager’s children. “Normally,” she told me, “I don’t drink, but when I walked into the hotel, I said, ‘Give me a beer.’ I had a little beer, and got completely drunk from it.”

The lieutenant went to fetch Odette’s children, and as he drove with them toward the hotel, they were stopped. The militia at the roadblock asked the children, “If your parents aren’t dead, or Tutsi, why aren’t you with them?” Odette’s son didn’t hesitate. He said, “My father’s manning a roadblock, and my mother’s at the hospital.” But the killers weren’t convinced. Two hours passed in edgy discussion. Then a car pulled up carrying Georges Rutaganda, the first vice president of the interahamwe and a member of the MRND central committee. Rutaganda recognized the children from earlier times—when he and people like Odette and Jean-Baptiste had moved in the same social universe—and for a moment, apparently, his atrophied soul stirred him to magnanimity. According to Odette: “He told the interahamwe who were hassling those kids, ‘Don’t you listen to the radio? The French said if we don’t stop killing children they’ll stop arming and helping us.’ Then he said, ‘You kids, get in that car and go.’”

So Rutaganda had violated the eighth “Hutu commandment” and showed mercy to Odette’s children, but she felt no warmth for the man. Many people who participated in the killing—as public officials, as soldiers or militia members, or as ordinary citizen butchers—also protected some Tutsis, whether out of personal sympathy or for financial or sexual profit. It was not uncommon for a man or a woman who regularly went forth to kill to keep a few favorite Tutsis hidden in his or her home. Later, such people sometimes pleaded that they took some lives in order not to attract attention to their efforts to save others. To their minds, it seemed, their acts of decency exonerated the guilt of their crimes. But to survivors, the fact that a killer sometimes spared lives only proved that he could not possibly be judged innocent, since it demonstrated plainly that he knew murder was wrong.

“That the person who cut off my sister’s head should have his sentence reduced? No!” Odette said to me. “Even this Mr. Rutaganda, who saved my children, should be hanged in a public place, and I will go there.” The children were in tears when they reached the hotel. The lieutenant himself was crying. It took a good deal of persuading, on Odette’s part, before he made the final trip and brought Jean-Baptiste and their adopted mulatto child to the hotel. “Mulattoes,” Odette explained, “were seen as the children of Tutsis and Belgians.”

PAUL RUSESABAGINA REMEMBERED that in 1987 the Hôtel des Mille Collines had acquired its first fax machine, and an auxiliary telephone line had been installed to support it. In mid-April of 1994, when the government cut outside service to and from the hotel’s main switchboard, Paul discovered that—“miraculously,” as he said—the old fax line still had a dial tone. Paul regarded this line as the greatest weapon in his campaign for the protection of his guests. “We could ring the King of Belgium,” Paul told me. “I could get through to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of France immediately. We sent many faxes to Bill Clinton himself at the White House.” As a rule, he said, he would stay up until four in the morning—“sending faxes, calling, ringing the whole world.”