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

The Hutu Power leaders in Kigali knew Paul had a phone, but, he said, “they never had my number, so they didn’t know how to cut it off, and they had other problems to think about.” Paul guarded his phone carefully, but not absolutely; refugees with useful foreign contacts were given access to it. Odette sent regular faxes to her former employers at Peace Corps headquarters in Washington, and on April 29, Thomas Kamilindi used the hotel phone to give an interview to a French radio station. “I described how we lived, with no water—drinking the swimming pool—and how it was with the killing, and how the RPF was advancing,” Thomas told me. The interview was broadcast, and the next morning, Major Cyiza told Thomas, “You fucked up. They’ve decided to kill you. Get out of here if you can.”

Thomas had nowhere to go. He moved into a friend’s room, and that afternoon he got word that a soldier had arrived at the hotel to assassinate him. Using the house phone, Thomas asked his wife to find out the soldier’s name. It was Jean-Baptiste Iradukunda. “He had been a friend since childhood,” Thomas told me, “so I called him and said, ‘OK, I’m coming,’ and I went. He explained that the military command wanted me dead. I asked who decided this, their names, and who had sent him. He hesitated. Then he said, in effect, ‘I don’t know who’s going to kill you. I can’t do it. But I’m leaving the hotel and they’ll send someone for sure to kill you.’”

“Nobody else came for me,” he said. “The situation normalized. I went out in the corridor again after a while, and we stayed put.”

When I asked Paul about Thomas’s trouble, he laughed. “That interview wasn’t good for the refugees,” he said, and he added, “They wanted to take him out, but I refused.”

I asked Paul how that had worked, why his refusal was heeded.

He said, “I don’t know,” and again he laughed. “I don’t know how it was, but I refused so many things.”

MEANWHILE, ALL ACROSS Rwanda: murder, murder, murder, murder, murder, murder, murder, murder, murder…

Take the best estimate: eight hundred thousand killed in a hundred days. That’s three hundred and thirty-three and a third murders an hour—or five and a half lives terminated every minute. Consider also that most of these killings actually occurred in the first three or four weeks, and add to the death toll the uncounted legions who were maimed but did not die of their wounds, and the systematic and serial rape of Tutsi women—and then you can grasp what it meant that the Hotel des Mille Collines was the only place in Rwanda where as many as a thousand people who were supposed to be killed gathered in concentration and, as Paul said very quietly, “Nobody was killed. Nobody was taken away. Nobody was beaten.”

Down the hill from the hotel, in his hideaway at the church of Sainte Famille, Bonaventure had a radio, and listening to RTLM, he heard how well the killing was going. He heard the radio announcers’ gentle encouragements to leave no grave half full, and the more urgent calls for people to go here or go there because more hands were needed to complete this or that job. He heard the speeches of potentates from the Hutu Power government, as they traveled around the country, calling on the people to redouble their efforts. And he wondered how long it would be before the slow but steady massacre of refugees in the church where he was hiding caught up with him. On April 29, RTLM proclaimed that May 5 was “cleanup” day for the final elimination of all Tutsis in Kigali.

James Orbinski, a Canadian physician who was one of about fifteen international relief workers still stationed in Kigali, described the city as “literally a no-man’s-land.” He said, “The only thing alive was the wind, except at the roadblocks, and the roadblocks were everywhere. The interahamwe were terrifying, bloodthirsty, drunk—they did a lot of dancing at roadblocks. People were carrying family to hospitals and orphanages. It would take them days to go two or three miles.” And getting to a hospital was no guarantee of safety. When Orbinski visited the hospital where Odette and Jean-Baptiste had worked, he found it littered with bodies. He went to an orphanage, hoping to evacuate the children, and met a Rwandan officer who said, “These people are POWs, and as far as I’m concerned they’re insects, and they’ll be crushed like insects.”

By the end of April, the city was divided across its main valley: to the east, where Orbinski was based, the RPF had control, and to the west, the city belonged to the government. UNAMIR and the few emergency workers like Orbinski spent hours each day in negotiation, trying to arrange exchanges of prisoners, refugees, and the wounded across the front lines. Their effectiveness was extremely limited. “I went to Sainte Famille every day, bringing medical supplies, making lists,” Orbinski told me. “I’d go back the next day—twenty people killed, forty people killed.”

When Paul recalled how he had used his telephone at the Mille Collines to focus international attention on the plight of his guests, he said, “But, you know, Sainte Famille also had a working phone line, and that priest, Father Wenceslas, never used it. My goodness.”

It was true that the phone worked at the church. Even Bonaventure Nyibizi, in his hiding place, had been aware of it, and one day in mid-May he had been able to sneak out and get access to it. “I called Washington—the USAID mission,” he told me. “They said, ‘You know what the situation is. Whenever you have a chance to leave, contact the nearest mission.’” Hardly a message of hope; but for Bonaventure, to make contact, and to know that others knew he was alive and where, was a comfort.

Why didn’t Father Wenceslas make similar calls? Why hadn’t more people acted as Paul had? “That’s a mystery,” Paul said. “Everybody could have done it. But, for instance, Wenceslas himself wore a pistol, yet he was a priest. I can’t say that he killed anyone. I never saw him killing. But I saw him with a pistol. One day he came to my room. He was talking about what was happening in the country, how people were shooting from Sainte Famille—from his church!—soldiers with armored cars. He said he gave them drinks because they’ve killed people. I said, ‘Mister, I don’t agree with that.’ And my wife said, ‘Priest, instead of carrying your Bible, why do you carry a pistol? Why don’t you put this pistol down and take up your Bible? A priest should not be seen in blue jeans and a T-shirt with a pistol.’”

Later, Odette told me the same story, and she said that Father Wenceslas had replied, “Everything has its time. This is the time for a pistol, not a Bible.”

Paul remembered the exchange differently. By his account, Father Wenceslas had said, “They’ve already killed fifty-nine priests. I don’t want to be the sixtieth.” Paul’s response was: “If someone comes and shoots you now, do you think that with a pistol you won’t die?”

After the genocide, Wenceslas fled with the help of French missionaries to a village in southern France, where he was assigned to active pastoral duty. In July of 1995, he was arrested and charged under French law with crimes of genocide in Kigali, but his case quickly snagged on legal technicalities. After two weeks in a French jail, he was released to resume his ministry. In January of 1998, France’s Supreme Court ruled that he could be prosecuted after all. He stood charged, among other things, with providing killers with lists of Tutsi refugees at his church, flushing refugees out of hiding to be killed, attending massacres without interfering, sabotaging UNAMIR’s efforts to evacuate refugees from the church, and coercing refugee girls to have sex with him. In 1995, he was asked by two interviewers—a Rwandan whose mother and sisters had been refugees at Sainte Famille and a French journalist—whether he regretted his actions during the genocide. “I didn’t have a choice,” Wenceslas replied. “It was necessary to appear pro-militia. If I had had a different attitude, we would have all disappeared.”