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

DURING ONE OF his visits to the Hotel des Mille Collines, Father Wenceslas had invited Paul Rusesabagina to join him for a drink at the Sainte Famille church. But Paul never left the hotel, and for that, even Wenceslas should have been grateful, since he had delivered his own mother to Paul for safekeeping at the hotel. In fact, a number of men affiliated with the Hutu Power regime had installed their Tutsi wives at the Mille Collines, and while their presence there surely contributed to the hotel’s overall safety, Paul felt that it reflected shamefully on the men. “Wenceslas knew himself that he wasn’t even able to protect his mother,” Paul said. “And he was so arrogant that when he brought her, he told me, ‘Paul, I bring you my cockroach.’ Do you understand? He was talking about his mother. She was a Tutsi.”

Wenceslas, Paul told me, was “just a—how do you call it? —a bastard. He didn’t know his father.” But what does that explain? Lots of people who behaved as badly or worse than Wenceslas had fathers, and would never have called their mothers cockroaches, while many people who were ill at ease with their origins didn’t run criminally amok. I wasn’t interested in what made Wenceslas weak; I wanted to know what had made Paul strong—and he couldn’t tell me. “I wasn’t really strong,” he said. “I wasn’t. But maybe I used different means that other people didn’t want to use.” Only later—“when people were talking about that time”—did it occur to him that he had been exceptional. “During the genocide, I didn’t know,” he told me. “I thought so many people did as I did, because I know that if they’d wanted they could have done so.”

Paul believed in free will. He understood his actions during the genocide in the same way that he understood those of others, as choices. He didn’t seem to think that he could be called righteous, except when measured against the criminality of others, and he rejected that scale. Paul had devoted all his diverse energies to avoiding death—his own and others’—but what he feared even more than a violent end was living or dying as what he called a “fool.” Regarded in this light, the option of kill or be killed translated into the questions: kill for what? be killed as a what?—and posed no great challenge.

The riddle to Paul was that so many of his countrymen had chosen to embrace inhumanity. “It was more than a surprise,” he told me. “It was a disappointment. I was disappointed by most of my friends, who immediately changed with that genocide. I used to see them just as gentlemen, and when I saw them with the killers I was disappointed. I still have some friends that I trust. But the genocide changed so many things—within myself, my own behavior. I used to go out, feel free. I could go and have a drink with anyone. I could trust. But now I tend not to do so.”

So Paul had a rare conscience, and knew the loneliness that came with it, but there was nothing false about his modesty regarding his efforts on behalf of the refugees at the Mille Collines. He hadn’t saved them, and he couldn’t have saved them—not ultimately. Armed with nothing but a liquor cabinet, a phone line, an internationally famous address, and his spirit of resistance, he had merely been able to work for their protection until the time came when they were saved by someone else.

THE FIRST MAJOR evacuation from the hotel was attemped by UNAMIR on May 3. Trucks arrived to take sixty-two refugees, who had been offered asylum in Belgium, including Thomas, Odette and Jean-Baptiste, and their families, to the airport. But as the refugees boarded the trucks, government spies milled through the parking lot, making lists of the evacuees, and the call went out on RTLM to stop the convoy. About a mile from the hotel, a rapidly growing mob of interahamwe and soldiers halted the trucks at a roadblock. The refugees were forced to climb down; some were beaten and kicked. Interahamwe with radios tuned to RTLM listened as the names of well-known evacuees were read, then sought those people out for special abuse. The former Attorney General, François Xavier Nsanzuwera, got the worst of it. With UNAMIR officers looking on, he was knocked to the pavement with a rifle butt. As he lay there, bleeding from the head, several shots were fired at him. The shots missed. But the mob grew more excited and began demanding the right to massacre the evacuees. Rwandan military officers held them off, at the same time refusing to allow the convoy to budge. I’ve heard many accounts of the hours the evacuees spent at the roadblock and not one clear explanation of why, in the end, the convoy was allowed to retreat back to the hotel, but it was, and Odette spent the evening with a sewing kit, stitching wounds.

Twelve days later, an officer from military intelligence turned up at the hotel and informed Paul that everybody in it would be killed that night. There was no question of relying on UNAMIR for help. Once again, Paul rallied all of his connections, in the government and abroad, and called on every refugee with plausible contacts to do the same. Paul remembers speaking with the director-general of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Paris, and telling him “Mister, if you want these people to be saved, they will be saved. But if you want them to die, they will die today, and you French people will pay in one way or another for the people who are killed in this hotel today.” Almost immediately after this conversation, General Bizimungu of the FAR high command and General Dallaire of UNAMIR came to Paul to assure him that the hotel would not be touched.

Paul made the effort, but the life-and-death decision lay, as always, with the killers and, tellingly in this case, with their French patrons. That night a single bullet crashed through a window of the Mille Collines, as if to say that the hand of death was only temporarily stayed. But by then, the battle for Kigali was raging, and the hotel and several other high-profile houses of “refuge,” such as the church of Sainte Famille, had become bargaining chips. The RPF was holding thousands of government prisoners in a stadium across town, and the RPF command proposed the kind of deal that Hutu Power understood: you kill those, and we’ll kill these. An exchange was negotiated across the front lines. UNAMIR helped to mediate the arrangement, and provided transportation, and it was widely reported at the time that the UN had saved the refugees. But the truth lies elsewhere: they were saved by the RPF’s threat to kill others.

The evacuation proceeded slowly, truckload by truckload, day by day. There were many days when no trucks moved, and even as some refugees were being trucked to safety, massacres continued at Sainte Famille and elsewhere in Kigali. On June 17, when only a handful of refugees remained at the Mille Collines, Paul went to the Hotel des Diplomates, in search of liquor for General Bizimungu. When he returned to the Mille Collines, he found that a mob of interahamwe had broken into the suite where he was staying with his family. His wife and children hid in the bathroom, while the militia tore up the living room. Paul ran into some of the invaders in the corridor. “They asked me, ‘Where’s the manager?’ I was in a T-shirt and jeans and they think a manager is always in a tie. I said, ‘The manager? You haven’t met him?’ They said, ‘No, where is he?’ I said, ‘He’s gone that way,’ and I went the other way. I met some more of them on the stairs, and they asked, ‘Where’s the manager?’” Paul laughed. Once again, he sent them off in the other direction. Then he went looking for General Bizimungu, who was waiting for his liquor handout. The general instructed one of his sergeants to chase the militia out. As Paul remembered it, Bizimungu said, “Go up there and tell those militia that if they kill someone, I’ll kill them. Even if they beat someone, I’ll kill them. And if they stay in this hotel for the next five minutes, I’ll shoot.”