An Ordinary Man (11 page)

Every time I saw soldiers walking down my street I assumed it would be my door they would come knocking upon. My plan was
to keep working the phones and hope that the military or the UN could find time to get me and my family an escort to the Diplomates.
But the radio made it sound as if all hell was breaking loose in Kigali and it was not clear when the troubles would ebb.

On the morning of April 9 they finally came for me. Two Army jeeps tore into my front yard and a squad of soldiers piled out.
The captain walked up to me and poked a finger in my face. He was sweating heavily and had angry eyes. I saw immediately that
this conversation could very well end with him shooting me in the face. I looked at him with the calmest expression I could
manage.

“I hear you are the manager of the Hotel Diplomates, ” he told me. “We need you to open up the hotel. We want you to come
with us.”

Here was my chance. I told him I would be happy to accompany him to the hotel, if only my family could come. What I didn’t
tell him was my extremely liberal interpretation of the word
family
. This was my excuse to load my neighbors and family into the hotel van and my neighbor’s car. I would call them my “uncles,
” “aunts, ” “nephews, ” and “nieces” if challenged. I gave my own car keys to another neighbor named Ngarambe.

“This car could save your life, ” I told him quietly.

We followed the Army caravan on the road out of Kabeza but went only a mile before the captain waved me to pull over at a
spot on the road where dead bodies were piled on both sides. It was the scene of a slaughter.

The captain came over to me with a rifle.

“Do you know that all the managers in this country have already been killed?”

“No, ” I said.

“Even if you do not know, this is how it is. And you, traitor, are lucky we aren’t killing you. We have guns and we’re going
to kill all the cockroaches in the hotel bar and in your house. You are going to help us.”

The captain held out the rifle and nodded toward the people huddled in the cars. His message was clear: These people were
to be killed right now. And I was chosen to be their killer. It would be my rite of passage.

But I noticed something.
He would not look me in the eye.

In that one small turn of the face, I saw that there might be some room for me to maneuver. I saw that I had a small chance
to save the lives of my family and neighbors. All I needed to do was find the right words. Everything now depended on my words.

I looked at the Kalashnikov rifle this army captain was offering me—bidding me to wipe out the cockroaches like a good patriotic
Hutu—and then I began to talk.

“Listen, my friend, I do not know how to handle a gun, ” I told him. “And even if I did, I do not see what would be accomplished
by killing these people.”

Surrounding us on every side were the bodies of people who had been freshly murdered. They had been pushed out of the roadway.
A few of the lucky ones had been shot, but most had been hacked apart by machetes. Some were missing their heads. I saw the
intestines of one man coming out of his belly like pink snakes. This captain had taken me to this spot on the road on purpose,
I thought, and was counting on all the bodies and the blood to send a clear message. You will join these corpses if you don’t
follow our orders, he wanted me to understand. But he would not look me in the eye when he asked me to kill and that’s how
I understood—somehow—there was a crack in his resolve that I could exploit. I wasn’t yet sure how or why, since he and his
men could have clearly killed me on the spot without consequence or remorse.

I went over to one of the cars where my neighbors were huddled. I purposely selected the frailest old man I could find and
asked the captain: “Look, is
this
really the enemy you are fighting?” I pointed out a baby in a mother’s arms, and said it again, trying to push all the panic
out of my voice: “Is this baby your enemy? I don’t think this is what you want to do. You are what? Twenty-five years old?
You are young. Do you want to spend the rest of your life with blood on your hands?”

When I saw this argument wasn’t going anywhere, I switched tactics. I aimed lower this time. Morality wasn’t working; maybe
greed would.

“My friends, ” I said, “you cannot be blamed for this mistake. I understand you perfectly. You are tired. You are hungry.
You are thirsty. This war has stressed you.”

I wanted just one thing to leap into his mind: cash. But I wasn’t sure this was going to work either. I had only a few minutes
to size him up and wasn’t sure where his ultimate interests lay. Maybe he was more hardline than I had thought. I found myself
wishing I could put a cognac in front of him to loosen him up. Everything now came down to how well I was reading this man—if
the promise of money would be enough to tempt him away from the murders he had been ordered to commit. I was like a Mephistopheles
trying to corrupt him. It was a role I was only too happy to play if he would only spare the lives of the people behind me.

“I have another solution, ” I told him. “I know how to solve this problem. Let us talk otherwise.”

We began to talk in terms of cash. It seems strange to say, but putting a price on lives was like a kind of sanity compared
to the murders he had been suggesting. At first the captain demanded that each Tutsi cockroach pay every one of his soldiers
200, 000 Rwandan francs in exchange for their lives. This was roughly the equivalent of $1, 500 American per person—many times
more cash than an average Rwandan will ever see in their lifetimes. But this was negotiation. You always start with the crazy
price and then work downward.

“My friends, ” I said, “even you do not have this much money. You cannot expect these people to be carrying that kind of sum.
But I can get it for you. I am the only person who can do this here. It is in the safe of the hotel and you will never be
able to open it without me. Drive me to the hotel and I will pay you the money.”

I hustled the refugees into the manager’s house of the Diplomates. In a way, we were going straight into the dragon’s den—these
were the men who were ordering Hutu citizens to pick up kitchen knives and machetes and kill anybody in Rwanda suspected of
being a descendant of the Tutsi clans or one of their allies. But I knew I would be safe here. Despite the captain’s bluster,
I had sized him up as a basically small man. He would not kill me in the presence of his superiors.

I told the captain to stay where he was—I now felt confident enough to command
him
—and got his money out of the safe. It was the price we had finally agreed on: a million Rwandan francs for everyone. It was
the end of the week when we always had a stockpile of liquid cash. It was supposed to have been converted into foreign currency
and wired to the corporate office in Belgium. Now it was going into the pockets of killers, but I think it was the best use
of that cash anybody could have imagined.

I went and paid off the captain. He drove away with his death squad and I never saw him again.

It was later suggested to me that I could have broken my agreement with this killer, simply refusing to pay the money once
I and my neighbors and family were safely inside the Diplomates. But this was inconceivable. He would have remembered me and
surely taken revenge, for one thing. And I had given him my word. Even if it was loathsome to reward him for being a potential
killer and to measure human lives in cash, I never make promises I cannot keep. It is bad policy. There is a saying in Rwanda:
With a lie you can eat once, but never twice.

He left me with something valuable, too. He told me that I was not powerless in the face of the murderous insanity that seemed
to have descended over my country in the last seventy-two hours.

With that brief refusal to meet my eyes, he told me that I might be able to negotiate with evil.

I soon discovered the true reason why I had been brought to the Diplomates and not killed. It was solely because of the keys
I had been holding. The interim government of Rwanda—a rump committee of the very same men who had organized the militias—had
taken over all the rooms as a temporary headquarters of the new government. But they needed the keys. Once I had opened the
suites and the bar, my life was expendable. I tried my best to keep myself and my family out of sight and they seemed to forget
about me in the chaos, for which I was deeply grateful.

The rebels soon learned what was happening at the Diplo-mates and started firing mortar shells at the hotel, which was all
too exposed on the hillside. They had an easy shot from their stronghold near the Parliament building. Bullets started whizzing
through the windows and I couldn’t go into my office because it faced the direction of fire. The crisis government hastily
started packing supplies and papers into boxes and prepared to decamp to the city of Gitarama, about fifty kilometers southwest.
They also looted bedspreads, pillows, television sets, and other items from their rooms, but it seemed best not to complain
about this small larceny. There was my own life to think about. I made a show of preparing to evacuate with them and they
seemed not to mind—although what they would want with a hotel manager I have no idea.

It did not matter: I had a secret plan in mind. My family and I would pretend to follow the military train, but then split
off almost immediately. We would use the cover of the government convoy as a safe way to get to Sabena’s other luxury property,
the Hotel Mille Collines. This was a place I knew very well from my time there in the 1980s and there were four hundred refugees
who had taken shelter there. Barely a half mile of hillside separated the two properties; I could have walked it in ten minutes
during peaceful times. But it would have been inviting death by machete to do it now while the
Interahamwe
were running about. We would have to leave my neighbors hidden inside the cottage—it was too dangerous to try to move them
out now—but I resolved not to forget them. I would simply have to come back later and rescue them by other means. But I wasn’t
sure I could even save my family, or myself. I would be leaving the Diplomates, where I was technically still the manager,
and going over to the Mille Collines, where I had plenty of friends and a long work history but was technically not the boss.
What kind of reception was I going to get over there? I had no idea what would happen.

On the morning of April 12 the government leaders started their trip to the emergency capital and I rolled out with them behind
the wheel of a Suzuki jeep. On that brief five-minute trip I kept seeing patches of red on the dirt of the shoulder. Days
later I would see trucks that would normally have been used to haul concrete blocks or other construction material. They would
be stacked high with dead bodies: women, men, children, many of them with stumps where their arms and legs had been. Somebody
with the city sanitation department apparently had the foresight to clean them off the roadways and take them for burial in
mass graves all over Kigali.

For now, though, there were only the bloodstains on the side of the road.“Don’t look, ” I said to my children and my wife.
But I had to keep my eyes open to drive.

SIX

I PEELED AWAY
from the killers and turned the car toward my beloved Hotel Mille Collines.

A squad of militia had set up a roadblock right in front of the entrance. I had come to dread them on sight—young boys, many
no older than fourteen, dressed in ragged clothes with red, green, and yellow stripes and carrying spears and machetes and
a few battered rifles. These boys had liberated some Primus beer from someplace and were guzzling it down, though it was early
in the morning. They were checking the identification papers of everyone attempting to get inside the Mille Collines. But
they had not yet entered the hotel itself.

I got out of the car to talk to them. It is always better to be face-to-face with the man you intend to deal with rather than
have him standing over you. To be on the same physical plane changes the tone of the conversation.

“I’m the manager of both the Diplomates and the Mille Collines, ” I told them. “I’m coming to see what is going on.”

To my surprise they did not ask me for my identification book. They glanced briefly at my family in the car before waving
us through. I thought I saw them smirk to each other. If I had to guess what they were thinking, it would be this: “Oh, why
not let six more cockroaches inside? It will make it easier to find them when the time comes.” They looked at me and my wife
and children and must have seen corpses.

All over Rwanda people were leaving their homes and running to places where they thought they might be spared.

Churches were favorite hiding places. In the village of Ntarama just south of the capital the mayor told the local population
of Tutsis to go inside the rectangular brick Catholic church to wait out the violence instead of trying to hide in the nearby
swamps. The church had been a safe refuge during the troubles in 1959 and nobody had forgotten the seemingly magical role
that it had played. More than five thousand frightened people crammed inside. But here, as well as everywhere in Rwanda, the
sanctuaries of Christ were a cruel trap; they only made easy places for the mobs to herd the fugitives. RTLM radio kept saying
the churches were staging bases and weapons depots for the rebel invaders, which was total nonsense, but it provided a motivation—and
perhaps some intellectual comfort—for hesitant killers to go inside and start chopping. Like my father said when I was a boy:
“Any excuse will serve a tyrant.”

Four busloads of cheerful Army soldiers and militiamen arrived to do the job at Ntarama. A man named Aphrodise Nsengiyumva
was at the altar leading prayers and trying to keep everyone cheerful when those outside started breaking holes through the
walls with sledgehammers and grenades. Light streamed into the darkened room. It would be among the last things most people
in here would ever see. Grenades were tossed in through the holes, blasting some of the refugees into bits, splashing blood
and muscle tissue all over the compound. Other militiamen broke down the doors and waded into the crowd with spears, clubs,
and machetes. Babies were ripped from their mother’s arms and dashed against the wall. People were cut down as they prayed.

It happened at secular buildings as well, and there, too, death was usually preceded by a betrayal.

A rumor went around in the suburb of Kicukiro, for example, that the UN troops stationed at a technical school would offer
protection from the mobs. There were indeed ninety commandos at the school, but they were less than eager to offer any protection.
Nonetheless, about two thousand of the hunted took shelter in the classroom buildings behind the very thin layer of safety
afforded by the blue helmets and their weapons.

On April 12, the same day my family and I reached the Mille Collines, the order was given for the UN troops to abandon the
school and help make sure that foreigners got out of Rwanda safely. The mission had changed. As the country slid further and
further into mass murder, the Security Council, Kofi Annan, and the United States decided that the mandate of the UN troops
was not to halt the killings but to ensure an orderly evacuation of all non-Rwandans. Everyone else was to be left behind.
Anyone with white skin or a foreign passport was given a free trip out. Even their pet dogs were evacuated with them.

The nation of Belgium was more than happy to go along; the grisly torture slayings of the ten soldiers assigned to protect
Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana had shocked the public back home. The former colonial masters could no longer stomach
the quagmire they had helped create. As it happened, the ninety UN troops at the vocational school were native Belgians. They
must have heard the stories of the militia at the roadblocks making sawing motions across their throats with machetes whenever
they spotted a Belgian uniform. Most of the
Interahamwe,
in fact, would be given standing orders to kill any person found carrying a Belgian passport. The militias surrounding the
school did not have the firepower to take on the UN soldiers, so they lay on the grass drinking beer and chanting slogans
and making threatening gestures. It must have been something of a relief for those Belgian soldiers to move out, knowing they
would be killed cheerfully if they ran out of ammunition in a firefight. This was the clearest signal yet that the world was
preparing to close its eyes, close its ears, and turn its back on what was happening.

The refugees knew what lay in store. Some begged the departing soldiers to shoot them in the head so they would not have to
face slow dismemberment. Others tried to lie down in front of the Belgians’ jeeps so they could not leave. Still others chased
after the vehicles screaming, “Do not abandon us!” The soldiers responded by shooing the refugees out of the way and firing
warning shots to keep them from mobbing the departing convoy.

The massacre of two thousand people began immediately after the last UN jeep had disappeared down the street.

I decided to get rid of that roadblock outside the hotel. It was a danger to everyone inside the Mille Collines. Anybody trying
to come inside would have to show their identity book. Those who could not prove their Hutuness would be murdered on the spot,
barely fifty yards from temporary refuge.

After I made sure that my wife and children were safely behind the doors of Room 126 I retreated into the manager’s office
with what would turn out to be one of the most formidable weapons I had in my possession. Its existence was kept secret from
just about everybody I knew. It was taken out only in moments of complete privacy.

It was a black leather binder that I had purchased many years ago on a trip to Belgium. Inside were about a hundred pages
of closely written script, arranged in three columns on each page. There were entries for name, for title, and for phone number.

This was my personal directory of numbers for the elite circle of government and commerce in Rwanda. For years I had made
a habit of collecting the business cards of local people who passed through the Diplomates or the Mille Collines and then
entering their information in pencil in my binder at the end of the day. If they came into the hotel often enough, and if
I liked them, I made sure that they occasionally received little gifts from me. Almost everyone in this book had a favorite
drink and I tried to keep that information memorized. If I heard gossip that a particular person had been demoted, promoted,
transferred, fired, or jailed I made a change to their title. Army officers, managers, doctors, ministers, professors—they
were all listed in neat phalanxes, and the eraser marks and crossed-out titles next to their names were a rough map of the
shifting sands of Rwandan politics. My binder may have been one of the better registries of power in the capital. I could
never be certain about this, of course, because nobody would talk about keeping such a thing. It could be used as evidence
if you were found to be connected to a person who fell from grace.

Now, of course, I had no idea who in this book was still in power—or even alive.

Many of the lines rang without anybody picking up. There were a handful of busy signals and quite a few tonal patterns that
indicated phones were out of service. But then I found myself talking to a young military camp chief named, as it happened,
Commander Habyarimana, though he was not related to the assassinated president. After a few minutes of conversation, I began
to recall what I had heard about him, and I realized that I had come to the right place. The commander was an angry young
man, but not for the same reasons that the
Interahamwe
were angry. His fury was directed at the presidential cronies, who he felt were responsible for turning Rwanda into an armed
hothouse of people who hated one another for no good reason. Commander Habyarimana had wound up on the wrong end of a dispute
with a superior and had been thrown into Kigali’s notorious jail for political prisoners, which was nicknamed “1930” for its
year of construction. He was eventually released and had been able to climb back up the military ladder. He was just as disgusted
as I was at the recent outbreaks of murder, and he promised to send me five of his men to help protect the hotel from invasion.

It was a good start, but I still wanted that roadblock gone.

I made a few more calls and finally got on the line with General Augustin Ndindiliyimana, a man whom I had known for several
years. He was the commander of the National Police. I did not envy him his position. The army had drafted thousands of his
best officers and appropriated a large part of the police arsenal, leaving him with a squad of, at most, a thousand poorly
trained and unequipped recruits to get control of the violent capital streets. Whatever he could do for me was going to be
a major gift.

“Now, general, ” I said quietly, in the voice of a man calling in a chip.“We have some refugees over here, as you know, and
that militia outside can come inside here anytime they want.”

I knew that he was afraid of the
Interahamwe
himself, and perhaps also of being accused of not supporting the pogroms that had recently become the law of the land. It
seemed that such a perception could spell death in these times. But I kept at him.

“General, you know we are friends and will always be friends. You know that I would not ask this if I weren’t in great danger.
Something must be done about that roadblock. You could send some officers to encourage those boys to move elsewhere. There
doesn’t need to be bloodshed in front of my hotel.”

It continued on like this for a while, and he agreed he would help me. I wasn’t certain if he was going to come through. But
within a few hours the roadblock had disappeared.

Having won that temporary respite, I turned my attention to another problem. I had to get hold of the master keys that opened
everything in the hotel. These were the tools that a hotel manager cannot afford to be without.

Bik Cornelis had told me that he had entrusted the keys to the reception staff, and so I approached one of the supervisors
there, a man I’ll call Jacques.

“Hello, ” I said. “It is now my responsibility to look after the hotel. I understand you have the keys?”

“Ah yes, the keys, ” he said. “I am not sure who has them right now.”

He made a show of asking his associate, who also denied any direct knowledge of their whereabouts. But these men had charge
of the reception desk, which is where Bik had told me the keys could be found. It was immediately clear what was really happening,
although neither Jacques nor I felt any need to say it outright.

I should pause here and explain what I mean. Despite its history of bloodshed and jealously Rwandan culture is rooted in an
attitude of excessive politeness. Perhaps it comes from all the fear in our background, the heavy hand of the European masters
pressed down on our ancestors, but nobody here likes to give a simple no. It is viewed as rude. So what you often get in response
to a direct question is a rambling story in which the refusal is voiced through a very soft yes. Or you often get an outright
lie. Important conversations can turn into exhausting set pieces. Ask an average Rwandan on the street where he is going that
day, and he’ll be likely to tell you “Oh, I don’t really know, ” even though he knows very well. Elusive answers are a national
art form; any man on the street here could easily work as a high-level diplomat. But both parties usually know what is being
said without anyone having to say it out loud. We call this “the Rwandan no.” Occasionally it can be misread. But I was almost
certain that Jacques was blowing smoke because he liked the idea of being in charge of the Mille Collines.

I soon found out that he was staying in the manager’s apartment with his girlfriend. He was also giving orders to the staff
as though he was in charge of the hotel. He had taken several bottles of the best champagne and was having a party with his
friends. I did not view this as an affront to my pride so much as I viewed it as a threat to my life and the lives of the
refugees upstairs. I had no idea where his loyalties really lay. We were in danger of invasion and slaughter and I suspected
that he was informing the thugs outside of what was happening in here and who was occupying what room. But I could not fire
him without risking a staff coup d’état at this fragile time.

I got on the phone to the Sabena Corporation in Brussels to clarify that I had their support. I then asked them to fax me
a letter naming me the interim manager of the Mille Collines until further notice. It came rolling through a few seconds later,
bearing the signature of Michel Houtard. He always joked that I might become president of Rwanda, but for now I just wanted
to take control of this hotel for a few more days, until the danger had passed.

Photocopies of the letter were immediately tacked onto employee bulletin boards all over the property. And then I went to
Jacques again. This time there was no pretense of cordiality.

“I want the keys
right now,
” I told him. “And I want this place in good order. If you agree with me, fine. If you don’t, then, please: good-bye.” I got
my keys.