An Ordinary Man (13 page)

That these people crammed together in the rancid half light, each nursing their own horrors, could endure such conditions
and keep on fighting on the side of life is proof to me not just of the human capacity for endurance but also to the basic
decency inside all people that comes out when death appears imminent. To me, that old saying about one’s life flashing before
the eyes is really a love for
all
life in those final moments and not merely one’s own; a primal empathy for
all
people who are born and must taste death. We clung to one another while the violence escalated, and most of us did not lose
faith that order would be restored. Whether we would be there to see it was a separate question. All we could do was wait
in the dark, with militia spies coming in and going out at all hours, even sleeping among us like fellow refugees. Cats and
mice were in the same cage.

The loss of our utilities created another problem. Without water we would all start to dehydrate, forcing people to go out
onto the streets rather than die of thirst. We had only a few days to figure out a solution. Every large compound in Rwanda—embassies,
restaurants, and hotels—must have their own set of reserve water tanks built onto the property as an emergency supply. Ours
were located directly under the basement. I went to check their levels several times a day and watched them steadily dropping.
There was no way to get a fresh delivery.

The solution came to me: We
did
have a reserve supply of water. In the swimming pool.

This pool was, in some ways, the most important part of the Mille Collines. Built in 1973 when the hotel was still new, it
was smaller than Olympic size, but it got a lot of use from our European guests who brought children. The logo of the hotel—five
overlapping triangles that represented hills—was painted on the slope that led from the deep end to the shallow end. A very
ordinary looking pool altogether, but it was the centerpiece of the back lawn, and it was surrounded with ten tables where
waiters used to bring cocktails, peanuts, and bar food. This was where the power brokers of Kigali often came to have private
conversations with each other in the evening. You never invite a man without a beer.

Something about human nature compels us to draw close to the edge of water. I feel it myself even though I never saw the ocean—or
even a lake of any size—until I was seventeen years old. I cannot explain it, but it is real. The tables near the pool were
snapped up first, even by men who would not dream of taking a dip, and who may not have been able to swim. Those tables probably
saw as much intrigue in the early 1990s as the courtyards of the doge’s palace in the heyday of Venice. In any case, that
pool was now a tool of life.

Here was the math. It held approximately seventy-eight thousand gallons. At the time, we had nearly eight hundred guests.
If we limited each person to a gallon and a half a day for their washing and drinking needs we could last for a little longer
than two months. A rationing system would have to be devised so that each person could be insured of receiving a fair share.
So we began a twice-daily ritual: Every morning at 8:30 and every afternoon at 5:00 everyone was told to come down with the
small plastic wastepaper bin from their room. They were allowed to dip it once into the pool water, which was already turning
slightly yellow. In order to keep the water as clean as possible, we did not permit anyone to swim in it, or even to wade.

The room toilets no longer flushed, and so we had to devise a method to get rid of waste. One of the guests discovered a trick,
which was quickly broadcast to the hotel at large: If you poured the pool water into the commode it would still wash the feces
and the urine down the pipes. The rooms began to smell a little worse, but at least there was no imminent sanitary emergency.

As for food, we were well stocked at first. Before the massacres started Sabena had a limited partnership with its rival Air
France on the question of catering meals for passengers. Because the hotel was the property of the airline their ready-to-eat
meals were stored in the basement of the hotel. We did a count: There were approximately two thousand trays. Those would be
a limited luxury that we parceled out stingily. It was very strange, of course, to be dining on rosemary chicken and potatoes
au gratin while young boys with machetes in hand peered at us over the bamboo fence.

When the airline meals ran low we had to come up with an alternate plan. Even though there were senseless murders happening
all over the country—more than five every minute—the marketplaces were still open. People still had to shop, even in the middle
of a genocide. I sent the hotel accountant, a man named Belliad, out with a truck and some cash to get us sacks of corn and
beans and bundles of firewood. We tried to acquire rice and potatoes, but they were unavailable. I then asked the kitchen
staff to cook it up. Since they had no electricity to run the stoves and ovens we had to build a fire underneath the giant
ficus tree on the lawn. Large pots of food were set in the blaze. We then served up this vegetable gruel in the large metal
trays we had used for buffet-style meals on the lawn. We ate as a group twice a day, the hotel’s fine china balanced on our
laps. If the pool was now a village well, the lawn was now our cookhouse.

Now that was a sight! It used to be that we would use the back lawn to host weddings, conferences, and diplomatic receptions.
I remembered nights out here with men in dark suits tailored in London and women in long silk dresses, holding cocktails in
thin-stemmed glasses, their faces gently lit with the soft colors of Malibu lights and their laughter like the music of an
opera libretto. Now our party was one of exhausted refugees in dirty clothes, some with machete wounds, many who had seen
their friends turn into killers and their family turned into corpses, all lined up under the ficus tree for that simple act
of eating that unconsciously signifies a small piece of hope, the willingness to store up fuel and keep living for another
day.

SEVEN

WE LOST OUR PHONE SERVICE
near the end of April. This was potentially disastrous. Without a phone my black binder would be nearly useless. I could no
longer call in favors with the Army brass or the government.

But then came a surprise. In 1987, when I was the assistant general manager, the Mille Collines received its first fax machine.
We had to request an auxiliary phone line to support it, one that was not routed through the main switchboard. We had asked
the technician to feed the fax line directly into the telephone grid of Kigali. This was a glitch I recalled when I was in
the darkness of the secretary’s office on the day the phones were cut. I was moved to pick up the handset attached to the
side of the fax. There was a dial tone humming back at me, as beautiful a sound as I could have imagined.

I guarded this secret carefully. If the hard-liners in the military found out that I had a phone, they would send in their
thugs to find it and rip it out. So I let only the refugee committee use it and instructed them to keep quiet. The news could
reach the ears of some of my renegade employees, which would be just like telling the
Interahamwe
themselves. I took to locking the door of the secretary’s office whenever I was away so that unauthorized people could not
wander in and discover my secret weapon. That phone was a lifeline.

I started staying up late at night, often until 4:00 A. M., sending faxes to the Belgian Foreign Ministry, the White House,
the United Nations, the Quai d’Orsay, the Peace Corps—whoever I thought might be able to help stop an attack against the hotel.
I tried to make the faxes brief and direct and forceful. I described the lack of food, the militia roaming outside, the desperate
struggle of refugees to get into the hotel, the constant rumors that we were about to be invaded. I pleaded with these governments
and agencies for some kind of assistance and protection. These letters were usually followed by a direct appeal via the little
phone handset on the side. But I often felt as though I was a man shouting into an empty room.

One follow-up call to a White House staffer was typical. It was very late at night in Rwanda and the conversation went approximately
like this:

“Yes, hello, my name is Paul Rusesabagina. I am the manager of the Hotel Mille Collines in the capital of Rwanda. I sent a
fax today to the number your secretary gave me. I was calling to see if you received it.”

“Ah, yes, Mr. Roos . . . Roossuhbaggian. How did you get this number?”

“I asked for you at the switchboard.”

“I see. You’re calling from Rwanda?”

“Yes, Rwanda.”

“Yes, I remember the fax. I passed it along to a colleague of mine who handles foreign policy details. He will review it and
get back to you.”

“So you didn’t have a chance to read it? I was told you were the one to handle this matter.”

“No, that wouldn’t be me. This has to be routed through proper channels. Have you also contacted the State Department or the
embassy of the United States in Rwanda?”

“Your embassy left the country on April 9.”

“Yes, that’s right. I see.”

“I was really hoping you could bring this up with President Clinton directly. The situation here is very bad.”

“Well, as I have said, this has to be handled by the foreign policy staff. All I can say is that they will review the document
and get back to you.”

“Who on that staff has been given my letter?”

“I can’t really say for sure. I’ve got another call coming in and I have to let you go.”

To all the faxes and phone calls I made to the United States in those weeks, I never once received a reply. It shouldn’t have
surprised me. I should have known a Rwandan no when I heard one.

On April 26 Thomas Kamilindi, who was one of the city’s best journalists, gave a telephone interview to Radio France International
in which he described the living conditions at the hotel, the lack of water, and the state of the ongoing genocide and civil
war. He also described the rebel advance on the capital. The interview was intended for listeners in Paris and all over the
French-speaking world, but it was also broadcast in Kigali.

Apparently some of the
génocidaires
had torn themselves away from RTLM long enough to listen, because there was a death order out for Thomas within the half hour.

Friends in the military urged him to sneak out of the hotel and find another place to hide, but I urged him not to leave.
I had been in touch with General Bizimungu and General Dallaire about his situation. We had him switch rooms to fool any spies
who might have known where he was staying. Some of the refugees were terribly unhappy with Thomas for focusing attention on
the Mille Collines—they thought he only reminded the militia thugs that we were here, dancing just out of their reach. Some
of the guests wanted to hand Thomas over as a kind of peace offering to the militia. I couldn’t decide if I found this idea
abhorrent or laughable.

A friend of Thomas’s was sent to the hotel that day to assassinate him. His name was Jean-Baptiste Iradukunda and he was with
an Army intelligence unit. They had known each other since they were children. Thomas was smart enough to boldly step out
into the corridor and meet his would-be killer face-to-face. They started to talk. I am convinced that had Thomas tried to
cower—or worse, to run—that he would have been shot. It is so much easier to die anonymously; it is so much harder to kill
someone after you have talked as one human being to another.

“Listen, Thomas, ” said the solider after a while. “I have been sent to kill you. But I cannot. I am going to leave now. But
somebody else will be coming later and they will not be as hesitant.”

Immediately after Thomas gave the interview, an Army colonel called from the hotel entrance. He was a man I had known for
a long time. I went out to say hello, and he wasted no time telling me what he was there to do.

“Paul, I am here to pick up that dog!”

“You are fighting against a dog, colonel?” I asked him with a small laugh. “Let’s go talk about this.”

We went back to my office and I asked a chambermaid to bring us drinks. Sitting in the quiet, and without an audience to encourage
him, I could already see that some of the rage had leaked away from his countenance. But he remained adamant: He was going
to have the head of Thomas Kamilindi. The interview he had given was an act of treason against the government of Rwanda and
the Army.

I began to think that the government leaders were most concerned that they had been embarrassed in front of their French patrons.
That they should have cared about an interview describing people drinking from the swimming pool at a time when murder-by-machete
was the law of the land tells you something about their mentality. But regardless, the execution order against Thomas was
real and I resolved to save his life by any means I could.

I tried flattery first.

“Colonel, ” I began, “you are too high ranking an officer to be concerned with such a small matter. Thomas is a small man.”

“I have orders, Paul.”

“You have orders to kill a dog? That is an insulting job. Don’t you have boys in the militia who are supposed to do that kind
of work?”

“It is not a small matter. He is a traitor and must pay.”

I could see that I was getting somewhere, but I switched my argument.

“Listen, colonel. Let’s say you take that dog out with your own hands and kill him. You will have to live with that for the
rest of your life. You did not hear this radio interview. You do not know what was said. You are proposing to take a man’s
life without a trial.”

“Paul, I have my orders. Where is he?”

“Even if you were to order it done instead of doing it yourself, it would be the same blood on your hands.”

It went on like this for quite some time. I don’t know why he kept talking to me. But the longer he sat there and sipped his
Carlsberg the greater the odds were that Thomas was going to survive to see the sun go down.

“Listen, ” I finally told him, after more than two hours had gone by, “this war has made everyone a little bit crazy. It is
understandable. You are tired. You need to relax. I have some good red wine in the cellar. Let me bring you a carton. I will
have it loaded into your jeep. Go home tonight and have a drink and we will talk more about this tomorrow, when we can come
to a compromise.”

Everything I suggested came to pass—almost. I did find some red wine from the cellar to spare. I had it loaded into his military
jeep. So far as I know, he did go home and enjoy some of it that night. But the compromise never happened. The colonel did
not come back and Thomas was not executed.

I had dozens of conversations like this throughout the genocide, surreal exchanges in which I would find myself sitting across
a desk or a cocktail table with a man who might have committed dozens of killings that day. In several cases I saw flecks
of blood on their uniforms or work shirts. We would talk as though nothing was out of the ordinary, as if we were negotiating
the purchase of new kitchen equipment or discussing an upcoming special event in the ballroom. Human lives almost always hung
in the balance during these talks. But they were always lubricated with beer or cognac, and usually ended with my gifting
that day’s murderer with a bottle of French champagne or whatever else I could dig out of my dwindling liquor cabinet.

I have since thought a great deal about how people are able to maintain two attitudes in their minds at once. Take the colonel:
He had come fresh from a world of machetes, road gangs, and random death and yet was able to have a civilized conversation
with a hotel manager over a glass of beer and let himself be talked out of committing another murder. He had a soft side and
a hard side and neither was in absolute control of his actions. It would have been dangerous to assume that he was
this
way or
that
way at any given point in the day. It was like those Nazi concentration camp guards who could come home from a day manning
the gas chambers and be able to play games with their children, put a Bach record on the turntable, and make love to their
wives before getting up to kill more innocents. And this was not the exception—this was the rule. The cousin of brutality
is a terrifying normalcy. So I tried never to see these men in terms of black or white. I saw them instead in degrees of
soft
and
hard
. It was the soft that I was trying to locate inside them; once I could get my fingers into it, the advantage was mine. If
sitting down with abhorrent people and treating them as friends is what it took to get through to that soft place, then I
was more than happy to pour the Scotch.

There is a letter from the American president Abraham Lincoln that helps illustrate what I believed I was doing. Though he
is remembered as the man who freed the slaves, his real objective in the civil war was keeping the United States together.
And so he wrote to a friend: “If I could preserve the Union and not free any slave, I would do it. If I could preserve the
Union by freeing all of the slaves, I would do it. If I could preserve the Union by freeing some slaves, and keeping others
in bondage, I would do it.”My only goal was saving the lives of the people upstairs, and questions of my taste in friendship
were secondary—if they were relevant at all. If you stay friendly with monsters you can find cracks in their armor to exploit.
Shut them out and they can kill you without a second thought. I reminded myself of this over and over.

Another principle helped me in these conversations, and it is this: Facts are almost irrelevant to most people. We make decisions
based on emotion and then justify them later with whatever facts we can scrounge up in our defense.

When we shop for a car we make sure to investigate the gas mileage, look at the leg room, peer at the engine, and evaluate
the cost, but the decision to buy it always comes down to a feeling in the gut. How will I look behind the wheel? Will it
be fun to drive? What will my friends think? We congratulate ourselves later for a shrewd acquisition based on reasons a,
b, and c, but the actual decision cannot be put in terms of an equation. People are really never as reasonable as they seem
to be—in fact, “reason” is usually an afterthought, nothing more than a cover story for the feelings inside.

The same is true in politics. Let me give you a rather pertinent example. I seriously doubt the leadership of Rwanda really
believed
that average Tutsis were spies who had melted into the general population. I think they whipped up the flames of fear to create
that belief. They were appealing to a dark place in the heart—that unreconstructed part of us that comes down from our ancestors,
who lived in constant fear of beasts in the night. There was an emotional reason for people to hate and fear the Tutsi, and
that nonsense about traitors in the villages was a set of “facts” grafted into place to justify the violence. And as I have
said, the ethnic violence was only a tool for a set of cynical men to hold on to their power—which is perhaps man’s ultimate
emotional craving.

It is a dismal principle. But I could use it to save lives.

When I took that colonel into my office, poured him some beer, and puffed up his ego it was not about the facts of the matter
at all. It was about his insecurity in his position and his need to feel like an important person. I created a web of words
in which the choice I did not want to see him make—killing Thomas—was running counter to his emotional needs. I made him believe
that such a loutish task was beneath him. And he bought it, even though he probably had the power to snap his fingers and
have me and other troublemakers chopped to bits within twenty minutes. It is not that the colonel was a stupid man. Even the
best of us can be slaves to our self-regard.

They kept coming and coming. From houses in Kabeza to besieged churches in Nyamirambo, they heard on the
radio trottoir
about the safe haven at the Mille Collines.