An Ordinary Man (22 page)

Another problem is the current government of Rwanda. To its great credit it has taken steps to stop the identification of
anybody as a Hutu or a Tutsi. In many parts of Rwanda today it is now considered rude to discuss somebody’s heritage, and
this is a good thing. But the changes have gone no further. Rwanda is a country that has still never known democracy. The
current president, Paul Kagame, was the general of the Rwandan Patriotic Front army that toppled the
génocidaire
regime and ended the slaughter, and for this he deserves credit. But he has exhibited many characteristics of the classic
African strongman ever since taking power. In 2003 he was reelected with 95 percent of the vote. There is nobody in the world
that can call results like that a “free election” and keep a straight face.

Moreover, the popular image persists that Rwanda is today a nation governed by and for the benefit of a small group of elite
Tutsis. Kagame’s government has done little to show the world a different picture. The Parliament is widely known to be a
rubber stamp for the will of the president. Those few Hutus who have been elevated to high-ranking posts are usually empty
suits without any real authority of their own. They are known locally as
Hutus de service,
or “Hutus for hire.” So there is no real sharing of power. What exists now in Rwanda is a new version of the
akazu,
or the “little house” of corrupt businessmen who have long surrounded the president. The same kind of impunity that festered
after the 1959 revolution is happening again, only with a different race-based elite in power. We have changed the dancers
but the music remains the same.

I said earlier that what my country needs most of all is to sit together around a table and talk. Perhaps we will not talk
as the best of friends, not yet, but at least as people with a common history who can respect each other. That discussion
never happened, not once in Rwandan history. The dictates of the
mwami
were followed by the plunder of the country by Belgians and then the corrupt ethnic visions of Habyarimana, with the balance
of power always bouncing back and forth between the races, and neither side learning
anything
from the ashes and the bodies. We never talk about it; we just steal what we can whenever our turn comes around.

The way that modern nations have that discussion around a table is through the democratic process and the civilized exchange
of ideas in a respectful format. But Rwanda has a cosmetic democracy and a hollow system of justice, and this is why I think
it is far too soon to say
Never Again
for my country.

We are not binding up the wounds of history. And I can assure you of this as a Rwandan: History dies hard.

I was not the only one who said no. There were thousands of other people in Rwanda who were also unimpressed by the propaganda
and put their lives in jeopardy to shelter fugitives. Individual acts of courage happened every single day of the genocide.
Some were partial killers, it is true, showing compassion to some and murdering others. But there were many who refused completely,
and there would have been almost no survivors of the genocide without the thousands of secret kindnesses dispensed under the
cover of night. We will never know the names of all those who opened their homes to hide would-be victims. Rwanda was full
of ordinary killers, it is true, but it was also full of ordinary heroes.

There was a Muslim man, for example, who concealed up to thirty people in his sheds and outhouses. One of his guests reported
the following: “The
Interahamwe
killer was chasing me down the alley. I was going to die any second. I banged on the door of the yard. It opened almost immediately.
He took me by the hand and stood in his doorway and told the killer to leave. He said the Koran says if you save one life
it is like saving the whole world. He did not know it is a Jewish text as well.”

There was also Father Célestin Hakizimana, who presided over St. Paul’s Pastoral Center in Kigali. He stood in contrast to
those other priests and ministers who either condoned the genocide or slunk away when danger came. Father Hakizimana turned
his church into a shelter for over two thousand people and refused to budge to the demands of the militia.

There was Damas Mutezintare Gisimba, who received four hundred hunted children into his orphanage. Many of them were hidden
in chambers in the ceiling, along with prominent politicians. Gisimba also roamed around Kigali poking through the stacks
of dead bodies piling up all around. He found several people not yet dead and took them into his care.

There were so many others. A farmer saved people by hiding them in trenches on his land and covering them up with plants and
banana leaves to make it look like an ordinary field. An elderly woman pretended to be a sorceress and threatened to call
down the power of the gods on any killers who tried to harm the people in her protection. A mayor used his own police force
to fight the
Interahamwe
and was killed for his actions. Schoolteachers hid their hunted students in sheds and empty classrooms. Some of the names
of these heroes are known, but most are not. Their good deeds are lost to history. The murders were anonymous and irrational,
but the kindness and the bravery were there in scattered places too, and that is a big part of what gives me hope for the
future.

What did these people have in common? I believe they all shared the long vision. They had an ability to see through the passing
moment and to understand that the frenzy that had gripped Rwanda was a temporary condition at best. They acted decently, as
was appropriate for decent times, and did not believe the world to be anything less than an essentially decent place, despite
the onset of a collective insanity. Their body temperatures did not fluctuate with the changing environment. All these ordinary
heroes believed that balance would one day be restored.

Let me explain a little more. The English scholar and theologian C. S. Lewis was a veteran of the trenches of World War I
and also the air blitz against London by the Nazis. He took note of a common delusion that comes in times of war: We have
a tendency to believe that the horrors we are seeing are the unvarnished real state of mankind, an animal condition without
a shred of true love or kindness to be found anywhere, a life of nasty, brutish shortness. Six thousand years of civilization
somehow becomes nothing but a painted shell covering up an ugly “truth” about man.

Lewis described the attitude this way: “In hatred you see men as they are; you are disillusioned; but the loveliness of a
loved person is merely a subjective haze concealing a ‘real’ core of sexual appetite or economic association. Wars and poverty
are ‘really’ horrible; peace and plenty are mere physical facts about which men happen to have certain sentiments.”

He disagreed with this view of reality, and I disagree as well. Kindness is not an illusion and violence is not a rule. The
true resting state of human affairs is not represented by a man hacking his neighbor into pieces with a machete. That is a
sick aberration. No, the true state of human affairs is life as it
ought to be lived.
Walk outside your door and this is almost certainly what you’ll see all around you. Daily life in any culture consists of
people working alongside each other, buying and selling from one another, laughing with each other, ignoring each other, showing
each other courtesy, swearing at each other, loving each other, but hardly ever killing each other as a matter of routine.
In the total scope of man’s existence collective murder is a rare event and should never be considered the “real” fate of
mankind.

I do not at all mean to downplay the role of politicized mass murder. It is a pathology of civilization and it will certainly
happen again, probably before the decade is out. My point here is to say that it is not—and should never be seen as—the default
state of mankind. These things are
not supposed to happen,
and when we write them off as Darwinist spectacles, inevitable by-products of war or worse, to ancient tribal animosities,
we have lost sight of the most important thing: the fundamental perversion of genocide. We will have played into the hands
of those who excite racial hatreds as a device to acquire more power. We will have been duped by the cheapest trick in the
book. Human beings were designed to live sanely, and sanity
always
returns. The world always rights itself in the long run. Our collective biology simply refuses to let us go astray for long.
Or as the French philosopher Albert Camus put it: “Happiness, too, is inevitable.”

This is why I say that the individual’s most potent weapon is a stubborn belief in the triumph of common decency. It is a
simple belief, but it is not at all naive. It is, in fact, the shrewdest attitude possible. It is the best way to sabotage
evil.

Let me tell you the most important thing I learned about evil. Evil is a big, ugly, hulking creature. It is a formidable enemy
in a frontal attack. But it is not very smart and not very fast. You can beat it if you can slip around its sides. Evil can
be frustrated by people you might think are weaklings. Quiet, ordinary people are often the only people with the real ability
to defeat evil. They can give it the
Rwandan no
.

I was a good-natured fellow with the guests who came into the hotel, no matter if they were good friends or odious hate mongers.
This was in my nature. There are very few people with whom I could not sit and enjoy a glass of cognac. Except in extreme
circumstances it very rarely pays to show hostility to the people in your orbit. And so when evil dropped by for a drink I
was able to have a conversation. I could find its weaknesses and seek out its soft spots. I could see the vanity and the insecurity
and even the ghost of common decency inside the minds of killers that would allow me to save lives. I could quietly flip evil’s
assets against itself. What happened at the Mille Collines was the most extreme form of pragmatism. We would go to any length
and do whatever it took to save as many lives as possible. That was the basic ideology. That was the
only
ideology. There was nothing particularly special about this—it only seemed like the normal thing to do.

I looked into the abyss during the genocide, and the abyss looked back and we were able to reach a compromise that was actually
no compromise at all. The swimming pool in which babies might have been drowned was turned into a village well. Policemen
who might have been directing death squads were instead posted at my front gate to help me keep out the killers. The hotel
itself was supposed to have been a gathering place where refugees could be lured with false promises and then killed as a
bunch. But it never happened. Tools of death became reappropriated. They were now tools of life.

I remember reading this in the Bible when I was a young man: “What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little
while and then vanishes.” Our time here on the earth is short, and our chance to make a difference is tiny. For me the grinding
blocks of history came together in such a way that I was able to take what fragile defense I had and hold it in place for
seventy-six days. If I was able to give much it was only because I had some useful things from my life to give. I am a hotel
manager, trained to negotiate contracts and provide shelter for those who need it. My job never changed, even in a sea of
fire.

Wherever the killing season should next begin and people should become strangers to their neighbors and themselves, my hope
is that there will still be those ordinary men who say a quiet no and open the rooms upstairs.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

There have been several excellent accounts of the Rwandan genocide and the authors of this book did not hesitate to mine them
for context and detail. These other works are gratefully acknowledged here.

The most rigorous and complete autopsy is
Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda
by Alison Des Forges (New York: Human Rights Watch and International Federation of Human Rights, 1999). Des Forges and a team
of researchers used Rwandan government documents from that period to produce a 771-page report of unparalleled authority.
Philip Gourevitch’s
We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda
(New York: Picador, 1998) is a work of distinguished reportage and unforgettable writing.
Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda
by Romeo Dallaire (New York: Avalon, 2004) is a cri de coeur that also happens to be a fine work of journalism.
Season of Blood: A Rwandan Journey
by Fergal Keane (London: Penguin Books, 1995) has a good section on Rwanda’s murky politics of ethnicity.
Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak
by Jean Hatzfeld, and translated by Linda Coverdale (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005) explores the motivations for
mass murder from the most authoritative source possible: the killers themselves. Two quotes in the last chapter were drawn
from Hatzfeld’s impressive and troubling work.

Justice on the Grass: Three Rwandan Journalists, Their Trial for War Crimes, and a Nation’s Quest for Redemption
by Dina Temple-Raston (New York: Free Press, 2005) contains an excellent dissection of RTLM’s role in inciting the massacres.
A portion of a broadcast is quoted from Temple-Raston’s work. The United Nations’ report on the disaster, entitled “Report
of the Independent Inquiry into the Actions of the United Nations During the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda, ” by a committee led
by Ingvar Carlsson, Han Sung-Joo, and Rufus M. Kapolati and dated December 15, 1999, is a blunt condemnation of the various
missteps in New York that cost the lives of approximately half a million people.
The Key to My Neighbor’s House
by Elizabeth Neuffer (New York: Picador, 2001; London: Bloomsbury, 2001) asks penetrating questions about justice in the aftermath
of genocide, and Samantha Power’s
A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide
(New York: Basic Books, 2002; London: Flamingo, 2004) is an indictment of the West’s tendency to fold in the face of evil.
A memo from the U.S. State Department is drawn from Power’s book. Some of the information about the forgotten heroes of 1994,
as well as some colonial history, was drawn from materials at the excellent Gisozi Genocide Museum in Kigali.

Land of a Thousand Hills: My Life in Rwanda
by Rosamond Halsey Carr with Ann Howard Halsey (New York: Viking Penguin, 1999; London: Viking/Allen Lane, 1999) is the autobiography
of Mugongo’s orphanage director, who is a treasure of Central Africa and a sharp observer of politics and people. Finally,
Keir Pearson and Terry George’s masterful screenplay for the movie
Hotel Rwanda,
reprinted in their book
Hotel Rwanda: Bringing the True Story of an African Hero to Film
(New York: Newmarket Press, 2005) ensured that the events at the Hotel Mille Collines would be known throughout the world.