An Ordinary Man (21 page)

All in all it is a contented life, and I want no more adventure in it. I would have been happy to have lived out my remaining
time as a good husband to my wife, a decent father to my children, and a safety-conscious driver for my passengers, with what
happened at the Hotel Mille Collines only a private memory, a forgotten episode in history. I went through hell and lived
to tell the story, but I never expected to tell the story to you quite like this. The way it happened is a brief footnote.

One day in 1999 the telephone rang. On the line was a young man from New York named Keir Pearson who said he was researching
a screenplay on the Rwandan genocide. A friend of his had been traveling in Africa at the time and had heard the dramatic
radio interview given by my friend Thomas Kamilindi. The young man from New York had borrowed money from his girlfriend to
buy an air ticket to Rwanda and wanted to talk to me. I said, sure, come for a visit on your stopover to Kigali. The story
of the Mille Collines was already well known. It had been told on the BBC and the Voice of America and other radio programs.
But nobody had put it on film.

I spent an hour with Keir Pearson in my town house and was impressed with his sincerity, as well as with his desire to get
the story correct. His business partner was an Irish film director named Terry George and together they made the movie
Hotel Rwanda
about my experience. There were a few dramatic embellishments, but I know that’s typical for Hollywood movies, and the story
was very close to the truth. The movie earned Academy Award nominations for Pearson and George as well as for the two main
actors, Sophie Okonedo and Don Cheadle, whom I later befriended. I was happy he was chosen, for he is a fine actor and much
better looking than I.

It was very strange for me to be called a “hero” the way that I was when the movie was released in Europe and America. I was
invited to the White House to meet President George W. Bush, who told me he saw the movie twice. I started giving lectures
about the current state of affairs in Africa today and the importance of truth and reconciliation in the aftermath of genocide.
With the help of some friends I started the Hotel Rwanda Rusesabagina Foundation to provide education and health care to the
thousands of orphans and homeless children who live in Rwanda today. Nearly half a million children were left parentless by
the murders. The others, the younger ones, are what are known as
enfants du mauvais souvenir,
or “children of bad memories.” They are the ones whose mothers were raped, impregnated and left to survive. Quite a few are
HIV-positive from birth. Most of them never knew a mother’s unconditional love because of the terrible way in which they came
into the world. My foundation is dedicated to funding orphanages and medical treatment and to providing education for these
lost children so that they may know some hope and not become a part of a future surge of evil in Rwanda. We cannot change
the past, but we can improve the future with the limited tools and words that we have been given.

Words are the most powerful tools of all, and especially the words that we pass to those who come after us. I will never forget
that favorite saying of my father’s: “Whoever does not talk to his father never knows what his grandfather said.” So I decided
to write this book for the sake of the historic record.

I am a Rwandan, after all, and I know that all things pass away but history. History never dies. It is what defines us as
a civilization, and we live out our collective histories every day, in ways both good and evil. Over and over people kept
telling me that what I did at the Mille Collines was heroic, but I never saw it that way, and I still don’t. I was providing
shelter. I was a hotel manager doing his job. That is the best thing anyone can say about me, and all I ever wanted. And that’s
really the best I have to give.

ELEVEN

IN A VILLAGE SOUTH OF KIGALI
is a church that is no longer a church. The compound is surrounded with a low stone wall and the ground is covered with weeds.
The building itself is shaped like an auditorium; the walls are of red brick. The floor is poured concrete. The stained-glass
windows are cracked and broken. Spatters of grenade fragments are in the walls and the tin ceiling is shot though with hundreds
of bullet holes. On sunny days you can see shafts of thin light streaming through, and the spots they make on the floor look
like a constellation of stars.

This is the former parish church in the community of Nyamata. The name means “place of milk.” The church had been renowned
as a safe haven during Rwanda’s past troubles. When the killings started in the spring of 1994 the Tutsis of the region were
encouraged to hide in the sanctuary. The refugees locked the iron gates and prayed while their friends and neighbors eagerly
struggled to break inside to murder them. On April 14 the Presidential Guard was called in from Kigali and they threw grenades
at the gates, blasting them into shards. The ordinary people and the soldiers flooded in and thousands of people were massacred.

The building has since been seized from the Vatican. It is now an official memorial to the genocide, but it functions also
as a crypt. There are burlap bags full of skulls in a side room. Some of them bear a slice where a machete chopped into the
brain. Out in the backyard is an open tomb with thousands of skeletons, with the skulls arranged in neat rows, the bones stacked
up on wooden shelves. Most of them were found in the sanctuary, where the bodies were stacked three deep, but others were
recovered from mass graves and pit toilets around the village. The altar is covered with a bloodstained cloth. The back wall
has stains on the bricks left by the children whose heads were smashed against it. Quietness reigns.

Standing out front is a sign draped with a purple cloth. It bears a pledge in four languages: “Never Again.”

We all know these words. But we never seem to hear them.

What happened? Hitler’s Final Solution was supposed to have been the last expression of this monstrous idea—the final time
the world would tolerate a deliberate attempt to exterminate an entire race. But genocide remains the most pressing human
rights question of the twenty-first century.

Each outbreak has its differences on the surface. In Cambodia slaughter was done in the name of absurd political dogma; in
Bosnia the killings erupted after the fragmenting of a multiethnic federation; the Kurds in Iraq were gassed when they demanded
independence from a dictator; and today in Sudan innocent people are dying because they occupy oil-rich territory coveted
by the ethnic majority.

Rwanda had its own unique set of circumstances. We had a radio station that broadcast vicious racial humor—“jokes” that sounded
more and more like commands with each telling. We had bad leadership concerned more for its own survival than the needs of
the people. We had a long history of grabbing impunity, in which people were allowed to get away with the most flagrant property
crimes and job discriminations so long as they were committed against Tutsis. We had a history of tit-for-tat massacres in
the countryside that were never investigated. And we had a hungry and desperate population that was taught to see the midnight
murder of their neighbors as a potential economic windfall.

Look closely at each of the world’s recent genocides, however, and the surface differences burn away. The core of genocide
is always the same. They erupt under the cover of a war. They are the brainchildren of insecure leaders eager for more power.
Governments ease their people into them gradually. Other nations must be persuaded to look away. And all genocides rely heavily
on the power of group thinking to embolden the everyday killers.

This last factor is the most powerful commonality of all, and without it no genocide could take place.

Let me explain what I mean. We were all born with a powerful herd instinct and it can force otherwise rational people to act
in inexplicable ways. I would never have believed this to be true if I hadn’t seen my own neighbors—gentle, humorous, seemingly
normal people—turn into killers in the space of two days. Ordinary citizens, just like you and me, were bullied and cajoled
into doing things they would never have dreamed possible without the reinforcing eyes of the group upon them. And in this
way murder becomes not just possible but routine. It even gets boring after a while.

The French reporter Jean Hatzfeld earned the trust of ten imprisoned Rwandan murderers, and they described to him the workaday
business of human slaughter. “In the end, a man is like an animal; you give him a whack on the head, and down he goes, ” said
one. “In the first days someone who had already slaughtered chickens—and especially goats—had an advantage, understandably.
Later, everybody grew accustomed to the new activities and the laggards caught up.”

Said another: “At the start of the killings, we worked fast and skimmed along because we were eager. In the middle of the
killings, we killed casually. Time and triumph encouraged us to loaf around. At first we could feel more patriotic or more
deserving when we managed to catch some fugitives. Later on, those feelings deserted us. We stopped listening to the fine
words on the radio and from the authorities. We killed to keep the job going.”

It is no surprise to me at all that the young teenagers in the refugee camps could have been organized into
Interahamwe
chapters in the winter of 1993. Something magical happens to you when you join a group, a feeling I can only describe as
freedom.
I felt it myself on various soccer teams when I was growing up. I also felt it when I joined the staff of the Hotel Mille
Collines. It is possible to lose oneself in the purpose of the collective effort; we embrace this feeling of being dissolved
into something bigger because at our cores we are lonely. We are trapped inside our own skulls. But we thirst for that unity,
that lost wholeness that we imagine we had before we were born. That feeling of warm acceptance we get inside a group is addictive;
it is one of the most powerful human urges. And when your individuality is dissolved into the will of the pack you then become
free to act in any way the pack directs. The thought of acting otherwise becomes as abhorrent as death. We fear the group
will withdraw its acceptance from us and we will be cast out and the love will die. We would do almost anything to keep this
from happening. Tyrants understand this. They try to point these groups like spears in any direction that serves their aims.
If nobody can find it within themselves to stand outside the group and find the inner strength to say no, then the mass of
men will easily commit atrocities for the sake of keeping up personal appearances. The lone man is ridiculed and despised,
but he is the only one who can stand between humanity and the abyss.

This is by no means a phenomenon confined to Africa. It has happened in every culture on the planet, in every period, and
the advancement of civilization has been no protection. The same nation that gave us Goethe and Beethoven also gave us Hitler.
There will be others, and perhaps some in unexpected locations, and the only question will be whether uninvolved people have
the courage to take a risk to save strangers.

A sad truth of human nature is that it is hard to care for people when they are abstractions, hard to care when it is not
you or somebody close to you. Unless the world community can stop finding ways to dither in the face of this monstrous threat
to humanity those words
Never Again
will persist in being one of the most abused phrases in the English language and one of the greatest lies of our time.

I am sometimes asked to name the thing that most scares me about Rwanda. My answer is this: It frightens me to death when
my countrymen are not talking. If a Rwandan is brooding you never know what he is thinking. When I was a hotel manager I made
it one of my number-one priorities to talk with just about everybody who came and stayed with us or drank with us. It was
one way I kept myself informed of what was brewing in my country. To stay away from evil people is to never know what is on
their minds. And it frightens me that my country today is packed with a lot of angry people not talking to each other. We
could be witnessing the roots of a future holocaust.

Europe needed the catharsis of its Nuremberg before it could have the renewal of its Marshall Plan. My country has had neither
justice nor effective reconstruction. We are not sitting around a table and talking to each other.

For one thing, the pace of the criminal justice system has been painfully slow. At this writing, more than a decade after
the genocide, only about twenty-five top government officials have been tried by the United Nations’ International Criminal
Tribunal in Arusha. Those men are locked up in comfort, which is more than can be said for those ordinary laborers of the
genocide who pass their days in squalid misery. Jails in Rwanda are wretched places, not much better than the shipping containers
in which some prisoners were kept in the days immediately after the genocide. Facilities are drastically overcrowded, with
barely enough room for some of the accused to sit up in bed. There is little to eat, so the relatives of some of the prisoners
live around the fringes of these hellholes to bring them food. Although it would be easy to escape almost nobody chooses to,
for they would live out their days branded as a murderer, whether true or not. Most of these people actually
want
to be tried. Being thrown in jail for a genocide-related crime in Rwanda does not take much evidence. It sometimes requires
merely the accusation of a single person whose motives may not be honest.

Rwanda is attempting to deal with this unique problem in a unique way—by blending traditional notions of justice with a modern
court apparatus. The idea is to reconstitute the old village justice system of
gacaca
—justice on the grass—the court of reconciliation so well known by my father. Genocide suspects would be tried and sentenced
by their neighbors in small villages across the nation. Farmers and tavern keepers and housewives would be trained to be apprentice
judges and lawyers. There are now nearly ten thousand of these courts operating all over the country. I would call it a noble
idea. I would also call it a total failure.

Justice on the grass was never designed to address something as grave as genocide. It was designed to solve cases of missing
goats and stolen bananas. Serious felony crimes were
always
referred to the courts of the king, even in the days of my grandfather’s grandfather. I am a defender of the wisdom of the
common man, but it is fantasy to expect a village of laypeople—with their own layers of local intrigue, jealousies, and loyalties—to
effectively mete out real justice for something as horrid and earthshaking as mass murder. It would be like taking a rapist
to a traffic magistrate. That such a flimsy system has been developed to handle genocide crimes serves only to trivialize
the genocide. It insults the dead.

For another thing, the entire point of
gacaca
was not punishment but reconciliation. You were supposed to apologize to the man you had wronged and share a bowl of banana
beer as a sign of renewed friendship. But how in God’s name can a man “reconcile” with people he has raped, tortured, and
murdered? How can things ever be put right with the parents of a baby who has been ripped limb from limb?
Gacaca
is a well-intentioned idea but punishing crimes of genocide requires the authority, stature, and rigor of a state-sponsored
court with impartial judges and firm rules of evidence.

The irony is that we could have been a long way down that road if we had had the discipline. After the genocide we still had
two hundred state courthouses, known as tribunals, in various locations around Rwanda. Judges were initially hard to find
because many had been killed or jailed or fled the country, but the ministry of justice was ready to start trying cases in
the spring of 1995. But the Army stopped the first trials and the hearings did not resume for two years, which passed agonizingly
slowly for those with nothing to do but look at the patterns of the sun on jailhouse walls. Justice has been a stop-and-start
trickle like this ever since. And the waiting goes on for the accused, as does the mounting anger.

This failure of justice is critical, for it leaves our nation still in pieces and in danger of exploding again before long.
Breaking the cycle will not be easy. It requires the application of true justice. Without justice there will be more massacres,
for widespread injustice never fades away. It ferments and stinks and eventually bursts into bloody flowers.

I am convinced that one of the strongest engines of the Rwandan genocide was the culture of impunity that was allowed to flourish
after the revolution against the colonists began in 1959. Rwandans killed their neighbors just to take their houses, people
killed people for their banana trees, people leaped over the counters of abandoned general stores and started selling the
merchandise as if they were the rightful owners. It was a huge mistake for our government to let this blatant larceny go unanswered.
Even today there are people living in houses that don’t belong to them and selling merchandise they never bought. This is
what I call impunity. A person’s private property may seem like a small thing when held in balance against their life, but
the success of a small crime grants a kind of permission to carry out worse deeds. It is like that famous American parable
about a row of windows in an abandoned factory. If they stay intact nobody will throw rocks at them. But if one window is
broken and goes unrepaired, the rest will get shattered by vandals in quick succession, because the public gets the idea that
nobody cares about the windows. A sense of social disorder creates more chaos. As a nation we did not care about our windows
forty-seven years ago, and I am afraid we are not taking good care of them now.