An Ordinary Man (18 page)

But I still thought I might be of some use.

When we passed the roadblock near the front of the hotel I saw that nearly every one of the killers was gone—a very bad sign.
The driver sped us to the front entrance. I heard General Bizimungu deliver an order to the sergeant with us. I’ll never forget
what he said:

“You go up there and tell those boys that if one person kills anyone I will kill them! If anybody beats anyone I will kill
them! If they do not leave in five minutes I will kill
all
of them!”

I ran inside the hotel, feeling as though I were underwater, and discovered the reception desk unmanned. But I heard shouting
and crashing upstairs. One of the
Interahamwe
was in the corridor. He was dressed in ragged clothes and holding onto a rifle. He stared at me. I was wearing a plain white
T-shirt and black pants.

“Where is the manager?” he demanded of me.

“I think he went that way, ” I said, pointing down a corridor. And then I strode off in the opposite direction. I could always
give that
Rwandan no
with the best of them.

Once I was out of his sight I slipped upstairs. The militia had broken down several room doors, to make sure they had discovered
everyone. The door to 126 had also been smashed open. So they had found my family.

I went inside the room, wondering if I would see their corpses. But the room was untouched. There did not appear to be any
signs of a struggle. I went inside the bathroom and something motivated me to peek behind the shower curtain. There they all
were, clustered in the arms of my wife, staring back at me.

Relief flooded over me, but I had to see what was happening to the others. I told them to stay put without making a peep,
dashed down the stairs, and ran down that spiral staircase near the bar and out to the back lawn, where I saw all my guests
on their knees near the swimming pool. This quiet square of water had once been the shadow capital of Rwanda and now it appeared
to be the site of an imminent massacre. The militia was strutting around, demanding that everybody put their hands in the
air. One of the men waved his machete in the air. I saw one of my receptionists among the militia—I had always suspected him
of being a spy.

They had herded everyone to the swimming pool. By that point I thought it was generally understood that everyone inside the
Mille Collines was a refugee from the militia and thus had reason to be killed. Why the need for formalities? Why not just
start the killing machine? The only thing I could imagine was that they were aiming to shove the dead bodies into the swimming
pool to foul the water for any refugee who might have escaped their notice.

Whatever the reason, the delay saved us all.

I saw Bizimungu inside the hotel, chanting his angry command. He emerged onto the pool deck now, enraged, his khaki and camouflage
well pressed, his pistol drawn, his face taut with anger. Bizimungu was known as a quiet man, almost timid by military standards,
but I had seen him angry a few times before and his temper was volcanic. He roared out his order again: “If one person kills
anyone I will kill them! If anybody beats anyone I will kill them! If you do not leave in five minutes I will kill
all
of you!”

There was a moment of surprise. The militiamen looked at one another, as if seeking the approval of the group for whatever
actions would follow. The lives of hundreds hung in their uncertainty. They could easily have disobeyed him. Bizimungu was
a powerful man with powerful allies, but there had been hundreds of mutinies against Army officers during the genocide—thousands
of unapproved murders. And this was the Hotel Mille Collines: the citadel of Belgian arrogance, the luxurious island of privilege,
the best redoubt of cockroaches anywhere in Rwanda. Didn’t the general see what kind of prize he was giving up?

I saw surly looks on the faces of several of those boys. Their lust had been rising and now it had been denied. They were
primed to kill and this traitor general had put a stop to it. I could tell they now wanted to turn their fury onto him. But
they didn’t. They lowered their machetes and began to file out.

General Augustin Bizimungu now sits in a jail cell. He will probably be there the rest of his life.

After the genocide he fled to Zaire, and then into faraway Angola. He was captured by local police there and brought before
the International Criminal Tribunal that was organized to prosecute war crimes committed during the genocide of 1994. Bizimungu
was charged with supervising the arming and training of the militias. As I write this, he has not yet been convicted. He is
now held in Arusha, the same city in Tanzania that had hosted the ill-fated peace talks that led to the final outbreak of
hostilities between the Rwandan Army and the rebels.

I have been criticized for my friendship with him during the genocide, but I have never apologized for it. “How could you
have stayed close to such a vile man?” I am asked, and my answer is this: I do not excuse whatever he may have done to promote
the genocide, but I never heard him agree with any of the bloodshed when he was in my presence. I had to stay close to him
because he could help me save lives. I would have stayed close with anyone who could help me do that.

He is a man who cannot be judged in stark terms. Like almost all men, there are hard places and soft places inside and the
final verdict can never be a simple one. There is a saying in Rwanda: “Every man has a secret corner of his mind that nobody
will ever know.” And I do not think I know enough about Bizimungu’s secret corner to judge him. He may well have done terrible
things in Rwanda before and during the genocide, but I know that he stepped in for me at crucial moments to save the lives
of innocent people when it was of no conceivable benefit to him.

If I had ended that friendship, I do not think I would be here to write these words today. There are also at least 1, 268
people who survived the killing partly because of the instructions of Bizimungu. In my book that counts for something.

The aborted slaughter at the Mille Collines was what it took to convince all parties that the hotel must be cleared out without
further dithering. The United Nations, the rebels, and the Rwandan Army conferred and decided to do it that very day. They
assigned us those five Tunisian soldiers to guard the parking lot for the last night. It made me furious that they were given
to us long after we needed them, but there was no point in making a scene. On that afternoon I busied myself with making sure
everybody was out of their rooms safely. There was a line of jeeps and trucks outside, the third such time that an evacuation
convoy had been assembled there, but I had a feeling this would truly be the last one.

I made a last check of the hotel where I had spent seventy-six of the longest days of my life. Though I had been convinced
I would die inside of it I felt affection for the place. When I was a young man it was where I had found my true occupation.
I had met some of the most generous people in my life within its walls. Sabena gave me a job when I needed one and taught
me things I never would have learned otherwise. They showed me how to respect myself by respecting others. When the killing
started the hotel had saved people. It had projected the image of an ultimately sane world that kept the murderers at bay.
I am not a particularly sentimental man, but I felt the odd urge to stroke it like a pet dog.

I made sure that the hotel was empty of everybody who wanted to go. Some employees had asked to stay, and I let them. I couldn’t
tell how many had been spies for the militia all along. By that point I was beyond caring. It was time to leave. When the
UN convoy pulled away I was in the backseat of the last jeep. I hid under a plastic tarp for fear that the militias would
recognize me and shoot at me as we drove by the roadblocks. The Mille Collines had been one of the very few places in Kigali
where nobody was killed.

TEN

IN THE TIME BEFORE THE GENOCIDE
it had been fashionable for the elite to buy country estates near a region named Kabuga just outside the capital. The area
is attractive, with low hills and unusually large plantations full of grazing livestock. Almost everyone in Rwanda, no matter
how long they have lived in a city, keeps close connections with the soil, and even a lifelong office worker probably has
a few goats to call his own in a village somewhere outside the capital. The biggest gentlemen-farmer flocks, however, were
at Kabuga. It was the best weekend address in the nation.

We were hustled there by the Rwandan Patriotic Front, which had turned it into a kind of refugee holding area. But it was
no camp in the conventional sense. It was a looting zone.

Soldiers from the rebel army had stolen food from all the shops. Potatoes had been dug out of the fields. Goats had been captured
and slaughtered. This made me furious. It was the same kind of impunity we had seen in 1959 during the Hutu Revolution, only
this time it was yesterday’s victims who were helping themselves to the spoils. War is hell, and ugly things happen in its
midst—I know this. But they always create permanent resentments that have a way of erupting later in history. The casual disrespect
for other people and their property was what helped create the genocide we had just lived through. I was afraid I was watching
the conception of another. It made me feel as though Rwandans had learned nothing at all.

It therefore does not make me proud to tell you this: I, too, was among those who had to forage for food. I can only say that
it was a choice between that or going hungry. My family and I also slept in the house of an unknown family who had fled the
advancing rebel army. I can only hope these strangers would forgive us today. I never knew who they were, but it made me terribly
uncomfortable to be using their property.

There was a surprise in the camp. We spotted the children of my wife’s brother—the man who I had been dining with on the terrace
of the Diplomates on the night Habyarimana’s plane had been shot down. Anaise was two and a half and Izere was barely a year
old. They were being taken care of by our housemaid, who had managed to struggle into the camp. Both of the children were
covered in dirt and appeared to be starving and barely alive. They had been living for months on ground-up chicken feed. Where
were their parents? Tatiana was frantic to know. But the maid could only hold up her hands. The parents had both disappeared
shortly after the genocide broke out. I remember shaking hands with my brother-in-law and his wife the night of the president’s
assassination, a time that seemed to be as far away as my own childhood. He was bidding me good-bye and urged me to be safe
before I went into my house that night. I now wondered if I had shaken his hand for the last time.

There were stories like that all over the camp: unexpected reunions and revelations of awful news from the past two and a
half months. Nights were the hardest for us. Weeping filled the air. I found it hard to find even the mindless release of
sleep. Wives came to understand that they would never see their missing husbands again. Parents had to force themselves to
stop imagining how their irreplaceable children had died at the hands of strangers. And that emptiness in their lives would
go on and on. It took a tremendous force of will to keep your own heart together in this unending grief.

The rebel soldiers were hardly welcoming. They treated us like prisoners of war. Some of the stronger men among us were offered
the chance to take a few days of military training to fight against the Rwandan Army. The offer was a little tempting, but
I refused. “I always fight with words, ” I told them. “Not with guns.” Many of the refugees who chose to join up never came
back; they were killed in combat, or killed by their supposed protectors in the rebel army. They were invited for meetings
and that was their last night on earth.

What I really wanted was to get the hell out of Rwanda. I had had enough. We were away from the militias but still in danger
to be killed anytime by the rebels. We were also filthy and exhausted and needing a break. I told my new hosts that I and
my family wanted either to be driven to the Ugandan border or flown to Belgium. What I got in reply was a wishy-washy response,
that classic
Rwandan no
of which I was thoroughly sick: “We will look into it for you, Mr. Manager.” Nothing happened, of course. Day followed day.
All we could do was eat more purloined bananas and wait for the war to be over, or to be killed ourselves.

Meanwhile, one of the largest mass migrations of people in African history was under way.

The government of France had been in continual and friendly contact with its allies at the top of the Hutu government and
was growing increasingly alarmed at the likelihood of their neocolony falling to English-speaking rebels. In mid-June, just
as my hotel was being evacuated, the French announced plans to send a peacekeeping mission to the western part of Rwanda for
“humanitarian” reasons. This gave the
génocidaires
the chance to look like victims instead of aggressors, and they started to pack up and leave for the protected area that became
known as “the Turquoise Zone.”

RTLM radio then performed its final disservice to the nation by scaring the living daylights out of the people remaining in
Rwanda, a considerable number of whom had just spent two months murdering their neighbors and chasing the less compliant ones
through swamps. The radio told them that the RPF would kill any Hutus they found in their path and encouraged all its listeners
to pack up their belongings and head either to Tanzania or the western part of the country and the borders of the Democratic
Republic of Congo (what used to be called Zaire), where the French soldiers awaited. Nearly 1.7 million people heeded the
call. Entire hills and cities mobilized into caravans: men carrying sacks of bananas, some with bloody machetes in their belt
loops; women with baskets of grain on their heads; children hugging photo albums to their chests. They wound their way past
corpses piled at the side of the road and the smoldering cooking fires in front of looted houses. I am sorry to say that the
dire predictions of the radio were not rooted in fantasy, as the rebels did conduct crimes against humanity in revenge for
the genocide and to make people fear them. In any case, what was left of Rwanda emptied out within days.

The U. N. Security Council, so ineffective in the face of the genocide, lent its sponsorship to the camps the French set up
to protect the “refugees.” The main place of comfort to the killers was at a town called Goma, just over the border into the
Democratic Republic of Congo. It is in a bleak area at the foot of a chain of volcanoes and the town is set in a plain of
hardened black lava. Into this hellish landscape, the French airlifted twenty-five hundred well-equipped paratroopers, Foreign
Legionnaires, helicopters, fighter jets, tents, water supplies, food, jeeps—everything, in short, that the pathetic UN force
could have used when the murders were at their height in April. Now all of these assets were being used to feed and shelter
some of the very people who carried out the slaughter.

Many of the French troops sent to support the effort were apparently there in the belief that they would eventually be used
to attack the rebel army, which was closing in on Kigali. Meanwhile, the
Interahamwe
began organizing the refugees into squadrons in the camps, preparing them for an imminent return to Rwanda to keep filling
the graves. Radio RTLM set up relay transmitters in the camp so their broadcasts could continue to be heard among the faithful.
It was difficult to tell the innocent from the guilty, but comfort was provided to everyone.

In a surprise for all of us the United States finally was persuaded to act. When cholera and other diseases broke out the
Clinton administration announced it would seek $320 million in aid for the camps at Goma and the killers and announced a public
health initiative to clean up the water-bloated corpses that had floated over into Uganda. This US aid package totaled more
than sixteen times what it would have taken to electronically jam the hate radio, which would have stopped many of those people
from becoming corpses.

On July 4, with much of the civilian population in flight, the RPF captured the capital of Kigali after a brief battle. They
had conquered a ruined city and caused further destruction. Houses were knocked over. Churches were covered in blood. Hospitals
were empty shells, looted of supplies. Land mines and live mortar rounds were lying everywhere. Wrecked vehicles blocked the
roads. And the corpses were stuffed everywhere: inside closets, underneath desks, and down water wells, and shoved casually
to the edge of the sidewalks. The stench of decaying flesh choked the air. Barely thirty thousand people remained, a tenth
of Kigali’s population before the genocide began.

Rwanda’s other major cities toppled swiftly from there and the country was all but conquered. On July 14 the plug was pulled
on RTLM for good. Less than a week later the rebel army swore in a new government. It marked the official end of the genocide,
but not the end of the killings. The aftermath would be long and dirty.

I was informed that my request to travel to Belgium had been approved on one condition: that I travel alone, leaving my wife
and children behind. “Forget it, ” I told them. “I have changed my mind. I am staying now.”

The rebel army took us back to the Mille Collines, which was in wretched shape. After I had left some people had taken it
upon themselves to start cooking fires on the lobby tiles and ash was everywhere. The hallway carpets were covered in a disgusting
glaze of grease and human waste. Doors were broken from their hinges. The RPF had looted the remaining supply of drinks and
liquor that I had used to keep so many people alive. The kitchen was a disaster. Almost everything of value had been stolen
or damaged beyond repair.

I cleared the squatters out, rallied what staff I could find, and got to work. We obtained some cleaning solution and carpentry
equipment to make the place semipresentable again. My colleague Bik Cornelis had arrived back in the country from the Netherlands
and was working side by side with me. The hotel had to start functioning again. Rwanda was about to be besieged with journalists,
humanitarian workers, peacekeeping soldiers, and more than 150 nongovernmental organizations. All those people who had abandoned
us during the slaughter were coming back and they needed a place to stay. The irony was too bitter to think of for long. There
were many things it didn’t pay to think of for very long. And truthfully, it felt good just to have this housekeeping task
in front of me, and I lost myself in a million details. I am a hotel manager and this was where I belonged.

We reopened on July 15, having been closed a little less than a month.

My family settled in the manager’s house at the Hotel Diplomates, where some of our friends had hidden under the noses of
the
génocidaires.
It was where we felt the safest. We did not dare to go back to our family house in Kabeza, and I had no particular desire
to see those neighbors of mine who had transformed themselves into lunatics during those first days in April.

My wife and I had been continually worried about our families in the south and I was able to take a day off from the hotel
to go check on them. My friend John Bosco hot-wired an abandoned car, as was the custom in those days immediately after the
genocide. When the road opened up into the lush hills that I loved, we found ourselves in a twilight country we did not recognize.
The silence was near complete. Everybody was either dead or exiled. The only thing I heard was dogs barking and snarling as
they fought each other to feast on human remains. Crowds of people normally line the sides of the roads in Rwanda: boys driving
herds of goats; women in colorful shifts balancing baskets on their heads; elderly men carrying sticks and wearing donated
T-shirts; merchants hawking batteries and leaves of tobacco on blankets spread on the ground. They were nowhere to be seen.
The life of the country had been sucked away. It was like a plague from the Dark Ages had descended.

“I don’t know this place, ” said my wife. “I’m scared.”

I began to dislike the eucalyptus trees on the side of the highway. They were reminding me of the killers I’d seen from the
hotel roof. I found myself scanning the brush on the side of the road for the flash of a machete or a grinning killer. We
saw so many dead bodies scattered on the side of the road that we began not to see them anymore. I wanted to make conversation
with my wife just to distract myself, but there was nothing to talk about that didn’t lead to a bad place, and so I fell into
a reverie. I wondered how many of those dead shells I might have known in the time before, perhaps people who had come into
the Mille Collines for drinks, or relatives of friends that I’d met. Perhaps I’d only passed them in the markets without looking.
Whoever they were, each one was irreplaceable, as irreplaceable to the people they loved as I was to my wife, or she was to
me, or us to our children. Their uniqueness was gone forever, their stories, their experiences, their loves—erased with a
few swings of a cheap machete.

Ah, Rwanda. Why?

My family and I could easily have been a part of that caravan of the dead. All it would have taken was a slip of my luck,
the wrong word to a general, a whim of a militia chief. Even after everything I had seen in the previous three months I felt
as though I had been terribly naive. I hadn’t really grasped the true scale of the disaster, how deep it had gone, and how
that membrane of protection around our hotel had been so fragile. That it had held up for seventy-six days was a miracle.
With the rest of the country looking like a giant cemetery there was nothing that should have stopped those killers from wiping
us out as well. We would have been like a handful of sand on a mile-long beach.