Into the heart of darkness

Genocide. The word is a relatively recent addition to the English language, coined by a Polish-born lawyer named Raphael Lemkin who decided a new term was required to embody the horror of the Nazis’ Final Solution, and to retrospectively identify and acknowledge the Turkish slaughter of Armenians during World War I.
Derived from the Greek word for “race” – genus – and the Latin “to kill” – cide – the term was added to Webster’s New International Dictionary in 1948, the same year Lemkin helped persuade the United Nations to adopt a resolution threatening criminal penalties for the leaders of any regime found responsible for an extermination campaign against any religious or racial group. The implementation of the term is crucial. Once it is invoked, the UN are duty bound to intervene in any territory where genocide is deemed to be in effect.
Genocide is the subject of Paul Rusesabagina’s An Ordinary Man – The True Story Behind ‘Hotel Rwanda’ – an autobiographical account, co-written with journalist Tom Zoellner, of the story depicted in Terry George’s film (in which Mr Rusesabagina was played by Don Cheadle). “Before the genocide, Rwandans used to say that God could take a ride for the day, every day, and move all over the world, but make sure to come to sleep in Rwanda,” says Mr Rusesabagina, who sits perfectly still and maintains almost unbroken eye contact over the course of a 40 minute meeting in the lounge of the Clarence Hotel in Dublin. “During the genocide, all of us were on our knees praying, saying, ‘God, where are you? You have abandoned us.’ In the end we said that God went and never came back.”
Between April 6th, 1994, when President Juvenal Habyarimana’s plane was shot down by a missile, and July 4th of that year, when the Tutsi rebel army captured the capital of Kigali, approximately 800,000 Rwandans were massacred as a result of racial hatreds between Hutus and Tutsis. The magnitude of the slaughter is hard to grasp - 8000 lives a day, five lives a minute. Many of these men, women and children died slowly, often witnessing their own family members being raped, tortured and slowly hacked to pieces with machetes wielded by their own neighbours and kinsmen.
Mr Rusesabagina was the manager of the Belgian-owned Hotel Mille Collines at the time, and used diplomacy, flattery, deception and liberal doses of cigars and Cognac from his cellars and cash from the safe to negotiate the lives of some 1268 Tutsis and Hutu moderates (‘cockroaches’ in the argot of the killers) sheltered on the premises.
“I was very much disappointed by human beings when I saw how my neighbours behaved,” he says, a youthful-looking 52-year-old man. “I never understood how a normal human being can believe they are going to solve problems with a machete – even guys I used to see, guys with whom I used to share my barbecues, guys I used to respect and took as wise men and gentlemen.”
The passages in Mr Rusesabagina’s book that recall the prelude to the genocide make for chilling reading, outlining the rising popularity of the Presidentially-funded RTLM radio station, which disseminated sensationalist hate propaganda; noting the half million imported machetes that made their way into the country in the year preceeding the mass killings; and describing the rise of the Interahamwe, packs of slogan-shouting armed youth militia.
“We could have avoided it with the international community’s help,” states Mr Rusesabagina. “All of us, by 1993, a year before the genocide, were threatened. In towns where people were gathered in a bar or a bus station or a hotel like this one, militia men came in throwing grenades, killed many people, injured many others. We were threatened from both ends, on one end by the Tutsi rebels, on the other by Hutu militia men. We were sensing something was going to happen, but no one suspected it to be on such a scale, as widespread. But we were all afraid of something. I left my house in November 1993 and went to stay in the hotel where I was a general manager with my wife and my children because the killers were coming.
“But when we saw the international community coming in, the United Nations bringing us 2500 soliders, we placed our hope in them. And when those people who had fled to neighbouring cities heard the UN soldiers had come, they said, ‘Oh well, now the problem is solved.’ Those people came back. I also went back to my house. I had a manager’s meeting in March 1994 in Brussels with my wife and my son who was one-and-a-half years old. On Thursday morning, March 31, just a week before the genocide started, we landed in the airport and went to our house. We didn’t go to the hotel. We trusted the international community, but the international community failed.”
In his book, Mr Rusesabagina rankles at the 1994 genocide being characterised as the product of ‘ancient tribal hatreds’. Rather, he says, it was the result of power struggles that can be traced back hundreds of years, the legacy of European imperialism. In much the same way as the Spanish conquered the Aztecs with a divide and rule strategy, backing a weaker tribe against the stronger one until the coloniser rules by proxy, European colonialists carved up Africa between them, creating a deeply divided continent.
Following the 1885 Conference of Berlin, Rwanda went to the Germans, who expressed little interest in expending their energies on what they considered a midland backwater, so their influence was largely symbolic, with the Tutsis running the country. However, after WWI, Germany forfeited Rwanda to the Belgians, who took a more active role in exploiting the country’s natural resources, not to mention pitting the crop-tending serf-class Hutus against the cattle-owning ascendancy Tutsis. The 1994 genocide was the latest in a long series of recurring civil wars resulting from these ingrained antagonisms.
In Mr Rusesabagina’s view, the UN abjectly failed to make recompense for their ancestors’ transgressions, sending only a poorly co-ordinated skeleton force to Rwanda, one rendered impotent by beaurocratic processes. It would have been better, he contends, had they not offered false protection, which only encouraged people to gather in churches and schools that became human abottoirs within minutes of the UN soldiers pulling out. In one horrific passage, the author describes people begging soldiers to shoot them in the head to be spared the horror of slow dismemberment.
“I would define the United Nations as a total failure,” he says. “A disaster. So far the United Nations' peacekeeping mission has never fully succeeded anywhere in the world. If you have an example you can give me one. They always failed wherever they went. If the UN do not thoroughly reform, starting with their way of making decisions by consensus, they will never reach anywhere. You can never call on 50 or 100 hundred countries, each country bringing at least three or four or five people, to sit down and come up with an agreement. According to geopolitical and economical interests, it will take months and the resolution will be diluted.
“And after coming up with an agreement, the UN do not have an emergency army. They go to countries and start begging soldiers, gathering weapons and ammunition for soldiers who’ve never used them, and then, in the end, they might get 3000 soldiers from at least 30 different countries, speaking at least 30 different languages. Can you imagine a commander of such a force, which never trained together and can’t speak the same language, trying to co-ordinate such an army? In the end, the definition of a UN peacekeeping mission is not a peacekeeping or peacemaking mission, but rather a neutral observer who’ll come and stand there and watch people butchering and killing each other.”
Two years after the genocide, Mr Rusesabagina and his family left Rwanda for Belgium, where he supported himself by driving a cab.
“In September 1996 I was threatened and narrowly escaped into exile,” he says. “You can never imagine how it hurts to be a refugee. I went with a one year visa, went to Belgian immigration, gave up my passport and turned my back. At that time I was someone without a country. No one can imagine how you feel when you remain without country, without nation, without any status. No one can imagine how heartbreaking that can be, but it is. I hated that.
“Before, when I would drink my banana beer, I would tell my wife, ‘Listen, when I am 50 years old, I’ll join politics’. On my 50th birthday, my wife reminded me: ‘Do you remember what you said, that you’d become a politician? Are you ready?’ Well, I didn’t want to, because it was not the right time to join politics, and I was bitter. Being in exile does not make things easy. But today my voice can rise up and talk. Only through dialogue, truth and reconciation, can we reconcile our country. Young Hutus and Tutsis are still getting married. That is a message. What is our problem then? Our problem has ever been bad leaders. But anything is possible. A true reconcilation, that is my hope.”
12 years on from the Rwandan genocide, history is being repeated in the Darfur region of the Southern Sudan. Three years ago, black African rebels took up arms against the Islamic fundamentalist regime in Khartoum. The government responded to the uprising by arming Janjaweed militias. These state-sponsored crackdowns have claimed some 300,000 lives – rebels and civilians – and displaced an estimated two million people. Once again, western countries have been slow to intervene.
“What is going on in Darfur was qualified by Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, as genocide,” Mr Rusesabagina says, “but the Chinese, who are exploiting the Sudanese oil, will never qualify it as a genocide, and since they have the right to a veto, no strong resolution will be taken against the Sudanese government unless the UN is reformed thoroughly. I went to Darfur last year to see with my own eyes what was going on there, and it’s exactly what was going on in Rwanda between 1990 and 1994.
“More than two million people were displaced within Darfur, without food and water and shelter, their wives and daughters being raped by a militia. 3000 villages have been destroyed, completely erased from the map, people fleeing their burning villages, being killed by a militia armed by the government. Those militias, just like Rwanda, go as far as posioning wells so that those people fleeing their burning villages don’t even get clean drinking water, so they die, whatever the matter. People were sleeping on the Sahara sand. When their children saw us, I was very much touched to see them. 2000 kids gathered in about 15 minutes, they were holding a big blackboard, I’ll never forget it, on which they had written, ‘Welcome Guests, But We Need Education’.
“And on my way back from Darfur, when I was in the airport watching the news, what did I see? All the superpower leaders gathered in Auschwitz for the remembering of the 60th anniversary of the Jewish Holocaust, and the most abused words were, ‘Never again. What happened here 60 years ago, we’ll never allow it to happen anywhere anymore’. And yet, where I was coming from, it was happening. What is happening in Darfur has been proven by many countries as a genocide. Why can’t the international country do what they did in the former Yugoslavia? Haven’t we learnt our lesson?”
Since the filming of Hotel Rwanda, Mr Rusesabagina has become the recipient of the US Presidential Medal of Freedom and the National Civil Rights Museum’s 2005 Freedom Medal. How did he feel receiving such awards and medals from the very people who failed his country a decade ago?
“Being awarded by those people, in another logic I would have refused the awards,” he admits, “but should we isolate ourselves? We want to change things. If you want to score, you have to go onto the field. You can never score without playing. That is why we have to be in close contact with the international community – whoever they are – so that we can discuss and change things through dialogue.
“As I describe it in An Ordinary Man, the awards, I got them from a totally different administration. When I met President Bush, he told me, ‘Not on my watch’. And what happened in Rwanda was not on his watch. But today what is happening (in Darfur) is happening on everybody’s watch. What is he ready to do? That is my question. We need him and many others to intervene in the situation.”