‘Hotel Rwanda’’s Paul Rusesabagina talks of lessons yet to be learned

Though the title for his upcoming autobiography is “An Ordinary Man,” Paul Rusesabagina, immortalized in the 2004 movie “Hotel Rwanda,” proved to be anything but ordinary when he recently recounted his experience of saving more than 1,200 lives during the horrific 1994 Rwandan genocide. Rusesabagina was the guest speaker at the New Hampshire African Community Center fundraiser in Bedford on Saturday, Aug. 27. NHACC program director Zephanie Byilingiro was able to arrange for Rusesabagina’s appearance because Byilingiro, himself a survivor of the Rwandan genocide, had known Rusesbagina while they both lived in Rwanda.

Rusesabagina (pronounced Roo-sesah-ba-geena), who received the 2000 Immortal Chaplains Prize for Humanity and the 2005 International Freedom Award, spoke with the confidence of a man who has given over 60 speeches this year alone. The audience of approximately 100 people sat in attention as he described in candid detail the terror he experienced and the brutality he witnessed between April and August 1994 as a hotel manager for the Sabena hotel chain in Kigali.

According to Rusesabagina, the Rwandan genocide, in which over 900,000 people were murdered over a period of a few months, was a result of many factors, including European colonialism that fed sectarian prejudice and mass economic displacement over a 50-year period; bad Rwandan leaders “who never dared to say when bad behavior was wrong”; the gross misuse of the national radio station RTLM that incited Hutus to slaughter Tutsis; and the general hopelessness of 1.4 million displaced people then living within Rwanda “who felt they had nothing else to lose” when rebel militias were formed and the killing began.

When describing his experience as portrayed in the movie “Hotel Rwanda,” on which he served as a consultant, he noted that the 2 ½ hour movie made things “look lighter than what really happened—it was much more rough than what you saw in the movie.” He pointed out how specific negotiations between him and rebel leaders were portrayed on screen as lasting only a minute took, in reality, many tension-filled hours to complete.

Rusesabagina also described what happened to him and his family after July 1994, when the movie ended Rusesabagina’s story. He told of going back to his homeland in the southern part of the country and seeing bodies lying alongside the road, “all along the way, we saw no human life, no animal life, just the sound of dogs barking.” He recounted the horror of learning that rebels had murdered his mother-in-law and her six grandchildren, some of whom had been skewered “by the sticks that are used to hold bunches of bananas.”

In 1996, after re-opening the Mille Colline and Diplomat hotels in Kigali, Rusesabagina and his family were forced to flee Rwanda and are now living as refugees in Belgium.

Because of his act of saving the lives of many Tutsis and moderate Hutus, Rusesabagina has been the target of death threats. While no threats were made during his visit to New Hampshire, security at the NHACC fundraiser was tight and all participants were subject to a bag-and-body search.

When asked what the United States can do to help prevent future genocide in Africa, Rusesabagina said the U.S. government needs to stop supporting African dictatorships.  Sending aid, he said, to the displaced in refugee camps is not enough. Americans, he said, tend to see Africans “as young birds with their mouths open all the time waiting for their mother to bring them a small bit of food.” By stopping behind-the-scenes support of dictators, Americans will help “Africans to help themselves.” He also feels that the U.N. needs to have “a real army.” To save peoples’ lives, says Rusesabagina, U.N. peace-keeping forces need to have the authority to physically turn back attackers of civilians. During the Rwandan genocide, the small U.N. peacekeeping force on the ground was unarmed; by having the ability to fight in order to protect the innocent, Rusesagabina said the U.N. peacekeeping army would become a “peacemaking” army.

In his richly African-accented English, Rusesabagina repeated throughout his speech that the lesson of the Rwandan genocide is that “history keeps repeating intself, but does not teach us its lesson.”
It is Rusesabagina’s wish that through a change in U.S. support, a change of will on the part of the international community and a change toward democratic governments in Africa, the world will one day understand the lesson from 1994 Rwanda.