In all of this, I was fortunate to have a handful of soldiers who wore the blue helmet of the United Nations. I have previously expressed my disgust with the UN as a collective body, but those individuals serving in its name were capable of bravery. The men in my hotel displayed courage in going out onto the streets of Kigali to fetch the condemned. They were chauffeurs through hell. One in particular, a captain from Senegal named Mbaye Daigne, became legendary for his ability to dodge the Interahamwe. His companion, Captain Senyo of Ghana, displayed equal bravery at plucking refugees from their houses. It was a task that probably violated the ridiculous mission parameters handed down from New York, but these rules deserved to be broken.
These soldiers never used the hotel van; that would have been inviting death, because everybody in town knew that we were a haven for refugees. They used instead a white jeep with the UN logo. Rwandan soldiers also helped rescue people. One day they went out to find a prominent politician who had been hiding in a private house. On the way to the hotel they were stopped at a roadblock manned by an especially savage bunch of militia. There were corpses stacked up on either side, the hacked-up remains of people who had produced the wrong kind of identity card. The car got an unusually thorough search and they discovered the refugee hiding in the back.
“Where are you bringing this cockroach?” they demanded.
The soldier thought quickly. “We are taking him to the ministry of defense, ” he said. “Now let us pass before the Army starts to wonder where we are.”
That was good enough for the militia and our refugee made it inside the Mille Collines without further incident. I suppose it was fortunate for us there were no cell phones in Rwanda in 1994, before the widespread use of cell phones. As we have seen, the violence was inherently full of chaos and mistakes. The chain of command was often vague and the orders were sometimes confusing. In such an environment it was therefore possible to make a convincing bluff that you were working for somebody in authority without anyone able to check your story. If there had been cell phones I think many who escaped death would have been killed instead. But that is not to say that the phones would have all worked for evil. I have said before that tools of murder can be turned into tools of life. If we had had cell phones in Rwanda, the Interahamwe would have been more efficient, but we also would have been able to coordinate more rescues right under their noses.
I used my secret fax phone many times to get a bead on where a given refugee might be hiding. One of them was my friend Odette Nyiramilimo, and her husband, Jean-Baptiste Gasasira, and their children, who I hoped was still in her house. In the first days of the genocide they had traded their family car, their stereo, their television, and other goods to some policemen in exchange for a ride south of Kigali, to where they thought they might be safe. But the policemen reneged, leaving my friends to try and flee through the marshes on their own. They were captured by Interahamwe and led in for interrogation, which they managed to escape. But in the chaos of war somebody made a mistake and put their names on the list of people who had been eliminated. Odette and Jean-Baptiste heard their own names being read on the rebel army’s radio station as among those who had been killed. This took the heat away temporarily and, not knowing where else to go, they went back to their house and stayed out of sight, afraid even to answer the telephone. I rang and rang again. But one day when their food was almost gone, the phone started ringing.
“Don’t pick it up!” ordered Jean-Baptiste.
“It’s all the same, ” said Odette. “We are going to die of hunger here anyway.” She answered the phone and it was me on the other end.
She could not have been more surprised. “We thought you were dead!” she said.
“I thought you were dead, too, ” I answered. “But don’t go anywhere. I’m going to organize a rescue.”
“Who are you going to send?”
“Froduald Karamira.”
I meant it as a small joke, for he was a businessman who was notorious for his role in the massacres, but Odette missed my humor. “No, he will kill us all!” she said, and I made up a proverb on the spot: “If you want your goods to be safe, give them to a thief.” Though she was in tears, she laughed. It was good to hear.
I negotiated again with Commander Habyarimana for the services of a Lieutenant named Nzaramba. His uniform and vehicle would give him partial, but not total, protection against the militias, and so it was going to be a risky operation. Not wanting to risk having the whole family in his jeep, Nzaramba made three separate trips. Odette came first with her son Patrick, and they were stopped at a roadblock close to the hotel.
“Where are you going?” they demanded.
She pulled out a supply of malaria pills and showed them to her would-be killer.
“I am coming to take care of the manager’s children inside the Mille Collines, ” she said. “They are sick.”
It worked. When she came in her eyes were glassy and faraway. I had not seen her since the killing had started.
“Odette, what may I bring you?” I asked her and could not have been more surprised to hear her say, “A beer.” I had never seen her drink beer before. It went down in three gulps.
Once she came out of her daze Odette told me that being inside the Mille Collines was like being in a land of the resurrected dead; she was seeing many people who she had heard had been killed.
The next time Nzaramba went out he came back with Odette’s children in the back of his jeep, and they too were stopped at a roadblock. This one happened to be right in front of the warehouse of an old friend of mine named Georges Rutaganda.
“Where are you going?” asked the man who leaned in their window. “Where are your parents?”
“My father is manning a roadblock and my mother is at the hospital, ” said Odette’s son. The killers did not buy the story and withdrew to discuss what should be done. The machetes were just coming out when a car pulled up. Inside was Georges Rutaganda.
Let me pause here a minute and tell you about this man. We grew up together. He took an investment from his father and made quite a lot of money as the executive distributor of Carlsberg and Tuborg beer in Rwanda. He also went on to become the vice president of the Interahamwe and a man very close to the party of President Juvenal Habyarimana. I tried not to let this get in the way of our friendship. I did tell him several times before the killing started, “Listen, Georges. What you are doing is wrong. You are going down the wrong path.” But he never got angry with me for my opinions. This absence of acrimony was a key element of our relationship. We both knew where the other stood politically. We had to stop visiting each other’s families in the evenings, but our professional dealings continued, as did the presence of good feelings. It was like that German expression I mentioned earlier: Dienst ist dienst und schnapps ist schnapps. We continued to do business together even during the genocide. In fact, he was the main supplier of beer, toilet paper, and other necessities to the Mille Collines. Yet another irony of Rwanda: The man near the heart of the militia movement was making cash on the side by helping the refugees. I used these deal-making sessions to take him into my office and speak to him, as only one friend from the hills can do to another. “Listen, Georges, ” I would tell him, “I would like you to be very careful with my hotel. It would be very bad for me if any of your Interahamwe came inside. Please do me a favor and tell them it is off-limits.”
Several people have criticized me for staying close to such a bad man, but I have never apologized for it. People are never completely good or completely evil. And in order to fight evil you sometimes have to keep evil people in your orbit. Even the worst among them have their soft side, and if you can find and play with that part of them, you can accomplish a great deal of good. In an era of extremism you can never afford to be an extremist yourself.