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Paul Rusesabagina

The Hotel ‘Mille Collines’ is a luxury hotel situated in Kigale, the capital of Rwanda. In 1994, it was owned by the Belgian airline company, Sabena, and was popular with foreign journalists and diplomatic workers. However, its well-kept grounds, spacious rooms and swimming pool were the scene of terrifying events during the horrific time of the Rwandan genocide.

The Rwandan Genocide was the slaughter of roughly 937,000 Rwandans of the Tutsi tribe and moderate members of the ruling Hutu tribe. The genocide, led by Hutu extremists known as Interahamwe, took place during a period of 100 days in 1994. The terrible events were sparked by the death of the Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu, when his plane was shot down above Kigali airport on 6 April 1994. Within hours of the attack, a campaign of violence spread from the capital throughout the country, and did not subside until three months later. Observers have pointed to the fact that many people all over the country responded almost immediately by attacking their Tutsi neighbours; the hatred had been fermenting for decades.

The two ethnic groups are really very similar – they speak the same language and follow the same traditions. But when the country was taken over by Belgium in 1916, the Belgians saw these two groups as being separate tribes and identified them and other groups by their ethnicity. The Belgians produced identity cards classifying people accordingly, and considered the Tutsis to be superior to the Hutu. The Tutsis therefore enjoyed better job prospects as a result and generally fared better.

Resentment among the Hutus gradually built up and, when riots erupted in 1959, many Tutsis fled to neighbouring countries. When Rwanda gained independence in 1962, the Hutus took over from the Belgians. Over subsequent decades, the Tutsis were portrayed as the scapegoats for every crisis. At the same time, Tutsi refugees in neighbouring Uganda – supported by some moderate Hutus – were forming the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). The president, Habyarimana, used this to stir up further fear and hatred of Tutsis within Rwanda, where they were accused of being RPF collaborators. No one knows who shot down the President’s aircraft, but the Tutsis were blamed and the bloodshed began.
A matter of days later, the hotel was over-run by hundreds of people, most of them Tutsis, seeking refuge from the massacres. It was by no means a secure building but people hoped that its international connections would offer some escape from the death squads. On April 15, Paul Rusesabagina, a Hutu married to a Tutsi woman, and temporarily manager of the hotel, called for its protection in an interview with a Belgian newspaper.
About a week later a Hutu lieutenant from the Department of Military Intelligence arrived just after dawn at the hotel and surrounded it with troops. He ordered Paul Rusesabagina to turn everyone out of the hotel within the hour. Paul knew that the refugees would probably be hacked to death on the spot, and he refused to give in. However, he also knew that they could not hold out for long and that, by refusing to obey, he had added his own name to the list of the condemned. He gathered some of the foreign diplomatic workers and a few of those hiding who had outside influence. They began risking telephone calls to the outside world, calling anyone they could think of abroad who might have some influence to help them. It worked, and a higher Rwandan official arrived in time and told the lieutenant to withdraw. The slaughter went on outside the hotel for weeks, during which the terrified people huddled inside.

Conditions inside the hotel were not good; there were too many people and food and water was in short supply. Paul did what he could to make life easier. He was again told that troops would be coming for them soon to slaughter them. He gathered together the bottles of wine and spirits from the hotel and went out to talk to the soldiers on guard outside the hotel. Encouraged by these bribes, the soldiers kept others away.

Paul survived the genocide, along with his wife and three children, as did most of the refugees he sheltered. An estimated 800,000 people were slaughtered during the terror.
The story of ‘Mille Collines’ was portrayed in the film ‘Hotel Rwanda’. At the premiere of the film in California, Rusesabagina received Amnesty International’s ‘Enduring Spirit’ award. He said of the film: “All we want to do is to show what happened, so that ten years later, people can at least know what it was and how it was.”

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