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Hotel Rwanda.
I am talking to Paul Rusesabagina about the film 'Hotel Rwanda'.
He's not an actor or a director. Up until 1994 he was an hotelier
in Rwanda's capital Kigali; now he lives in Brussels and owns
a trucking business. But for the one hundred days detailed in
the movie, he was responsible for keeping over 1200 people alive
while militant extremists terrorised the country. This is a
conversation with a hero.
"I'm someone who normally does not give up. That's how I survived," says Paul Rusesabagina in one of his many straight-to-the-point responses. From the start I'm wondering how to interview a man who made a stand against horrors most of us can't imagine. So we discuss the movie in the most obvious way: what he thinks of it.
"Oh, the film is a good product, well done." And when I ask him what he did as a consultant on the film: "I was just an advisor. Because I'm the only person who knows how it happened. What happened, and how it happened. So I had to make sure things were done the way they happened."
The movie tells the true story of the Rwandan genocide of 1994, when almost a million people were killed by Hutu extremists. Rusesabagina, a Hutu himself, risked his life by sheltering 1268 refugees in the Mille Collines hotel. Some seven years later, director Terry George was looking to make a film set in Africa, and Rusesabagina was looking for someone to tell his country's story.
"I came across rough drafts of the script done by his [George's] co-writer, Keir Pearson... he was also looking for a story to tell, to be told from Africa, so when he came across that script from his co-writer, he immediately came in touch with me."
As pleasant as he is to talk to, I haven't gotten Mr. Rusesabagina to say much yet. I figure I'm not asking the right questions, so try something tougher: How did he survive?
"Even myself, I sometimes wonder, but I was sure of one thing: to be killed. Because, at a given time, I realised, that to kill these people, they would first of all have to kill me," he says levelly. "But then I said, when will I die? When will my day come? I kept on expecting, waiting for that day... Are they going to come and take me to the roof of the hotel and throw me down? How, that was the important problem. And my character, I'm someone who normally does not give up. That is how I survived."
Rusesabagina still sounds matter-of-fact, like a man making polite conversation at a dinner party, and it is only when I ask him what message he wants the film to send that his tone changes. He does not sound angry, which I half expect, but merely determined. He speaks with the kind of quiet forcefulness you would expect from a man who survived in the middle of a war zone.
"This has happened in Rwanda, this is my message, it is still happening in the Congo, and people, according to what I have seen, were not very well informed, the average people, at least, were not very well informed. Even the media would not talk about it the way it was exactly, but now people are going to be kind of woken up, kind of reminded of their responsibilities, their obligations to mankind, and they'll remember Africa. Africa seems to be completely forgotten from the rest of the world."
I also ask about the UN, who, in a shocking act, pulled out most of their troops when the killing started. "I came back to Rwanda on the 30th of March with my wife and my son, and if I knew what was going on, what was going to happen a week after, I could have left them behind in Europe, but I took them back because we were very confident that the United Nations were there," he says ruefully. "The United Nations disappointed us, completely."
Having lived in Brussels since 1996, I ask him if he wants to return to Rwanda some day. "The day that Rwanda will be in peace, I will go back." Will it happen anytime soon? "It can happen, and I'll tell you something, it should happen... [but] you can never say that ten years after genocide everyone is reconciled and everything is forgotten. The number of people who have been killed, even one person being killed, you can never forget that."
When I ask Paul Rusesabagina for a final message, he reiterates what he told me before. "Wake up and remember that those are also human beings who are being butchered. Please do something." It's hard to know how to respond to that, other than to agree.
Henry Nicholls
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