He was a survivor of one of humanity’s quickest self-inflicted disasters: 100 days of slaughter that left almost 1 million people dead, many of them hacked to death with machetes.
But for Paul Rusesabagina, the manager of what has become known as Hotel Rwanda, there are lessons to be learned even in the worst of history.
“It was the first time in my life of dealing with the devil,” he said Sunday, speaking in a firm, clear voice to an overflow audience at St. Sabina Catholic Church.
His weapons were an ability to stay calm, to remain neutral, to talk at length, to negotiate–and to think quickly on his feet, he said.
“I remained a hotel manager,” he said. “I kept going. I never gave up. We made a place where there was peace.”
At one point, he told the hushed audience, marauding Hutu militia members cut the hotel’s switchboard to shut off its links to the outside. They forgot about the hotel’s fax machine, with its own phone line. Rusesabagina used that to appeal for help, notably to the White House and the French foreign office.
“But the whole world closed its eyes,” he said. That was the tragedy.
The triumph, as chronicled in the movie “Hotel Rwanda,” was that Rusesabagina managed to save 1,268 people from probable death in the chaos, looting and murder after a political assassination plunged the nation into tribal warfare and genocide.
His story, as Rusesabagina told it Sunday, matched the movie shot for shot.
Among the causes of the Rwanda disaster, he suggested, were bad leadership of the nation, the government’s use of a national radio network to demean members of the Tutsi tribe and poverty that made the seizing of Tutsi lands and goods attractive to the poorer Hutus.
There also was “impunity,” he noted.
Long before the massacres, the Rwandan government had done little to discourage the looting of Tutsi homes and businesses, a process of demeaning and belittling that scholars have noted is a commonplace beginning for genocide.
“Unfortunately, history keeps on repeating itself and never teaches us its lessons,” Rusesabagina said during his 60-minute address.
