The plush breakfast room of the Park Hyatt hotel in Toronto is perhaps an unlikely setting for an interview with Paul Rusesabagina. He was, after all, general manager of the Hotel des Milles Collines in Kigali, soon to be known to cinema-goers everywhere simply as Hotel Rwanda - a place where terror stalked the corridors and men came armed with machetes and guns rather than menus. During the Rwandan genocide of 11 years ago, in which almost a million Tutsis were slaughtered by their Hutu countrymen, Rusesabagina’s hotel became the last refuge for those fleeing the death squads while the general manager himself became a kind of Oskar Schindler figure for Africa, credited with saving no fewer than 1,286 lives.
He called in favours from army officers, bartered with money taken from the hotel safe, bribed soldiers and militiamen with food, drink, and anything he could lay his hands on. He took in orphans, the survivors from a local church congregation, friends and relatives, strangers and neighbours, Hutu and, mostly, Tutsi, until every room was full and even the corridors were packed with refugees, and still he took in more. In fact, he never turned anyone away.
“In Rwandan culture, even if an animal, say a lion, comes to hide in your house, you have to protect him. If all the hunters chasing him come there you must help him,” he explains. “It is the same with human beings; if they come to your house, even if they are your enemies, you must protect them. I felt I had an obligation.”
He constantly put his own body in the firing line between
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soldiers and the refugees he was protecting. Looking around the tranquil dining room now, blinking as if he can’t quite believe his own acts of heroism, this unassuming and kindly man tells you
quietly that there was not one hour during those 100 days of terror when he did not expect to die. Each morning, after a few hours, sometimes minutes, of snatched sleep, he would wake to the sound of gunfire or screaming or crying, usually a combination of all three.
On countless occasions he felt the cold barrels of guns being squeezed at his temple and saw the flash of machete steel as it was raised to bring him down. Each time he managed to talk his way out of it. “I knew that they wanted to kill the refugees and so I knew that they would kill me first,” he says. “I knew I would not survive.”
Miraculously, he did, and it is hardly surprising that film-
makers wanted to tell his story. Now Paul is portrayed on screen by Don Cheadle, an actor who is younger and slimmer - Paul is 50, ten years older - but does a remarkable job of capturing his quiet, self-deprecating manner, his polite stubbornness, his delightful, dazzling smile and his heavily accented English.
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“I like Don. He is a very nice man,” Rusesabagina says. “I am very happy to have such a handsome fellow play me in this film. And he is a very, very good actor. I would say the film is 90 per cent accurate. They have changed one or two things because it is a movie. And you know, really, it is not possible to capture the full horror of what happened. How can you do that?”
Rusesabagina was involved in the project from the beginning, when American screenwriter Keir Pearson first contacted him in the autumn of 2000. “I had a friend who lived in Tanzania and a lot of the refugees were flowing in there from Rwanda. He’d heard this story of this guy who saved all these people in a hotel,” explains Pearson. “I started researching and what struck me was that here you had one person who was willing to do something while the whole world knew what was going on and wouldn’t do anything.”
For Terry George, the Irish director, the film is essentially a love story set to the backdrop of terrifying, almost incomprehensible events. When the killing started, Paul, a Hutu, was desperate to get his wife Tatiana (played by Sophie Okonedo), a Tutsi, and their three children and immediate family to safety, and moved them into the hotel. “Paul and Tatiana held each other together and what fascinated me and Keir was the way their emotions crossed over each other,” says George. “It started where Paul was afraid for his family and at first it was Tatiana who encouraged him to include more and more people. It’s a
deep-seated love story. And of course you have the drama of one ordinary person who finds the courage that we all hope we have, but fear that we really don’t have in that situation. I would have bolted and run, as did all of the West.”
In 1994, the former Belgian colony was seething with unrest. In a population of seven million, approximately 85 per cent were Hutu who, essentially, had formed the ruling class since independence in 1962. On April 6, 1994, a plane carrying President Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu, was shot down and Tutsi rebels were blamed. Within hours, the streets were filled with Hutu militia known as the “Interahamwe” (those who stick together), who began hunting down Tutsi businessmen and politicians. But within days the gangs, including children as young as ten wielding machetes, were slaughtering any Tutsi they could find and any moderate Hutu who stood up to them. At one point, it is estimated that 8,000 people were being murdered each day. But the international community refused to act and Rusesabagina still finds it hard to accept that Rwanda was left to its own fate. “That is what haunts me,” he says now. “I want them to feel ashamed, especially the politicians who could have stopped it. Instead of increasing the number of UN peacekeepers, they pulled out. Once the UN soldiers were gone there was nothing left to stop them.”
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Inside the Hotel des Milles Collines, Rusesabagina lived each day convinced it was his last but determined to beg, barter, negotiate for just a little more time, a few more people, in the hope that the killing would stop. The film portrays him as a skilled operator working in a society where bribery is part of everyday life - a bottle of scotch for a favoured general, a bunch of flowers for a politician’s wife, a box of chocolates for a mistress. Faced with trying to save the lives of more than 1,000 people, he called in those favours, traded on those skills day after day. “A good hotelier should be a good businessman,” he says. “And a good businessman should be a good negotiator. I don’t know whether I was negotiating for people’s lives. I just thought I was doing the right thing.”
For Terry George, Rusesabagina’s very nature makes him a supreme diplomat. “What
you get from Paul is this tremendous calm, this tranquillity and diplomacy that you meet on rare occasions. And then you start to understand how this guy pulled it off.”
Ask Rusesabagina, though, to explain where he found such resolve and he admits that he doesn’t really know where those reserves of courage came from. “I was acting as fast as I could to avoid catastrophe,” he says. “And it was not easy to co-ordinate, believe me. There were people from different extremes, refugees, high-ranking soldiers, all of them in the same hotel and yet all around there were people being butchered. It was unbelievable. You don’t have time to think about anything in such circumstances. You don’t have time to be scared. I was on their list to be killed. I knew that. I was certain I would die. But you don’t die twice. You only die once and there’s a day for everybody and when it comes it won’t miss me. But you know, I said to myself, ‘Why should I die like a coward?’”
He is not exactly sure how many of his own family were killed but knows that it was more than 15. “It was many people,” he says. “My younger brother, many brothers-in-law. I lost my mother-in-law who was killed with a daughter-in-law and six grandchildren. They were thrown into a pit.” Recently, he was faced with the task of explaining to his two youngest children, Anaise, 13, and 11-year-old Carine, that they are in fact, his nieces - and that their parents, Tatiana’s brother Thomas, and his wife, Fidens, were slain in the genocide. “I wanted them to see the film and their story is part of the film, so I had to tell them,” he says. “It was not easy to prepare them because they never knew that we are not their real parents. They couldn’t believe it and we had to talk to them again and again.”
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In his quiet way, Rusesabagina clearly enjoys the attention that comes with the film. “I enjoy meeting the stars but now it’s becoming a routine,” he says, chuckling softly at his little joke. “I met all the stars you can think of: Clint Eastwood, Morgan Freeman - very nice - Jamie Foxx. I have spoken with Harrison Ford and he is a good friend of mine. He came to the premiere in Los Angeles.”
But he knows too that when it’s all over, he will return to the suburbs of Brussels, where he has lived since finally leaving Rwanda as a refugee in 1996, and go back to running his transport business and caring for his family. “I am very happy there,” he says. Although the horrors of the past will, of course, always be with him.
“When you have seen killing like this it is impossible to forget the details of what you have witnessed. It was horrible, unbelievable, and it is still fresh in my mind. Sometimes I believe in God, other times I doubt. We were being punished for something? Can you believe that a population of seven million people can butcher each other so that within 100 days a million people are dead? Fifteen per cent of the whole population. It is too shocking and yet it is true.
“When it was happening I prayed. But afterwards we tend to forget. Me, I sometimes strive within myself against God. We used to say that God can go anywhere once in the world but he made sure that he was asleep in Rwanda in 1994.”
For the film-makers, Hotel Rwanda was a labour of love. They wanted to tell the story, get the message out. “Ten years on, politicians from around the world have made the pilgrimage to Rwanda to ask for forgiveness from the survivors,” says Terry George. “But it’s happening yet again in Sudan or in the Congo or some godforsaken place where life is worth less than dirt. Places where men and women like Paul and Tatiana shame us all by their decency and bravery.”
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And for Rusesabagina himself, he’s just glad that the story has been told. “Maybe it will make some difference,” he says. “Perhaps it will make people think and raise awareness. That is my dream. I wanted to let the world know how we felt and maybe we will all learn what to do next time.” n
Hotel Rwanda opens in London on Friday and nationwide from March 4