Main Sections

Hero Of Rwanda Genocide Says AFRICA Needs Help From Countries Like America To Stop Killing

Tuesday March 20, 2007

By Ed Barna

    Though hotel manager Paul Rusesabagina saved more than 1,200 Tutsis and moderate Hutus from being slaughtered while 15 percent of the people in Rwanda were being killed, the slain included many relatives and members of his wife's family.

    After his address at Middlebury College, one student somewhat apologetically asked--he would understand if Rusesabagina did not want to answer--whether going through that ordeal had strengthened him. The “African Schindler's” reply was that afterward, he was “angry and bitter,” but in the end realized “I was not changing anything, and “to score, you need to go to the field and play.”

   But his pain did not just come from losing loved ones. “I was bitter because Africa is a forgotten continent. The world did nothing,” he said. The subtitle of his talk, in which he said the same thing is now going on in the Darfur (trans. “country of the Fur”), was “A Lesson Yet to be Learned.”

    March will be a month of learning about genocide at the College, especially Africa. Rusesabagina's appearance began a “convocation series” in which there will be intensive discussions of refugee resettlement and other actions, following two other addresses.

    The March 3 address was hugely attended: Mead Chapel was packed, and so was a Bicentennial Hall video link site, from which people had to be turned away. In the student newspaper “The Campus,” one student remarked that it will be a good year for speakers, with both the real-life hero upon which the film “Hotel Rwanda” was based and former President Bill Clinton appearing.

    Too bad they couldn't have come at the same time. Rusesabagina said that he had tried to meet with Clinton, as well as with United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan, but both found other things to do when the appointment time came around.

    Clinton was President in 1994, when a missile attack on an airplane that killed the Hutu president of Rwanda was blamed on the Tutsis, and a country of a thousand green hills the size of Vermont saw 800,000 people tortured, butchered, or both. At the Hotel Mille Collines (thousand hills), Rusesabagina obtained a fax machine, a precious link to the outside world that he used to contact Washington, D.C. to tell them what was happening was genocide, not scattered, spontaneous revenge killings.

    Here's his version of a telephone talk with a White House staffer, from his book “An Ordinary Man,” which became a New York Times bestseller in 2006: “Yes, I remember the fax. I passed it along to a colleague of mine who handles foreign policy details…This has to be routed through proper channels. Have you also contacted the State Department or the embassy of the United States in Rwanda?”

“Your embassy left the country on April 9.”

“Yes, that's right, I see.”

“I was really hoping you could bring this up with President Clinton directly. The situation here is very bad.”

“Well, as I have said, this has to be handled by the foreign policy staff…I've got another call coming in and I have to let you go.”

Rusesabagina summed up, “To all the faxes and phone calls I made to the United States in those weeks, I never once received a reply.” Later, he would unearth a Pentagon paper saying “Be careful. Legal at State was worried about this yesterday-Genocide finding could commit (the U.S. government) to actually 'do something.'”

The term “genocide,” his book notes, was coined by Polish-born lawyer Raphael Lemkin, who helped persuade the UN to pass a resolution in 1948 forbidding the destruction of a group because of its religion, nationality or ethnicity, and a 1948 treaty threatening criminal penalties for the leaders of any regime engaging in genocide. “It was not until 1986 that the U.S. Senate finally ratified the agreement. By then, genocides had been carried out in Cambodia, in Nigeria, in Pakistan, in Burundi, and in many other places on the globe.”

Even the idea of jamming Rwanda's national radio station, which repeatedly fired up Hutu crowds to kill Tutsis, was rejected “on the grounds that the Army National Guard airplane required for the overflights cost $8,500 an hour to fly.” Rusesabagina says, “I still wonder how policy officials from that time can sit down to sleep at night, knowing that they failed to act.”

Rusesabagina urged his audience, “Stand up,” and insist that the U.S. and U.N. play a stronger role in the Darfur. He had gone there, he said, and “it's exactly the same.” Don't count on the African Union, he said, because most African heads of state are dictators, and
“Have you ever heard of a dictator fighting another dictator in the name of democracy?”

   In 1996, Rusesabagina and his family fled to Belgium, to avoid being killed for knowing too much about what had happened. He told his story to Keir Pearson, who together with Irish film director Terry George was nominated for an Oscar for making “Hotel Rwanda.” (His review: “There were a few dramatic embellishments, but I know that's typical for Hollywood movies, and the story was very close to the truth.”) He has founded the Hotel Rwanda Rusesabagina Foundation to help provide health care and educations to Rwandan orphans and homeless children, who number nearly half a million. And he does what he did so often to keep militia men or police or crowds from killing those in the hotel he managed: he talks.

   The word is strongly that any violence, he insisted to those in Mead Chapel. And in his book, where he describes the way his father used discussion to help resolve problems between people living on their hill, he makes an observation that might be value during the upcoming Presidential election: “Hard-liners and loudmouths did not get to be village elders.” 

Printer Friendly

Top

Advertisements

Search our Archives