planning to do a similar thing
here: take power and then start a campaign of genocide against the Hutu? I heard it said more than a few times over glasses
of Carlsberg or Tuborg: “It may come down to kill or be killed.”
During that dangerous time I did something that had the potential to be my death warrant. The RPF leadership was looking for
a place to give a press conference and every public venue in town had rejected them. When they approached me about a room
at the Diplomates, I agreed to host them, and I charged them the standard rate of five hundred dollars. It wasn’t the profits
I cared about. I really believed they deserved to have equal access like anybody else. It was not my place to discriminate
based on ideology or what people would think of me. But I heard later that the government was unhappy with me. I suppose,
in retrospect, it was like the incident with Habyarimana’s silly medals. These were symbolic stands, and probably foolish,
but ones I thought were worth the risk.
I have said that those first months of 1994 were like watching a speeding car in slow motion heading toward a child. There
was a thickness in the air. You could buy Chinese-made grenades on the street for three dollars each and machetes for just
one dollar and nobody thought to ask why. Many of my friends purchased guns for themselves in the name of home protection.
This was something I refused to do, despite the urging of my wife. In one tense conversation she told me I was acting like
a coward for not acquiring a firearm. “You know that I have always said I fight with words, not with guns, ” I told her. “If
you want to call me a coward for this, then I guess that is what I am.” She stared back at me, hurt and silent.
A few days later, I took her and our little son, Tresor, along with me to a manager’s meeting in Brussels that I had been
scheduled to attend. With the other children at boarding school in Rwanda, it was just the three of us, and we made a little
vacation out of it. We traveled by train through Luxembourg, Switzerland, and France. Walking amid the gray monuments and
plazas, drinking the yeasty beer, and eating the starchy tourist food made it possible—almost—to forget the slow boil back
at home.
After three weeks, I had to return to my job, and we arrived in Kigali on the red-eye on the morning of March 31. At that
hour the city was quiet, the militias were mostly asleep and the tension that I had come to associate with Rwanda was at low
ebb. The rolling green hills had never looked so good or so welcoming. Perhaps things were finally calming down. The United
Nations had sent twenty-seven hundred troops to Rwanda a few months earlier to enforce the Arusha peace agreement, and it
seemed the visible presence of the blue helmets was finally making a difference in keeping the militias contained. The UN
seemed capable of maintaining the peace. They had given us hope.
It had been so long since we had been to our house that we decided to go straight there instead of to our suite at the Diplo-mates.
For the first time in almost two years we felt good about the future.
FIVE
I STILL REMEMBER the sunset on that night of April 6, 1994. There was no rain. The sky was hazy with spring moisture and dust and the slanted
dying light made the bottoms of the clouds turn blood orange. The colors deepened and darkened as the sun went lower, reaching
for the hillcrest in a nimbus of purples, violets, and indigos, the colors of oncoming night. Around town some people paused
to watch, cocking their heads to the west. It was a moment of beautiful stillness.
I have been told that it is common for people to mark exactly where they are when they learn of death on a grand scale. I
have met Americans, for example, who can tell me in detail which suit they were putting on or what highway they were driving
down at the time of the suicide jet attacks on the World Trade Center.
here: take power and then start a campaign of genocide against the Hutu? I heard it said more than a few times over glasses
of Carlsberg or Tuborg: “It may come down to kill or be killed.”
During that dangerous time I did something that had the potential to be my death warrant. The RPF leadership was looking for
a place to give a press conference and every public venue in town had rejected them. When they approached me about a room
at the Diplomates, I agreed to host them, and I charged them the standard rate of five hundred dollars. It wasn’t the profits
I cared about. I really believed they deserved to have equal access like anybody else. It was not my place to discriminate
based on ideology or what people would think of me. But I heard later that the government was unhappy with me. I suppose,
in retrospect, it was like the incident with Habyarimana’s silly medals. These were symbolic stands, and probably foolish,
but ones I thought were worth the risk.
I have said that those first months of 1994 were like watching a speeding car in slow motion heading toward a child. There
was a thickness in the air. You could buy Chinese-made grenades on the street for three dollars each and machetes for just
one dollar and nobody thought to ask why. Many of my friends purchased guns for themselves in the name of home protection.
This was something I refused to do, despite the urging of my wife. In one tense conversation she told me I was acting like
a coward for not acquiring a firearm. “You know that I have always said I fight with words, not with guns, ” I told her. “If
you want to call me a coward for this, then I guess that is what I am.” She stared back at me, hurt and silent.
A few days later, I took her and our little son, Tresor, along with me to a manager’s meeting in Brussels that I had been
scheduled to attend. With the other children at boarding school in Rwanda, it was just the three of us, and we made a little
vacation out of it. We traveled by train through Luxembourg, Switzerland, and France. Walking amid the gray monuments and
plazas, drinking the yeasty beer, and eating the starchy tourist food made it possible—almost—to forget the slow boil back
at home.
After three weeks, I had to return to my job, and we arrived in Kigali on the red-eye on the morning of March 31. At that
hour the city was quiet, the militias were mostly asleep and the tension that I had come to associate with Rwanda was at low
ebb. The rolling green hills had never looked so good or so welcoming. Perhaps things were finally calming down. The United
Nations had sent twenty-seven hundred troops to Rwanda a few months earlier to enforce the Arusha peace agreement, and it
seemed the visible presence of the blue helmets was finally making a difference in keeping the militias contained. The UN
seemed capable of maintaining the peace. They had given us hope.
It had been so long since we had been to our house that we decided to go straight there instead of to our suite at the Diplo-mates.
For the first time in almost two years we felt good about the future.
FIVE
I STILL REMEMBER the sunset on that night of April 6, 1994. There was no rain. The sky was hazy with spring moisture and dust and the slanted
dying light made the bottoms of the clouds turn blood orange. The colors deepened and darkened as the sun went lower, reaching
for the hillcrest in a nimbus of purples, violets, and indigos, the colors of oncoming night. Around town some people paused
to watch, cocking their heads to the west. It was a moment of beautiful stillness.
I have been told that it is common for people to mark exactly where they are when they learn of death on a grand scale. I
have met Americans, for example, who can tell me in detail which suit they were putting on or what highway they were driving
down at the time of the suicide jet attacks on the World Trade Center.
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