Revisiting Rwanda's Horrors With a Former National Security Adviser

WASHINGTON, Dec. 14 - In a pivotal scene in "Hotel Rwanda," which opens Wednesday, the colonel in charge of a beleaguered United Nations peace-keeping force rushes to talk with the commanding officer of a fresh and heavily armed United Nations contingent that has just arrived at a hotel packed with refugees from the bloody genocide outside its walls. The colonel, played by Nick Nolte, suddenly throws his blue beret on the ground in anger. The eyes of the hotel manager, played by Don Cheadle, slowly register concern, then fear. The awful truth becomes clear: the new soldiers are there to evacuate the mostly white foreigners, leaving the black Rwandans to their fate.

"That gets to you - they were counting on the U.N. and they were abandoned," whispered Anthony Lake, as he watched the scene in an otherwise empty theater here. Mr. Lake, the national security adviser in the Clinton administration, played a role in determining United States policy in Rwanda a decade ago, and he had agreed to attend the screening of a movie that, even before its release, is provoking uncomfortable memories of the collective failure by Western powers to confront an atrocity.

"Hotel Rwanda," from MGM's United Artists unit, depicts the events of 1994, when Hutu extremists slaughtered some 800,000 of their countrymen, women and children. The genocide of the Tutsis and moderate Hutus was probably the fastest and most personally brutal in history: more often than not, the implements for death were machetes.

To deal with its burden of horror, the film searches out a bright spot. Like "Schindler's List," it concentrates on a real-life hero, Paul Rusesabagina, the fastidious, crafty and courageous manager of a luxury hotel in Kigali, the capital city. For two and a half months, Mr. Rusesabagina, a Hutu, held insanity at bay. Somehow, using his connections to the Hutu army command, bribes of money and single malt Scotch, flattery and threats, and desperate telephone calls to the outside world, he was able to save the lives of 1,268 people who took refuge in his hotel, the Milles Collines, including his Tutsi wife and their four children.

The director, Terry George, has taken pains to make the movie watchable and to retain its PG-13 rating. There are plenty of bodies - including a grisly scene reminiscent of the bone yard in "The Killing Fields" - but the massacres occur in peripheral vision. They are depicted mostly in a fictionalized piece of videotape. (Mr. George was persuaded not to use actual videotape of people being killed.)

People familiar with what happened 10 years ago in Rwanda, both those inside and outside the country, are coming face to face with scenes that remind them of their own trauma and shame, much of it grounded in the fact that the world willingly turned its back on what was happening there.

Mr. Lake, for his part, requested two ground rules in agreeing to see and discuss the film: that he not be made to appear "self-serving or self-exculpatory" (a rule that tended to take care of itself), and that he be allowed to air his views on the current situations in Darfur in Sudan and in the eastern Congo. The extensive loss of civilian life in those places, he believes, is a direct echo of the Rwandan genocide, and this time, he asserts, international powers should not sit idly by, as they have largely done to date.

Blid Alsbirk
In "Hotel Rwanda," Don Cheadle,
center, plays Paul Rusesabagina, a
Kigali hotelier who was able to
save more than 1,000 lives.

In Rwanda, the United States did not simply not intervene. It also used its considerable power to discourage other Western powers from intervening. At the height of the carnage, when Belgium lost 10 peacekeepers, the United States demanded a total United Nations withdrawal. Some African countries objected, and eventually Washington settled for a severe cutback in the 2,500-man United Nations force. The commander of the force in Kigali, Maj. Gen. Roméo Dallaire of Canada, who had asked for 5,000 troops, was left with 270.

The withdrawal, Paul Rusesabagina noted, was a critical turning point. In an interview in New York, where he was promoting the film, he said it signaled to the Hutu militia, known as the Interahamwe, that their planned killing of Tutsis and moderate Hutus could continue unabated.

"You can imagine the situation," he said, describing a scene of dead bodies piling up in the streets outside his hotel. "The majority of the population is now killing systematically the minority, and no one just raises a finger to say this is wrong. And even the United Nations is pulling out.

"Everyone was listening to radios so we all knew what was going on in the Security Council. When other countries wanted to maintain their soldiers the U.S. said no. Of course I was angry against each and everybody. I was bitter. It's because it was Rwanda. It was Africa. What else can you conclude?"

With time, his anger has dulled, he said: "By now I have come to realize that the average person outside is not always aware of what was going on. But the leaders were aware of what was happening."

Mr. Lake, now a professor of international diplomacy at Georgetown University, said he had reviewed memos of the time in an attempt to reconstruct the government's position. The goal was not to "wallow in guilt," he said, but to understand why the slaughter in Rwanda registered so faintly in the Washington decision-making apparatus.

"My retrospective anger and dismay is not that we made a wrong decision," he said, "but that we didn't make any decision." There never was a "principals' meeting" - at the level of cabinet officers - to discuss Rwanda, he said. Nor did he energize his staff to look at various options and make a policy recommendation to President Clinton.

"I'm not blaming my staff," he continued. "I could have and should have said: Tell me more. What's going on? Why can't we do more?" Instead, he said, he was obsessed with other crises in Bosnia and in Haiti. And the conventional wisdom was that humanitarian intervention was unthinkable because only months before, 18 American soldiers had lost their lives in Somalia.

But why insist that the United Nations force be cut back? "What I believe happened," Mr. Lake said, "and I was told this later, I don't know if I was involved in it - was the Belgians came to us and said please help us get our folks out of there. They had just had 10 killed. It was their Somalia." He said United States diplomacy was providing "protective cover."

Mr. Lake readily acknowledged other unattractive features of American policy: that the State Department prohibited use of the word "genocide" for months, that the Pentagon refused to jam Rwandan broadcasts that guided the killing and that there had been warnings well ahead of time, including one from the Central Intelligence Agency, that a catastrophic human disaster was in the making.

He did recall a small victory, which came out of a meeting with two human rights activists, an American and a Rwandan: a news release was issued that publicized the names of the Rwandan officials who were responsible for the slaughter. In retrospect, he said, it was nothing, no more than "taking a water pistol to a forest fire."

But the American activist who attended the meeting, Alison Des Forges of Human Rights Watch, has a different take on it. "We saw him for half an hour," she recalled. "He just listened very politely and said virtually nothing. I said: 'It seems we're not getting through. What can we do?' He said: 'Make more noise.' In other words, he was telling us: you don't have a constituency to make me listen. Though he did allow us to issue a press release over his name."

Mr. Rusesabagina, now 50, is a quiet-spoken man of solid build who emanates an air of assurance, if not stubbornness. He gives the impression that he has dealt with certain questions about the genocide so often that the answers now come by themselves. What he really thinks and feels sometimes seems out of reach.

But he comes alive when he describes how he outsmarted the Hutu commander who handed him a gun and told him to kill his wife and children and other Tutsi "cockroaches." He bought him off with money. "If someone accepts to negotiate, then you are already winning," he observed.

He recalled how his 14-year-old son, Roger, found nine dead bodies in a neighbor's garden, came running home and stayed in his room for four days without talking. And how at one point the men in the hotel gathered for what he called a "blood brotherhood." "We sat down, we had a drink, then we called our children," he said. "We told them we might die today or tomorrow. If us parents die, you guys, the elder ones will take care of your younger brothers and sisters. And whoever remains, the elder will always take care of the younger. Even if there are only two left, one must take care of the other."

And he provided a simple explanation for why he stayed behind at the hotel and refused evacuation until the very end. "Look, I was used to negotiate with the killers," he said. "If I save my life and if all of these people who sleep on the floor and the lobby of the hotel are killed, what will I say one day to history?

"To start with, my own conscience would never have been quiet throughout my life. And secondly I wouldn't see myself as a gentleman and sit around the table and share a drink with the men, as we say in Rwanda. No, it would have been a shame forever."

Mr. Rusesabagina left in June 1994 with his family, and returned a few weeks later, once the Tutsi rebel forces, the RPF, had gained control of the capital. He resigned as a hotelier in February 1995, and then left the country in September 1996, after a complicated business dispute. He lives in Belgium with his wife and four children and two nieces whose parents were killed. He has little time for the current Tutsi-dominated government led by President Paul Kagame.

Like Mr. Lake, he believes there is genocide elsewhere in Africa today. In western Sudan, government-backed militia, mostly Arab, are killing civilians from pastoral tribes, and so far an estimated 100,000 have died. In September, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell declared it genocide. In eastern Congo, where both Tutsi and Hutu Rwandan refugees and exiles abound, many belonging to military groups, the numbers are even more horrific. Human rights groups say that about 2.3 million have died since 1998 from war, famine and disease.

Mr. Lake visited Rwanda in the fall of 1994, after the slaughter had stopped. His throat tightens as he describes a visit to a churchyard where the mutilated bodies of women and children were scattered on the ground and stacked inside sheds. "We couldn't get out without stepping on them," he said, his voice breaking. It was "shameful," he added, that his administration refused to employ the term "genocide" for a period of six weeks.

"It was based on the belief that if you used the word, then you're required to take action," he said. "They didn't go the sophistry route - using the word and finding a way to weasel out of it. Now in Sudan, we've used it and we're wriggling out of its meaning. Which is more unattractive? I don't know."

Incredible.

While the Times at least covers this, no fault is given to Half-Bright ("Me? Jewish?") or Clinton (the first black president). Can you ever imagine for a minute if this atrocity happened on a Republican's watch? The Times and CBS and the rest would still be running daily stories...the phony b*stards.

As an aside, the History Channel (aka History Cliff Notes Channel) had a show on last night called "Rwanda: Do Scars Ever Heal". The show states, in passing, that the French helped train the paramilitary Hutu units that did a lions share of the slaughtering. Additionally, Kofi Annan was responsible for the draw down in UN forces that you mentioned. The whole episode is completely unbelievable.

It was nice to the Belgian troops taking a knife to a UN blue beret and shredding it, as they left Rwanda; ashamed for the powers that be.

Actually watched this story on the History channel last pm. It was scathing, not so much in what it said about the clinton administration, and un, but just what it showed. ex. a clinton official, avoiding the genocide terminology, in bureaucratspeak, Albright discussing the necessity for careful consideration of other commitments. And the annan refusal to respond. It was breathtaking.

And while there was little repetition of the words, "clinton administration" (actually can't recall that construct used once) it was all the more damning cause at the end its namelessness kind of made its evil even more apparent.

The man in charge of "peacekeeping" missions at the UN at the time was none other than Kofi Annan. Anna's office ordered the UN forces at the time to withdraw from confrontation. The Belgians who were killed had previously surrendered without firing a shot and were later murdered in cold blood. How can anyone look to the UN for moral authority?

The sad truth is that no one will stand up for victims of genocide. As long as the killing does not spread across international borders, a government may kill as many of its own people as it wants without any consequences. See the history of Turkey, The soviet Union, Germany, Cambodia, Rwanda etc. Today in Darfur and in Bumra people are being killed, villages are burned, women raped, crops are destroyed in order to wipe out whole groups of people. These victims are innocent. They are not being killed for what they have done but for who they are.

It is sad that in the 21 century, so much of the world still lives in such savagery. Take a few seconds today and thank God that you live in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

A couple of weeks ago I had a very moving experience that truly broke my heart.
I teach classes at a small college and have had a young woman from Africa as one of my students. She is very charming, articulate and pretty. I was chatting with her after class and asked where in Africa she came from. And sort of shyly she said Rwanda. She then told me her story of the nightmare.
Her parents were from different tribes. Her father Tutsi and her mother Hutu. She said for much of her life, it did not matter, that the two tribes got along. Then she said the nightmare began when Tutsis who had been living in Uganda started arriving in droves. When the massacre began, they broke into her family's house and in front of her ordered her father to kill her mother. He refused. They beat him to death and then killed her mother. She was raped and slashed and left for dead. Eventually she was found by relief workers and saw the nightmare in her town. She said there were bodies everywhere and the people living in the town were all strangers. She said then the reprisals against Tutsis came.
The only living relations she has left are members of her mother's family but they won't speak to her because she is half Tutsi. Catholic relief workers helped her come to this country and she is here on a student visa. She has been denied political asylum so now her greatest fear is what will happen when she graduates.

I saw most of that show. Amazing that the UN was ready to stop the slaughter before it started and kofi (peacekiller) anon gave orders to stand down.

Another thing that was disturbing was the "sly grin" of the hutu who held a Bible and claimed he was sorry for murder as he got off with 5 years for his repentance and the friend whos brother he had killed looked very angry and stated he accepted the hutu's apology but only because he was afraid he would kill him if he did not.

The whole thing was almost to disturbing to watch. All the skeletons piled up in the church still to this day. One skull on a mantel.

she was told by the immigration official that things are not that bad in Rwanda anymore so there was no need for asylum. Boggles the mind.

I should point out that this young lady is fluent in English, very education oriented and abides by all of the rules of her visa status - but is very scared of what will happen when she no longer qualifies for a student visa.

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