Hotel Rwanda' Manager: We've Failed To Learn From History
Hotel Rwanda' Manager: We've Failed To Learn From History
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NPR
April 5, 2014
11:45 AM ET
Heard on Weekend Edition Saturday
Paul Rusesabagina is a figure from history — a terrible history.
Paul Rusesabagina is a figure from history — a terrible history.
He was the manager of the Diplomat Hotel in Kigali, Rwanda, 20 years ago, when the genocide of Rwanda's Tutsi people began. More than 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus would be killed in just three months.
While most of the world took no action to stop the killing, Rusesabagina sheltered more than 1,000 people inside his hotel. He gave them water from the pool so they wouldn't die from dehydration, smuggled in food so they wouldn't starve, and held off the militia who came to the hotel by bribing them with alcohol and cigars.
His story was turned into an award-winning movie in 2004, Hotel Rwanda, starring Don Cheadle as Rusesabagina.
Today, Rusesabagina lives in San Antonio, Texas. He's the founder of the Hotel Rwanda Rusesabagina Foundation, which advocates for human rights internationally.
Rusesabagina tells NPR's Scott Simon that he no longer lives in Rwanda because after speaking out against people doing evil, he became a target of that evil. "Having no other choice, I just fled the country," he says.
Paul Rusesabagina, who sheltered more than 1,000 people in his hotel during the Rwandan genocide, says the brutal violence in Syria, the Central African Republic and the Congo shows history repeats itself while people fail to learn from it.
Courtesy Hotel Rwanda Rusesabagina Foundation
Interview Highlights
Interview Highlights
On what drives people to commit genocide
There are many reasons why people kill each other. One of those reasons is, of course, bad leadership. When leaders teach the people they lead to kill others, then people go ahead and do what their leaders tell them. A second reason is because people are poor and are not educated well enough. They always, as I said, tend to trust their leaders.
The worst reason, this is impunity. In Rwanda, for instance ... since I was a young kid, late '50s, early '60s, we saw people killing their neighbors and getting their cars, getting their properties — houses, plantations and so on. Until just recently, in the late '90s, immediately after the genocide, those people were still living in houses they never built, they were still living in plantations which were never theirs, with the cattle which never belonged to them.
On his anger at the Western world for not doing more to stop the genocide
History always keeps repeating itself. We saw this happening with the Armenians, the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust. I remember in 1994, I was very angry with ... everybody in the international community, because when people were being butchered, they were there, and they never did anything.
On recent violence in Syria, Darfur and the Central African Republic
This recalls exactly what we were going through in 1994. This recalls what also has been going on in the Congo, on our own watch. That recalls me that history repeats itself, and does not teach human beings any lessons.
Twenty years ago this week around 1 million people died in the mass killings now known as the Rwandan genocide. At the time, the international community did nothing and the genocide’s memory leaves a stain on many consciences. One story emerged, though, about heroism in trying times: “The Hotel Rwanda.” The story of the hotel was immortalized in a much-celebrated 2004 Hollywood movie. But the story of a heroic hotelier, Oskar Schindler-like protecting his guests, is not quite what it seems.
In his new book Inside the Hotel Rwanda: The Surprising True Story… And Why It Matters Today(Benbella Books), Edouard Kayihura attempts to set the record straight. Kayihura is a survivor of the genocide and one of the 1,268 people who took refuge inside the hotel. The book, which was written with Kerry Zukus, builds on Kayihura’s memories and supplements them with testimony from other refugees – or prisoners – in the hotel.
The following is an excerpt.
In the hotel, we thought of ourselves as many things: refugees, hotel employees, victims. At times we considered ourselves prisoners—glad to be alive, but at the same time stuck inside this building with nowhere else to go. And as captives in this luxurious dungeon, we had one very bad prison guard [Paul Rusesabagina], who, like many classically corrupt sentries, exploited us and treated us poorly. But one thing we never considered ourselves to be was hostages.
BOOK EXCERPT: THE REAL STORY BEHIND 'HOTEL RWANDA'
BOOK EXCERPT: THE REAL STORY BEHIND 'HOTEL RWANDA'
BY EDOUARD KAYIHURA ON 4/7/14 AT 10:34 AM
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