Awakening Awareness to Genocide
By Tyler B. Reed / Daily News Staff
Saturday, February 26, 2005

SHERBORN -- A decade ago, Hutu extremists went door to door in Rwanda, dragged Tutsi men, women and children from their homes, and murdered them with machetes.

The American military never intervened. United Nations peacekeepers on the ground were ordered never to fire their guns.

While genocide occurred around him, hotel manager Paul Rusesabagina transformed the Hotel Mille Collines in Kigali into a shelter, saving more than 1,200 lives.

Rusesabagina, the hero now portrayed by actor Don Cheadle in the movie "Hotel Rwanda," stopped in Sherborn last night on his way to Los Angeles for Sunday night's Academy Awards ceremony.

Rusesabagina and his wife, Tatiana, met with reporters and accepted the Peace Abbey Courage of Conscience Award.

Tomorrow, the movie that made him famous and now serves, he said, as a way of awakening people to the genocide in the Sudan and the Congo, is up for an Oscar. Cheadle was nominated for Best Actor in a Leading Role.

"The average American was not informed about what was going on," Rusesabagina said. But since arriving in the United States on Nov. 2, "I've noticed that people are very, very receptive."

Now a humanitarian worker, he started the Rusesabagina Foundation to help a half-million orphaned children from Rwanda. He travels the world to raise awareness about the atrocities now occurring in the Sudan and Congo.

According to Rusesabagina, many of the mistakes international peacekeepers made in addressing the 1994 genocide in Rwanda have not been corrected. "The U.N. is a powerless institution," he said.

On a recent trip to see the ethnic cleansing in the Darfur region of Sudan, Rusesabagina saw villages reduced from 48,000 people to 200. He said he saw 220,000 people "just sleeping on the sand." And the 1,500 soldiers on the ground to help, were basically just "bodyguards to humanitarians," he said.

"What I have seen is just unbelievable," he said. "Three thousand villages have been completely razed by helicopter bombardment."

Rusesabagina, who also spoke to reporters yesterday morning at the Newton Sheraton Hotel, sat close to his wife last night at the Peace Abbey in Sherborn and called upon people to stand up to the African dictators overseeing campaigns of genocide.

He said what happened at his Rwanda hotel was "our duty, our obligation and our responsibility toward our fellow human beings."

Rwanda hotel manager issues a plea

By Stephanie V. Siek, Globe Staff | March 3, 2005

SHERBORN -- The story of Paul and Tatiana Rusesabagina demonstrates that individuals can stand firm against unimaginable evil, when even the world's most powerful countries and leaders do little or nothing to stop it.

In a century that brought to life the phrase, ''Never Forget," more than 800,000 Rwandans classified as Tutsi or moderate Hutus were left to die at the hands of their neighbors in one of the largest-scale genocides since the Holocaust. If there is a message that the Rusesabaginas want to have resonate even more vigorously in the 21st century, it is: ''Always remember -- and don't let this happen again."

The Rusesabaginas were presented with The Peace Abbey's Courage of Conscience Award last week in Sherborn for their efforts to shelter more than 1,200 people fleeing the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. Converting the four-star luxury hotel he managed in the Rwandan capital of Kigali into a sanctuary, Paul Rusesabagina managed to save the lives of men, women, and children who faced almost certain death by the Interahamwe. The Interahamwe was the name for the militias-turned-death-squads that called on ordinary citizens to kill the Tutsi people they had lived alongside and with whom they had created families for decades. The movie, ''Hotel Rwanda," is based on the Rusesabaginas' experiences.

''When I went through this, I never knew I was going to survive," Paul Rusesabagina said. ''The only thing that was certain was that I was going to be killed.

''Each and every day is a day of bonus, and should be used for good."

The Courage of Conscience Award, a sculpted pair of outstretched hands from which a dove takes flight, was cast in bronze especially for the Rusesabaginas, said Lewis Randa, The Peace Abbey's director. The award is usually white ceramic, but Randa said it had been changed because that color was seen as being too representative of the European and American countries that he says turned their backs on Rwanda.

The Peace Abbey, a nonprofit organization that runs nonviolence workshops, a guesthouse, and a school for mentally challenged adults, has given the award 102 times since 1988. Past awards have been presented to Mother Teresa, the Dalai Lama, Muhammad Ali, and Rosa Parks.

Keith Harvey, the executive director of the American Friends Service Committee, praised the Rusesabaginas for widening their definition of family, from just themselves and their children to everyone who went to the Hotel des Mille Collines seeking shelter.

''It is my hope, and yes it's my prayer, that we all learn from your story," Harvey said shortly before presenting the award. ''Family, when defined in its most sacred terms, includes all our brothers and sisters, especially those whose lives are threatened."

The couple said they see nothing exceptional in their actions.

'People shouldn't thank us because of what we did," Paul Rusesabagina said. ''What we did was our responsibility, our duty. These are our fellow human beings."

They thought at the time, he said, that nationwide many other people were acting just as they were. Unfortunately, they were mistaken.

The United Nations had deployed 2,500 peacekeeping troops the previous August to monitor a newly negotiated accord between the Hutu-led Rwandan government and Tutsi guerrilla forces. Fifteen days after the genocide began on April 6, 1994, the UN withdrew all but 250 troops after 10 Belgian peacekeepers were murdered by the death squads. The peacekeepers' superiors, citing their status as observers, had forbidden them from firing back in self-defense. As the killings of civilians continued through July, the UN Security Council waffled over whether to characterize the killings as ''genocide," which would have obligated the assembly to commit itself to end the violence.

Friday night's ceremony at the Peace Abbey was just two nights before the Academy Awards. ''Hotel Rwanda" was nominated for three Oscars, but ended up winning none. But when the Rusesabaginas talked about the movie, it was about its potential to spread the word about the genocide and about how accurately it portrayed the horror.

In fact, the reality was much worse, Paul Rusesabagina said. Standing at the windows of the hotel, one could see and smell corpses. He recalled venturing outside and discovering that the death squads had killed every living thing. ''Except dogs. What we were seeing all the way were dead bodies and dogs eating dead bodies, and the whole country smelled."

To help the survivors -- particularly orphans, women whose rapists infected them with AIDS, and the children of such rapes -- he has launched the Paul Rusesabagina Foundation (www.rusesabaginafoundation.org).

After the ceremony, he said that many Rwandans felt the United Nations and the Western powers had failed them. They watched European soldiers arrive, only to see them hastily evacuate their countrymen while leaving Rwandans behind.

''We saw the whole world turning backs, closing eyes," he said. ''Nobody looked behind to see what was happening. They just ran away."

Rusesabagina wants to make sure the same doesn't happen with the Darfur region of Sudan, whose people the United States and the United Nations have declared victims of genocide. He said that Americans should mobilize much as they did in the 1980s protests against apartheid in South Africa.

''Today, people can go down to the streets, demonstrate, denounce, and fight what is going on in the Sudan, where 1.6 million people are displaced in their own country. You young people, you are tomorrow's leaders, and you can change the world. I am sure you can make it. It is just a matter of will."

Stephanie V. Siek can be reached at ssiek@globe.com.
© Copyright 2005 Globe Newspaper Company.