Hotel hero speaks

Evin Shoap / senior photographer Paul Rusesabagina addresses Grafton-Stovall Theatre Tuesday.

As Holocaust Remembrance Week’s second event, the real-life hero depicted in the Oscar-nominated movie "Hotel Rwanda," Paul Rusesabagina, spoke Tuesday evening in Grafton-Stovall Theatre.

Lines to attend the lecture wrapped back around to Keezell Hall, and Rusesabagina was welcomed with a standing ovation.

To begin the event, Yvonne Ngundam of the Counseling and Student Development Center Peer Mentoring Program read Maya Angelou’s "Equality," following the program’s official welcome address from Elissa Berger, the Holocaust Remembrance Week chair. Rusesabagina then was introduced by Peter Pham, assistant professor of justice studies.

Rusesabagina began by providing historical context to the tragedies he witnessed first-hand in Rwanda’s genocide. According to his speech, his country is made up of three different groups: 85 percent Hutu, 14 percent Tutsi and 1 percent Batwas. Before colonization, Rwanda shared one language and culture and was linked by intermarriages.

In 1959, a Hutu uprising led to a change in the social structure and in consequence, the latter half of the 1990s witnessed bloodshed in the continuing struggle for power between the Hutus and the Tutsis. In 1993, the President Juvénal Habyarimana signed a power-sharing agreement and gave the nation much hope for peace, Rusesabagina said.

It was in April 1994 that missiles brought down a plane carrying both Burundi’s and Rwanda’s presidents, killing both leaders in an incident that would be used for justification of mass genocide. The act framed the Tutsis, when in reality it was committed by the Hutu extremists who began slaughtering Tutsis and Hutu moderates, he said.

"Are you sure the enemy you are fighting today is this old man? Are you sure the enemy you are fighting are these babies?" Rusesabagina questioned when he was ordered on April 9, 1994, by militia to shoot and kill a group of innocent civilians. On that day, soldiers came to his house and transported his family and 26 neighbors who had taken shelter with him to one of the hotels he managed. Soon, his family and many more refugees were transported from the Diplomate Hotel to the Mille Collines Hotel.

On April 23, he was issued a mandate by a militia official who arrived at the hotel demanding Rusesabagina turn out all who had taken sanctuary there within 30 minutes. He spent those minutes on the phone with any international connection he could get a holdof.

"I had nothing to lose, but rather all to gain … I could see the militia with guns, with machetes, with clubs; with everything," Rusesabagina said. "It was 6 a.m. in Europe and midnight in the U.S., I couldn’t call anyone abroad. I started calling all my friends in the army." Within the half hour, a colonel from the National Police arrived and the siege was ended.

At one point, electricity and phones were cut off, and the residents relied on the hotel’s pool for survival, Rusesabagina said.

"I could see with people coming with dustbins to fetch water," he said. I could see the water level lowering and wandering what will happen tomorrow."

He had many instances in which he could have been evacuated, but he refused and in one evacuation sent his family instead.

"I could not see myself leaving these people," he said. "If I leave them and they are killed, I will never ever go to my bed and sleep." Just as in the movie, this one attempt to send his family to safety failed as they were ambushed by extremists and returned lucky to have survived.

Another horrific episode occurred when he met with General Bizimungu. Upon their return to the hotel, he witnessed an extremist siege had taken place, Rusesabagina said.

"They had everyone, innocent civilians, hands up, taken by the pool behind the Hotel, ready to be butchered," Rusesabagina said. "The general ran up and down the stairs yelling at the militia, ‘whoever kills someone I will kill him! Whoever beats someone I will kill him!’ He saved all those people on that day,"

"That experience opened my memories and brought me out of my dreams," he said. … "No one could believe, not even you yourselves, unless you see it. And I do not wish you to," Rusesabagina added.

He also spoke of the current bloodshed raging in Africa today.

"Since 1996, 4 million people have been killed in the Congo according to the UN; no one ever talks of it," Rusesabagina said.

"Behind each and every dictatorship there is a Western superpower playing Nintendo," he said. "… Ask your lawmakers, tell them, urge them, put an oil embargo on the Sudanese government. Why is there no weapons embargo on the Sudanese government who’ve been killing their own people?"

The week’s events were sponsored by JMU Hillel and Rusesabagina’s lecture was sponsored in conjunction with UPB, the Center for Multicultural and International Student Services, African Student Organization and the Counseling and the Student Development Center’s Peer Mentor Program.