Overview
“Tutsis were called 'cockroaches' because they would come out at night and were difficult to kill,” (An Ordinary Man).
During the genocide, as much as 70% of Rwanda’s Tutsi population was killed in a hundred day period. Many refugees resorted to hiding in churches and other locations. When discovered, they were often killed by grenades, beaten to death with clubs, and hacked to pieces by machetes. Even babies were thrown against walls and killed indiscriminately. During this time, Paul Rusesabagina was a key role model in the country because he provided shelter to Rwandans.
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Paul Rusesabagina
“Wherever the killing season should next begin and people should become strangers to their neighbors and themselves, my hope is that there will be those ordinary men who say a quiet no and open the rooms upstairs.” (Rusesabagina, 204).
Paul Rusesabagina wrote a novel, An Ordinary Man, which entailed the treachery that was experienced during the Rwandan Genocide as well as the decades leading up to the genocide. Rusesabagina, who is a Hutu, married a Tutsi woman, which subjected his family to many of the struggles experienced by the Tutsis. Rusesabagina hid 1,268 Rwandans looking for sanctuary from the storm of murders by their friends and neighbors.
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In his own words, he was just an “ordinary man doing what an ordinary man would do.”(Rusesabagina)
By opening and hiding just over a thousand Rwandans in his luxurious Belgian owned hotel, the Mille Collines, he had done his job as hotel manager, by protecting his guests. In Rusesabagina’s mind, he wasn't a hero, he was just doing his job by giving shelter to those who needed it.
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“If you stay friendly with monsters you can find cracks in their armor… shut them out and they can kill you without a second thought.” (Rusesabagina, 121).
Throughout the genocide, Paul remained friends with the slaughterers and the murderers in order to carry out his plan. After the genocide, the country entered a lengthy healing process, as did Paul in coming to terms with what he'd witnessed and the magnitude of his actions.
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“Kindness is not an illusion and violence is not a rule. The true resting state of human affairs is not represented by a man hacking his neighbor into pieces with a machete. That is a sick aberration. No, the true state of human affairs is life as it ought to be lived.”- ("An Ordinary Man")
"I am nothing more or less than a hotel manager, trained to negotiate contracts and charged to give shelter to those that need it. My job did not change in the genocide, even though I was thrust into a sea of fire. I only spoke the words that seemed normal and sane to me. I did what I believed to be the ordinary things that an ordinary man would do." ("An Ordinary Man")