In 100 days, one million of Rwanda’s 7.5 million citizens lost their lives in a slaughter that rocked the country but, for some reason, could not rock the world.

‘Africa is a forgotten continent,’ Paul Rusesabagina said last night to a crowded audience at Hendricks Chapel. ‘If this genocide had happened anywhere else, the whole world would not have stood by and watched it happen.’

Rusesabagina, a native Rwandan, experienced firsthand the horrors of the 1994 genocide, in which the Hutu-led Interahamwe militia murdered much of the country’s Tutsi population. And unlike the rest of the world, Rusesabagina did not simply stand by and watch it happen.

‘When Rwanda descended into madness, Mr. Rusesabagina made a promise to protect the family he loved,’ said Clarence Cross, co-director of University Union Speakers, when presenting the guest. ‘He ended up finding the courage to save more than 1,200 people from certain death, and was portrayed by Don Cheadle in the 2004 film ‘Hotel Rwanda.”

Rwanda and its neighboring countries experienced multiple civil wars throughout the 1970s and ’80s, in which hundreds of thousands of people fled their homes in fear of both governments and rebel militias. On the night of April 6, 1994, Rusesabagina had dinner at his brother-in-law’s house, and returned home when his wife called and said she had never heard anything like the violence taking place in their city of Kigali.

‘That night, I shook my brother-in-law’s hand for the last time,’ Rusesabagina said. ‘He and his wife were killed and never found after the butchering began.’

Bodies lined the streets, and it was common to see husbands killing wives, wives killing husbands and priests killing their church members with machetes, guns and spears, Rusesabagina said. Foreigners left the country immediately, leaving no one as witnesses to these atrocities.

For reasons unknown to him, neighbors sought safe harbor in Rusesabagina’s home, and by the end of the first day of the massacre, his family had increased from six people to 32.

‘Thirty-two of us stayed together for three days, waiting to be killed,’ Rusesabagina said. ‘Soldiers arrived at the house and said my family needed to move to the Hotel des Mille Collines, where I had previously been a manager. I told them my family was now 32, and I would not leave them behind.’

Rusesabagina assumed a temporary management position at the hotel, which quickly became home to hundreds of refugees. All of the phone lines were cut off, leaving only one option for the hotel’s new inhabitants in trying to get outside help.

‘There was a fax line – that became our lifeline,’ Rusesabagina said. ‘We were desperate, without any hope of survival. We used that line until the very end.’

On May 2, United Nations executives and army officials decided Rusesabagina and his family could leave the hotel. In what he describes as the most difficult decision of his life, he chose to instead stay with the refugees.

‘I told my family to leave but knew I had to stay,’ Rusesabagina said. ‘There is nothing more heartbreaking than seeing your loved ones leave without any hope that they or you will survive to see each other again.’

However, shortly after they left, the evacuated refugees were thrown from their trucks and beaten, causing Rusesabagina’s wife and children to return to the hotel.

Almost a month later, Rusesabagina requested more security for the hotel, but was turned down.

‘I told the mayor that one day this would all come to an end, and to imagine if that day was today,’ he said. ‘I asked, ‘Is the answer you gave me the answer you want to give to history?”

The mayor then granted Rusesabagina’s request for soldiers, and shortly after, all refugees were evacuated from the hotel. Rusesabagina found his murdered brother-in-law’s children in a refugee camp, and upon returning to Rwanda in July, discovered his mother, nieces, nephews and other family members had been slaughtered.

‘The whole country was dead,’ Rusesabagina said. ‘There were no voices to hear except those of dogs barking, fighting for the dead bodies in the roads.’

Rusesabagina’s family remained in Rwanda for two and a half years following the genocide, eventually moving to Belgium, where he is now a citizen. As she listened to Rusesabagina speak, junior political science and Spanish major Rachel Marx said she kept seeing scenes from ‘Hotel Rwanda.’

‘I couldn’t stop thinking about how the actual memories must be playing back in his head as he spoke,’ Marx said. ‘How vivid it must have been to see those atrocities firsthand is unfathomable to me.’

It is important to note, Rusesabagina said, that Rwanda is not an isolated incident, but that there have also been massacres in Northern Uganda, Burundi and the Darfur region of Sudan. In these countries, hundreds of thousands of people are forced to live without food, shelter, water, clothing or the most important basic need: education.

‘This isn’t just civil war; it’s mass slaughtering of people,’ Marx said. ‘It continues to happen and needs to be dealt with globally. We can’t just expect Africans to deal with it on their own.’

Rusesabagina visited the Darfur region of Sudan right before the 60th anniversary of the Auschwitz concentration camp liberation. In an ironic moment, he saw world leaders on television repeating the phrase, ‘Never again, never again.’

‘In Rwanda, the whole world closed its eyes, closed its ears and turned away from what was happening,’ Rusesabagina said. ‘There are so many voices calling for help – you have to stand up, raise awareness and be our messengers.’

Published on December 6, 2005 at 12:00 pm