“The UK US of the whole world wanted to abandon the entire nation to traitors, thieves, killers, gangsters ….. without any evidence of the international community, the Rwandans took machetes and started killing each other for 100 days without killing. We witnessed the massacre.’ Paul Rusesabagina
The gravity of these words touched my heart as I heard them from the back of a crowded audience at the Colorado Convention Center in Denver. >. The emotions were also evident among the 5,000 school students who listened intently to each individual’s speech. If there have ever been so close in a short life those who have suffered and witnessed so much horror and terror, and really who is worthy of the title of hero? I certainly did not feel that I was in the essence of true greatness.
I was even more privileged than most the day before in November 2005. After a speech I had prepared for Paul Rusesabagina to show to the host of PBS, I produced Global Agenda for an exclusive one-half-hour interview where he would share his story and compare it to today’s African struggles. would give
I had solved my anxiety for several weeks and was reassured by the organizers’ speech, that they would give me a time with Rusesabagina for my show. After the conversation I led him to one of the dressing rooms where we had created a stand. We were soon inundated with members of the press, newspapers and other television stations who were all asking for an interview. Because of the relationship he had built earlier, I was allotted thirty out of the forty-five minutes he had to spare before leaving for the airport. I could just feel a little indignation among the “reality” TV stations when they found out that the little PBS affiliate had more or less exclusive access!
Paul Rusesabagina is a real life hotelier portrayed by Don Cheadle in the film, Hotel Rwanda. When the country plunged into genocide in 1994 and the ethnic Hutus began killing their Tutsi neighbors, Rusesabagina – a Hutu woman married to a Tutsi turned her hotel into an impromptu refugee camp, terrorizing more than 1,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus. Rusesabagain began to cash in on all the favor he had earned from international peacekeepers, corrupting Rwandan Hutu soldiers and maintaining a bloodthirsty militia outside the gates for hundreds of days of slaughter. In the end he survived with his own people and sheltered most of the refugees. The genocide claimed an estimated 800,000 lives, however most were Tutsis, but many moderate Hutus were also targeted and killed.
You see the movie and if you don’t like it you can do it. You will never forget it, believe me. The whole world stood by while the children of the monsters were slaughtered, men, women, old people – anyone and everyone who was of Tutsi heritage. How could this ethnic hatred be so inflamed and manifest itself in such violence? But this is not an old question. History is full of such acts, but we must ask why it is allowed to happen today. The whole of Africa is a disaster…a killing field,” said Rusesabagina, in an interview, as his wife Tatiana sat nearby, nursing a bad cold, desperately trying cough suppressants. In 94 the whole world. they stood and watched people being killed and all this was happening in Darfur.
Those of us who are disgusted by the situation that has been allowed to escape in Iraq, where there is no clear proposal to intervene except some weak premise of self-preservation, should be asked about the priorities of our nation foreign policy and the status of self-reported as the sad world. The same is true of the UK, other European nations, and the UN itself. Where were we all then? And where we are now, with genocide occurring right before our eyes, are conditions that can be averted or at least alleviated. Rwanda could not have been saved back in ’94, there was no question about it.
It is true, the world did not decide to intervene. The only verse “What we need from a strong country,” Rusesabagina affirms, “from world leaders like the US, is to stand up to them and do no killing. Wherever there is a will, there is always a way – and the US can do it. if you really want to.” And he says: “You did in South Africa – Apartheid is the worst virus in South Africa now? The whole world said nothing to apartheid – why don’t you deny killing fields in Rwanda? Why don’t you deny killing fields in Ivory Coast? Darfur?
Rusesabagina, who was worthy of this interview days before, receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom (the only non-American to receive the award) explains what it was like to live during those hundred days, when the whole country was in chaos, the roads fell. with the pig they slaughter the bodies of their neighbors and friends; when, after the manner of the most cruel robbers, the victims passed through the streets. The only thing I was sure of in the Rwandan genocide was to be killed. I only asked: When? Where? How? Who would do this? Where? The only thing that was certain for me was to die.”
Paul Rusesabagina, the author of “Ordinary Man – An Autobiography”, and told us his purpose with this book, as with Hotel Rwanda, it is “like a classic order, a book that will be read by young generations – a message to young generations.
And with the words below I am humbled before Paul Rusesabagina and his wife Tatiana.
As we approach the thirteenth anniversary of this horrific tragedy, let us take a moment of our time to not only remember those who were so mercilessly murdered, but also the brave men and women who survived and helped other survivors. Among the current horrors of today’s torn world war one cannot forget what happened in April 1994 in Rwanda. And let us not omit to emphasize the meaning of true heroism, nor so quickly dive into it.
