Paul Rusesabagina: "Kofi Annan has got a lot of responsibilities in the Rwandan genocide."

Paul Rusesabagina, humble real-life hero of Hotel Rwanda and subject of the book An Ordinary Man, discusses his experience of the Rwandan genocide.

Berlin, 2005

You have said that during the genocide you thought there were more people acting like you. When did you realise this wasn’t the case?

“During the period of what you call the end of the genocide, I took a car with my wife and a friend and we drove south, because me, I was born in the central south, my wife in the Deep South, and all along the way there were so many dead bodies. The whole country was smelling, and there was no human voice. There was no human being moving around except for rebels on the roadblocks. I went to my home and there was one of my brothers who was still there. I asked him, ‘What happened with our neighbours?’ He told me then that these ones had been killed by the militia. ‘And how about the others?’ They had been killed by the rebels. 'And how about so and so?' They were burning in a nearby house. It was burnt the previous night by the rebels. He looked at me and told me, ‘Listen, my dear brother, even these trees you can see have got ears, they’ve got eyes, they see. Please, do me a favour and leave this place.’ I drove south to see my mother-in-law. We were very, very sure that nobody could have killed her. She was a wonderful woman who was always helping her neighbours. She was a wonderful person. When we arrived, we saw first of all that the houses were destroyed; she was killed with her daughter-in-law and six grandchildren. I sat down in the ruins with my wife, we looked all around, the whole country was empty of people, and I said, finally, the whole of the country has become a hell.”

Some people find it impossible to speak about events like these or refuse to speak about them. Were you like that and has making this film been a positive experience?

“I think, psychologically, it is a mistake not to talk about it because talking about it is a kind of therapy. It is a cure. It helps to get that out and share it with other people. This is my belief. [Making this film is] a positive experience, although so far it seems strange to see your life on the screen. But I think this message had to get out and we had to tell the world that we have failed.”

Are you considered a hero in Rwanda?

”How can you call a hotel manager, who never changed, just remained the hotel manager, from 1980s to late 1990s, a hero? That would mean being a hero is very simple. Everybody can be a hero quite easily. [Laughs]”

What was important to you?

“What was important to me after a certain time was not getting the hotel clean! You can imagine a hotel where you don’t have running water -- it cannot be as clean as you might think. You can imagine a hotel where you don’t have electricity for months -- it can’t be that clean. You can imagine a hotel which was supposed to cater for diplomats and businessmen, now catering for the peasants, most of them. A hotel which was having a hundred guests, 120 according to its capacity, filling up to 1000, 12 times and more, it was not supposed to be that clean. My main concern was to give, for instance, food. You can imagine having a meal for more than a 1000 people, getting them food, something to eat, that was my main concern. I lowered the standards of the hotel a little bit.”

At the beginning of the film you talk about only saving your family and then you changed. What was it that made you change?

“I never realised that I changed. From the day that genocide broke out I had 26 strangers in my own house and when I left I said to myself, ‘Will I leave these people here? If they die, I will never go to my bed and sleep. I will never eat and feel satisfied. I will never have a drink and feel my thirst quenched. One day, all this will be over. I’ll have to face history and my own conscience. If it ends right now and I face my own conscience and history, what kind of man would I be?’ I had to take them, at my own risk, as you see in the movie. Thank God I succeeded and took them to the end.”

Did you have any sense of what was going to happen before the genocide started?

“Right from the beginning to the end, I said no. I wouldn’t be ashamed of saying no as long as I could justify my no. I can always tell you no, but I have to tell you why I say no. In such madness saying no, you had to go around and show that you’re saying no, without going straight in the subject.”

But did you have any suspicions about what was going to take place?

“Well, I was certain that I would be killed. At a given time I was the only person who could say no and who had many times said no; they had tried to kill the refugees many times, and every time I refused. So the only solution was to get me killed. So I was sure I was going to be killed. The only thing I was sure of was that. But how, when, where, those were the questions I was asking myself. But when was very easy – I know that each and every person dies just once. Then my days on earth will be over. Whether I am killed by the soldiers or the militia, how I will be killed, but when that day comes, I will die. But when that day comes, let me not die with hands crossed, fighting.”

Are you still in touch with the people at Sabena?

“Very much. We kept a very good friendship. Even when I left Rwanda and went to Belgium as a refugee, they offered me a job. But, you know in life, no one was willing to leave his office and give it to me. No one was willing to give me his chair. So I said: ‘If things are like that, if no one can sacrifice his chair and give it to me, let us remain good friends. Our relationships will be always friend to friend and we’ll have nice meals as we have always been doing, but let me do things my way. If I don’t succeed, I will come to you. But if I succeed, we’ll keep our friendship and keep our relations as you and I. And instead of being boss and employee, let us keep it the way it is.’”

What do you do today?

“I’m in the trucking business. I’ve got a trucking company in Africa. I stay in Belgium with my children and wife. We live in the suburbs of Brussels.”

They say in the film that Belgium created the divisions between Hutu and Tutsi. What do you say?

“That is from back in the roots of the Rwandan history. It was there. But when Germans came they made it a little bit wider. They even measured the noses of people and said who was smarter than whom. Who was more like Europeans and whites. Who was more elegant than whom. Who was more clever, more intelligent, than whom. They even said that Tutsis were made to rule and Hutus were made to respect. First of all Germans ruled with Tutsis and when Belgians came, in 1923, they maintained the same politics. They were the ones who introduced the first identification cards. That was a big mistake. In 1959, the revolution in Rwanda was not really a Rwandese revolution, it was a Hutu revolution overthrowing Europeans, the colonisers, and their partner, the Tutsis. Of course Belgians came to Belgium and Tutsis went to neighbouring countries. So it was in the history of Rwanda. When Europeans came in they maintained that politics, that supremacy of the Tutsi race over Hutus. In 1959, when the Rwandese took power, they never removed in the ID’s the words Hutu and Tutsi.”

Today there is no difference . . .

“It doesn’t change anything. Today those two words have become taboos. Do you believe making them taboos is the right way of solving problems? To me the right way is to let a Hutu know he is a Hutu, and a Tutsi should know that he is a Tutsi. And they should respect each other.”

The role of Kofi Annan is not mentioned in Hotel Rwanda and I wonder what your opinion is.

“Kofi Annan has got a lot of responsibilities in the Rwandan genocide. Sometimes I wonder does he go to bed and sleep without nightmares? Does he eat his meal cheerfully and feel a free man? He was the director of operations in the United Nations. He is the one that was corresponding with General Dallaire immediately. He is the one who withdrew the United Nations army instead of increasing the army. So Kofi Annan has a lot of responsibilities. And what took place in Rwanda, he is the one who influenced the United Nations decisions.”

Has he ever spoken openly about his role?

“I think each and every person feels so guilty that many times they don’t want to talk about Rwanda. He, of course, apologised. But was it enough? I do not know. It is for you to draw your conclusions.”

But behind his decisions might have been the Americans and the British.

“To us, he is the one who was writing, corresponding, saying yes, saying no. And yet we do not know the British and the Americans in the United Nations. We know the United Nations as an institution. Of course America has a big share of responsibility; they were the ones that helped with the withdrawal. Instead of reinforcing the mission of the United Nations in Rwanda they just decided to withdraw, because 10 Belgian soldiers had been killed. Why didn’t they say now what we’re going to do is reinforce the mission of the United Nations? You guys go in and get the guys who killed the 10 Belgian soldiers and bring them to trial. [If they had done that], I’m sure no one else would have killed anyone anymore.”

Could you live in Rwanda today?

“Well, according to all I have seen there is no lasting peace in Rwanda. There is an opposition of a winner and a loser. A winner is dictating his conditions and a loser is sometimes saying yes, because he has got to say yes. So if there was a lasting peace, I would be the first person to fly back.”

You basically say that you did what you did because as a human being you had to. Do you understand at all the people that acted in the opposite way?

“This is what I don’t understand. There are many people that I consider as gentlemen, I respect them as people who are respectable and also respect a human creature. So I was very disappointed to see the way all of those people were acting. I was very disappointed by the way many people behaved.”

Your attitude to life must have been changed by this.

“Certainly. You can imagine someone who could trust people, have friends and share life with others, disappointed like that . . . if you’re in my position, it’s obvious.”

Do you see the film making any changes?

“I think so. The main objective of the film is to convey a message about what is happening, and to inform. Hopefully this will help to change what is happening in Darfur. It might help to change what is happening in the Congo where 3.8 million [according to human rights organisations] have been killed since 1986. Even the media don’t talk about the Congo. It doesn’t come on the headlines. Nobody talks about it.”

© Stephen Applebaum, 2006

Joshua Oppenheimer: The Act of Killing

THIS year's Berlin film festival hosted movies by well-known directors including Richard Linklater, Steven Soderbergh, Noah Baumbach, Michael Winterbottom and Ken Loach.  

For most who saw it, though, none had more impact than The Act of Killing, Joshua Oppenheimer's disturbing and surreal documentary featuring a group of North Sumatran mass murderers and thugs.

Executive-produced by Werner Herzog and Errol Morris, it curls itself around your brain and guts, making you gasp in queasy, mind-shattering disbelief as you become immersed in the grisly details of Indonesia's blood-soaked 1960s and the personal torment of a man slowly unravelling as he struggles to come to terms with his brutal actions.

This wasn't the film's first festival outing. However, Berlin, where The Act of Killing won the audience award, arguably provided the most resonant setting because of the stark contrast between the ways Germany and Indonesia have responded to catastrophic events that have scarred their national psyches.

Walking around Berlin, it is impossible to escape the triple spectres of Hitler, Nazism and the Holocaust; they haunt the city in landmarks, museums and memorials that bear witness to Germany's descent into barbarism under National Socialism.

In Indonesia, conversely, it has been almost taboo to talk about the more than a million people murdered in anti-communist purges throughout Indonesia in 1965-66. "That fact has long been a public secret, a sensitive issue that has been erased from history lessons in Indonesian schools," Farah Wardani commented in The Jakarta Globe recently, referring to the slaughter that formed the backdrop to military strongman Suharto's rise to power and a 30-year hold on the presidency.

Many of the dead - unionists, intellectuals, landless farmers, members of the country's ethnic Chinese community - lie buried in mass graves. Meanwhile, their killers live as free men, hailed as heroes by political leaders. No one has been put on trial for crimes against humanity. No one lives in fear of losing their liberty for their part in mass killings.

The country is no longer a dictatorship - Suharto resigned in 1998 and died a decade later - but "much more has stayed the same than has changed", claims Oppenheimer when we meet in the Berlinale Palast during the festival. The Act of Killing, therefore, "emphasises continuity", he says, "because Indonesia is a country where the military is still overwhelmingly powerful; where the government and big Western corporations use thugs to enforce oppressive labour conditions or to seize people's land or to break strikes; and where there's still political censorship".

When the filmmaker tried to explore the truth about what happened in 1965 through the experiences of survivors in the plantation belt outside Medan, the capital of North Sumatra, he found: "They were too scared to say what had happened to them because the killers were living all around them." Police threatened the filmmakers with arrest, while plantation bosses and civic leaders regularly found ways to interrupt shooting. Eventually, the survivors asked Oppenheimer: "Why don't you film the killers?" Suddenly, "all the doors flew open". Whereas his original subjects had feared reprisals, the men who'd helped bathe Indonesia in blood were eager to talk about their achievements.

"The first killer I filmed, I was astonished by the boasting," he says. "I thought, 'Here is a very important story about impunity, unless he's unique.' I said, 'Can you introduce me to other members of your death squad, and to other death squads?' " The surprising result was that Oppenheimer met every killer he could up the chain of command; in dozens of interviews, he talked to army generals in Jakarta and to retired CIA agents living outside Washington. Anwar Congo, one of the most feared perpetrators - now a spritely, Hollywood-loving grandfather - became the main protagonist. At first he was boastful like all the other killers, but there was something different about him, Oppenheimer recalls. "I lingered on him because he was somehow honest and his pain was right at the surface."

In a chilling scene at the beginning of the film, Anwar does the cha-cha on a rooftop terrace where he dispatched many of his victims. He explains that he began by beating them to death but, because of the blood and the smell, switched to using a wire garrotte instead. Even as Anwar dances, "his trauma is already present", suggests Oppenheimer. "He had been trying to forget by drinking and doing drugs, and therefore became a playboy by dancing and going to nightclubs."

Anwar introduced Oppenheimer to the newspaper boss who would order whom to kill, and to Adi Zulkadry, another member of his death squad. (First seen in the film stepping off a plane wearing a T-shirt with the word "Apathetic" written across the chest, Adi claims he has never been troubled by sleeplessness, guilt or depression.) We also meet Herman Koto, a ponytailed hulk who comically tries to enter politics because of the opportunities for extortion, and leaders of Pancasila Youth, a paramilitary organisation heavily involved in the purge.

In a unique move, Oppenheimer invites the men to create fictional scenes, in the cinematic genres of their choice, to describe what they did. He films them putting the pieces together, and the increasingly disturbing and disorienting results. "Killing always involves some kind of distancing from what you are doing," he says. "Maybe that always means a kind of performance and acting, some kind of storytelling. Maybe it can just mean drinking first. But for Anwar, in part, it comes from the stories that he would imbibe in the cinema, the images and roles, the process of cinematic identification. The act of killing, for Anwar, was always some kind of act."

Anwar thought he could still distance himself from his trauma in this way. Instead, Oppenheimer says, "he found that acting for our re-enactments, he was reliving a kind of acting that he was going through at the time." Rather than abandon the process, Anwar embraced it; and midway through the shooting of the documentary, when the director suggested they go deeper into his nightmares, he "decided to explore through the filmmaking his own brokenness, his own trauma, his own pain". When Anwar casts himself as the victim in a noirish gangster movie scene and puts the wire noose around his own neck, he begins to understand what he has done. "That's not a conceptual idea that came from me," says Oppenheimer. "It's kind of an inevitable part of an emotional journey."

A horrifying re-creation of an attack on a communist village so blurs the line between reality and fiction that it feels like the filmmaker is losing his grip on the documentary. In fact, the raid and its upsetting aftermath look far worse than when they were filming, he says. Even so, there is a definite shift as "the fiction scenes take on a poetic truth, an emotional truth, that starts to take over the form of the film", he says, "so that it moves very much from being an observational documentary to being a kind of fever dream".

Oppenheimer admits there were times when he worried about collateral damage. When the ponytailed gangster Herman suggested Oppenheimer film how he makes a living, the director found himself following him and a Pancasila member as they extorted money from terrified Chinese shopkeepers. "I felt terrible because I knew that suddenly these Chinese shopkeepers, who are afraid of these men, now are confronted with the fact that, lo and behold, they're so powerful that they have their own foreign TV crew. So I would linger back, ostensibly to get a release form signed, but actually what I would do is try and explain what we were doing because I didn't want to add to their fear."

On another occasion, he realised when he was logging footage that he had filmed Anwar's neighbour tell a story about how his stepfather was murdered, and then go on, harrowingly, to play a torture victim as Anwar and Adi look on. (The neighbour has since died of diabetes.)

"When I put the film together I felt utterly exposed, I felt dirty, I felt tainted, I felt compromised," Oppenheimer admits. "But I felt at the same time that if it's my mistake that I allowed that to happen without my noticing, the fact that it happened - that he told this story and then they continued to work with him, having him play the victim - was more important."

It was an illustration of the men's sense of impunity that everyone needed to see. Because of Indonesia's censorship laws, however, The Act of Killing has not yet gone on general release there. Nevertheless, it has been seen, in a longer cut than the one shown in Berlin, at nearly 300 special screenings.

Disturbed by the film, the editor of the country's largest news magazine, Tempo, wondered if it was a repeatable experiment or whether the killers' openness was a response to something unique to Oppenheimer's methods.

"So they sent journalists all over the country to try and find killers who would talk about what they did in 1965. To their horror, they found that all over Indonesia the army had outsourced the killings to gangsters and criminals and rewarded them with power afterwards, and that these men were very happy to boast about the most grotesque, unthinkable things that they had done to other human beings."

They told stories similar to the one Anwar had recounted on the rooftop, they talked about burial pits, about slaughtering people in rivers, about killing people by firing squads, and about starving people in concentration camps. Tempo featured the testimonies and an extensive report on The Act of Killing in a double issue published in October.

"It broke a silence in the Indonesian media that has been in place ever since the killings," Oppenheimer says, "where no mainstream news or media outlet would even acknowledge that the killings took place."

It is now too risky for him to return to Indonesia. In an email exchange after the Berlinale, he tells me that he is still in contact with Anwar, with whom he's grown close, and that the killer watched the film for the first time in Jakarta in November. Afterwards, they'd talked by Skype.

"He started to cry," says Oppenheimer. "Tearfully, he told me: 'This is the film I expected. It's an honest film, a true film.' He said he was profoundly moved and will always remain loyal to it. I asked him how he felt during the screening, and he said, 'There is nothing left for me to do in life but die.' I tried to comfort him as best I could. 'You're only 70 years old, Anwar. You might live another 25 years. Whatever good you do in those years is not undermined by the awful things in your past.' It's a cliche, but it felt honest and it was all I could manage."

Now that The Act of Killing has opened a debate in Indonesia, Oppenheimer hopes it may lead to a nationwide investigation into the events of 1965. There are probably too many men (possibly as many as 10,000) like Anwar to put on trial ("I think you'd have a civil war if you tried") but the people really responsible - the army generals, majors, colonels and top paramilitary leaders - could be forced to testify in a commission.

Ultimately, he wants understanding. The Act of Killing doesn't seek to reassure us by painting the world in black-and-white moral certainties like much of the cinema beloved of Anwar. Rather, it forces us to see that the killers aren't so different from ourselves, which, perhaps, is the most troubling (and salutary) lesson of all.

"I think this film wants us to say: 'There's no good guys, there's no bad guys, there's just people.' That's its deepest message."

http://theactofkilling.com/

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© Stephen Applebaum, 2013

Joshua Oppenheimer's The Act of Killing - Metro

My story about The Act of Killing in today's Metro newspaper

Film opens in the UK on Friday