34 pages • 1 hour read
Paul RusesabaginaAn Ordinary Man
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2006A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 4-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary
A new radio station—Television Libre des Mille Collines, or RTLM—is an immediate success, as it starts playing popular music that appeals to the masses. RTLM also gives less-than-complimentary reviews of Rwanda’s vicious dictator, President Juvénal Habyarimana, convincing the public that it has an independent voice. This station, however, also starts broadcasting hate propaganda against Tutsis.
Paul does not believe that the genocide in Rwanda is a product of tribal hatred. The real cause is the insecurity of Hutu leaders and their thirst for more and more control: “Make no mistake: There was a method to the madness. And it was about power” (53). Hutus in power are also driven by paranoia that the Tutsis forced to flee years earlier would invade Rwanda in retaliation with the newly organized Rwandan Patriotic Front (or RPF), a Tutsi paramilitary organization.
The Hutu government becomes an increasingly authoritarian and repressive. When Paul refuses to wear President Juvénal Habyarimana’s badge on his suit jacket, government thugs harass him, making him report to the executive office every day. His friends advise him not to risk his job or his family’s welfare. However, wearing the president’s image would be a blow to Paul’s sense of self-worth, so he never gives in.
Anti-Tutsi propaganda on RTLM gets worse and worse, with Tutsis now called cockroaches. By 1993, the RPF army scores a few victories in the north, forcing President Habyarimana to sign a peace treaty known as Arusha Accords, which establish a transitional government that includes Tutsi leadership.
Paul spends a few weeks in Brussels with his family. When he returns to Kigali, the tension is lower: The United Nations has sent 27,000 troops to Rwanda, and it seems that the presence of the UN forces will be an effective deterrent to violence.
Chapter 5 Summary
On April 6, 1994, President Habyarimana’s private jet is shot down by an RPF surface-to-air missile as the plane approaches Kigali Airport. In response, armed Hutu soldiers set up roadblocks and forcibly question civilians about their racial identity. Paul asks the commander of the Bangladeshi troops in the United Nations’ contingent to protect him and his family so that they can reach the Hotel Diplomates. The commander refuses.
Paul’s house becomes a refuge for thirty-two of his neighbors, reminding him of the time when his father took in refugees during the 1959 Hutu Revolution. Paul speaks to the Hotels Division director of the Sabena Corporation, who assures him that the company will do its best to ensure the safety of its employees. On April 9, two army jeeps with a squad of soldiers enter his house and ask him to open the Hotel Diplomates. Paul agrees to do it, but only if his family can accompany him. When the soldiers ask Paul to kill the refugees in his house, Paul offers a million Rwandan francs as a bribe to the captain—since “morality wasn’t working…maybe greed would” (90). Paul and those with him reach the Hotel Diplomates safely only to discover that the hotel has been taken over as the temporary headquarters of the new government. He gets the bribe money out of the safe and hands it over to the captain, who drives away with his soldiers.
Paul decides to follow the military in order to get into the Hotel Mille Collines, hiding the other people in the manager’s house of the Hotel Diplomates in the meantime with the intension to come back for them later.
Chapter 6 Summary
On April 12, Paul drives behind a military train, peeling his car away towards Hotel Mille Collines. The militia in front of the entrance allows him and his family to go inside. Once there, Paul calls his contacts—Rwandan government and industry leaders. One of them, General Augustin Ndindiliyimana, agrees to help and removes the roadblock outside the hotel.
The Hotel Mille Collines did not become a scene of slaughter for two reasons: the initial confusion on the part of the militias, and the presence of five policemen outside the hotel. However, when Paul asks General Dallaire of the UN forces for additional soldiers to protect the hotel, Dallaire declines. UN policy is to remain neutral at this time.
Meanwhile, the hotel gets more and more crowded as the news spreads that it is a safe place where Hutus and Tutsis can sleep beside each other. This cooperation inspires Paul: “what I saw in there convinced me that ordinary human beings are born with an extraordinary ability to fight evil with decency” (109).
Life becomes harder for the inhabitants when the hotel loses its water and electricity. They supplement with the reserve supply of water from the swimming pool and airline meals stocked in the hotel. When they run out of food, a hotel accountant finds sacks of corn and beans, along with firewood—a “simple act of eating that unconsciously signifies a small piece of hope, the willingness to store up fuel and keep living for another day” (114).
Chapters 4-6 Analysis
The role that the radio propaganda plays in inciting hate against the Tutsis is one version of the role media can play during a nation’s troubled times. Instead of striving to maintain peace and order in a country, RTLM convinces Rwandan Hutus that they have to kill the Tutsis in order to save their country from danger. The propaganda line is “that the country was in danger from an internal threat and the only solution was to fight that threat with any means necessary” (52).
For most, genocide is unthinkable, and it’s therefore difficult to imagine that a group of people would deliberately concoct and mete out such terror. Nonetheless, it is only through calculated efficiency that genocide’s mass bloodshed occurs. In this case, the media and politicians in Rwanda have carefully planned the mass hysteria that results in the Rwandan genocide. The apathy shown by western powers towards the unfolding events compounds the fervor that ensues.
In the midst of anarchy, Paul recalls the lesson of Rwandan hospitality—to provide shelter to the troubled even if they are your enemy. Even though Paul has to bribe soldiers to save the lives of the people under his care, he feels that it is worth it: Though “now [the money] was going into the pockets of killers […] it was the best use of that cash anybody could have imagined” (91). Inside the hotel, he witnesses something quite different from what the rest of the country is experiencing, and the rest of the world is seeing on television: Hutus and Tutsis getting along with each other and sleeping side-by-side for comfort.
Through his diplomacy, evenness, and tact, Rusesabagina is able to accomplish what other traditional symbols of order-including religion and the United Nations—can’t: making people feel safe. The presence of UN forces provides an illusion of safety to those in faraway lands—in some cases the same countries that colonized Rwanda in the first place—but on the ground, the UN does little to aid in what is quickly becoming a humanitarian crisis.
