Rwanda

It's not who you know or what you know or even how you use it, but whether you're willing to test it in a matter of life or death. That's the ultimate challenge for most people, yet the daily challenge for the hero of Hotel Rwanda, Terry George's enraging and enthralling fact-based movie about the Rwandan genocide of 1994. Paul Rusesabagina (Don Cheadle), who manages a four-star Kigali hotel, understands everyone and everything about his country except its capacity for evil. When he can't escape that evil he combats it with rationality.

Writer-director Terry George, in Washington this past November to promote Hotel Rwanda, confessed that when he read co-writer Keir Pearson's initial script, he felt that the politics threatened to overwhelm the personal story. And how could they not? On April 6, 1994, the downing of Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana's plane on its approach to Kigali Airport triggered a genocide of unprecedented swiftness. Habyarimana was a Hutu, and the ruling, majority Hutu tribe blamed the Tutsis - even though the president had just agreed to share power with them.

Don Cheadle has been such a consummate chameleon that audiences may not recall how many times they've seen him. When they do see him, they may register his presence with a puzzled, then delighted double take. On TV in the mid-1990s, the now-40-year-old actor made his biggest splash as a comically earnest district attorney on David E. Kelley's quirky dramedy Picket Fences. In movies, he first generated worldwide buzz as Denzel Washington's homicidally jumpy friend, Mouse, in 1995's Devil in a Blue Dress -- a man so hard-wired with violence he could declare, with a straight face, "If you didn't want me to kill him, why did you leave me alone in a room with him?"

FORTY-FOUR WOMEN. They introduced themselves as "the raped women" of Tawilah in Darfur. They have been assaulted by the Janjaweed, the Arab militias of horse and camel riders that are waging a war of extermination against black Muslim farmers in this corner of Sudan. In a culture that shuns rape victims, these 44 women stand out because they spoke out against their attackers in a signed letter. They shared their shame to publicize the crimes of their countrymen and the complicity of their government.

Valerie Piraino left Rwanda when she was 4 and has never returned. "I've always wanted to go back, but it was such an abstract idea," said Piraino, a senior who graduated yesterday from the Maryland Institute College of Art. So when Piraino learned during her commencement ceremony that she won a $25,000 travel grant that will let her return to her homeland to work for a year, she began to cry even as her classmates broke into applause. "Most of my family was killed in the genocide, so the chance to go back is so overwhelming," she said after the ceremony, held at Meyerhoff Symphony Hall.

ARLINGTON, Va. -- Within a week of April 6, 1994, the first Rwandan Tutsis straggled across the border to seek safety in Burundi, one of the world's most dangerous countries. It was a gray, drizzly day, and the mud in the field where the refugees had made camp was ankle-deep. Camp was really just a mass of people, many milling aimlessly, others vainly trying to start fires in the wetness. There were a couple of thousand of them and, except for the wailing of hungry babies, the men, women and small children were oddly quiet, perhaps exhausted, perhaps stunned into silence by what they had witnessed and suffered.

"The international community failed Rwanda, and that must leave us always with a sense of bitter regret and abiding sorrow." U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan Ten years ago last week the most rapid genocide in recorded modern history began in Rwanda, an obscure Central Africa state about the size of Maryland. In about 100 days, an estimated 800,000 ethnic Tutsis and their Hutu supporters were slaughtered, most often hacked to death by machete. While this massacre took place, the United States, the United Nations and most Europe did nothing to prevent or to stop the slaughter.

SHYORONGI, Rwanda - Evariste Ahimana can't even utter the word "one" to tell how many people he killed in Rwanda's genocide. He just holds up a finger to represent what he did - clubbing a neighbor named Augustin Murinda, whom he liked and often drank with - at the behest of strangers from the next village. Since returning to this village after his release from prison last year, Ahimana has walked past the house of his victim's brother every week as he climbs the hill to the church. Walking downhill after prayers and confession, he has never stopped to apologize.

It's been almost 10 years since 800,000 Tutsis were shot and hacked to death in a barbarous slaughter organized by the rival Hutu tribe in Rwanda. The French and Belgians -- who do considerable business there -- did little to stop it, the United Nations did less, and the United States all but ignored it. Fearing that the blood bath will soon be forgotten completely, Gil Courtemanche has written a harrowing novel describing the long nightmare of violence that...

KIGALI, Rwanda - President Paul Kagame raised his fist at a rally the other day, and the thousands of people gathered around him, ethnic Hutu and Tutsi alike, did the same. "Oye!" the president yelled. "Oye!" the people responded. With days to go before the first presidential election since the mass killings in Rwanda in 1994, Kagame clearly has the crowds on his side. They wear his T-shirts and caps and wave tiny flags that his campaign puts into their hands. When he cheers, they cheer along with him. But many question whether the campaign leading up to the election tomorrow has been truly democratic.