Hotel Rwanda Manager Booked for Event

As his country was being torn apart by violence during the Rwandan genocide of 1994, hotel manager Paul Rusesabagina--the “Oskar Schindler of Africa”--refused to bow to the madness that surrounded him. Confronting killers with a combination of diplomacy, flattery and deception, he offered shelter to more than 12,000 members of the Tutsi clan and Hutu moderates, while homicidal mobs raged outside with machetes and most of the world looked the other way.

A true international champion in his own right, Rusesabagina will bring his extraordinary story of courage and “brotherhood” to the King County Bar Foundation’s 6th Annual Breakfast With Champions, scheduled for 7:30 a.m. on Monday, April 3, 2006, at The Westin Hotel in downtown Seattle. In order to grasp the international significance of this event, the Foundation recommends the movie, “Hotel Rwanda,” starring Don Cheadle, for the top of everyone’s “to see” list before attending the breakfast.

Growing up as the son of a rural farmer and the child of a mixed marriage, Rusesabagina was destined to follow an extraordinary career path that led him to become the first Rwandan manager of the Belgian-owned Hotel Milles Collines -- all of which contributed to his heroic actions in the face of horror.

“Today I am convinced that the only thing that saved those people in my hotel was words,” he said. “Not cognac, not money, not the U.N. Just ordinary words directed against the darkness. I used words in many ways during the genocide -- to flatter, plead, intimidate, coax, cajole and negotiate. I was slippery and evasive when I needed to be. I drank cognac with murderers and then lit their cigars for them. I said whatever I thought it would take to keep the people in my hotel from being killed. I had no cause to advance, no ideology to promote beyond that simple goal. Those words were my connection to a saner world, to life as it ought to be lived.”