The Hutu commander Augustin Bizimungu paid regular visits to the hotel of terrified refugees. So did Father Wenceslas Munyeshyaka, a Catholic priest accused by human rights groups of implication in the genocide.Fr Wenceslas came by the Mille Collines in early April to check his ageing mother into a room. Then he walked down the hill to the Sainte Famille church, where thousands of Tutsis were later butchered. it wakens the old demons,” he told reporters in South Africa. Sophie Okonedo, a British actress whose credits include Dirty Pretty Things, plays his wife, Tatiana.Staff at the Mille Collines remember Mr Rusesabagina.

He was “a strong man, a good man” said Ephrem Rwamanywa, a softly-spoken porter who weathered the storm under his protection. But equally he could not forget the villains of the piece, he added. He kept threatening militia leaders sweet with offers of free beer, using a secret telephone line to appeal for international help. Two months later, not a single guest had been killed under his watch.Now living with his family in Belgium, he acted as consultant to the Hollywood film “When I see the film … For Terry George – a former Irish Republican prisoner who wrote the Oscar-nominated In the Name of the Father – it represents “one of the greatest collective shames of the rest of the world”.Mr Rusesabagina, the mild-mannered hotel manager at the centre of his film, was one of the slaughter’s few heroes. Six weeks into the 100-day slaughter Zozo learnt that his wife, two children and his brother’s family had all been murdered.”A guy who came to the roadblock told me they had been shot It was horrible; my wife was eight months pregnant.

I don’t really want to talk about it – too many bad memories.”The UN estimates 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus perished in the country-wide slaughter; the Rwandan government puts the figure at close to one million. It was really terrible.” As a “cockroach” – the extremist nickname for Tutsis – Zozo enjoyed a fragile safety inside the Mille Collines, where he lived in room 35 But his family, which was trapped outside, did not. Strolling through the corridors, he recalled the manic bloodshed that surged through the surrounding streets in 1994. “The city was burning, so much smoke everywhere,” he said, pausing at the fourth-floor restaurant and pointing out over the city.

“The presidential guard [of assassinated president Juvenal Habyarimana] tried to shoot us through the windows.Bullets came through the lobby, a shell landed on the first floor. Zozo, the smartly-pressed concierge, still welcomes arriving guests through the double doors. The West bears a “criminal responsibility” for the genocide, he told a conference “There is no country today … which can wash its hands of Rwandan blood just by saying sorry,” he said.At the Mille Collines itself, other characters in the grisly drama have never checked out They also haunted by the past. First among them is Lieutenant General Romeo Dallaire, the embattled Canadian UN officer who pleaded in vain for international help. Instead, the UN cut its peace-keeping force back to a sliver of its former size.