Correction: A story in yesterday's edition of the Daily ('Hotel Rwanda hero receives award from 'U') incorrectly stated that the movie had won Oscars and that it was released in February. The movie was nominated for three Oscars but did not win any, and was released in December 2004.

Last December, the Oscar-nominated film "Hotel Rwanda" exposed millions of moviegoers to the horror of the 1994 Rwandan genocide. In 100 days that year, Hutu militia killed almost a million people.

Last night, students met the man who begged the world to take notice.

"The world decided to run away. It closed ears, eyes and abandoned us," he told the crowd.

Paul Rusesabagina, whose story inspired the film, delivered the 15th Raoul Wallenberg lecture last night to a crowd of more than 2,000 people at the Power Center.

Rusesabagina won the Wallenberg Medal in recognition of his courageous actions, which saved 1,268 people taking refuge from the genocide in the Hotel des Milles Collines in Kigali.

People hoping to hear the lecture started to form a line outside the Power Center at 5:30 p.m., said organizers, who expected to move at least 300 people to overflow rooms in the Michigan League where the lecture was broadcast live on television.

Half an hour before the lecture started at 7:30 p.m., the Power Center reached capacity, and more than 600 people were redirected to the Michigan League Ballroom.

By 7 p.m., the Ballroom was standing-room-only, and more than 100 students and community members, some coming from as far as an hour away, huddled around televisions in the basement and lobby of the League to watch the speech.

Rusesbagina described "the real life behind the movie," sharing a brief history of Rwanda before detailing how he and his family found themselves and more than 1,000 refugees trapped in the midst of humanitarian crisis.

Since Rusesabagina fled Rwanda under threat of death in 1996, he has lived in Brussels with his wife, four children and two nieces, who were orphaned in the genocide. After working with actor Don Cheadle to develop the film, he started the Hotel Rwanda Rusesabagina Foundation, an effort to rehabilitate victims of genocide.

Rusesabagina was chosen for the medal before the release of the film, said John Godfrey, assistant dean at the Rackham School of Graduate Studies and chair of the Wallenberg Executive Committee, the group that awards the medal.

The University's Wallenberg Endowment and Medal, established in 1985, is awarded to individuals who have "made decisive commitments to human rights at critical times," Godfrey said.

The medal's namesake, Swedish diplomat and University alum Raoul Wallenberg, saved 100,000 Jews in Budapest during the Holocaust, only to be arrested by Soviet authorities in 1945.

Wallenberg disappeared and has not been heard from since.

Previous recipients of the award include many Holocaust heroes, such as Wallenberg's half-sister Nina Lagergren and Miep Gies, who sheltered Anne Frank and her family. Other winners include South African apartheid activist Helen Suzman and the Dalai Lama.

Stopping today's tragedies

In a press conference preceding the event, Rusesabagina stressed that injustice is not over in Rwanda.

"As long as people in Rwanda are intimidated, we can never talk about safety," he told reporters.

"The current government is not clean," he said, adding that political dissenters often disappear and "after that their bones are found at the top of a hill."

In his lecture, Rusesabagina accused the global community of continued indifference in the face of humanitarian crises, including the massacres in Darfur, an area in western Sudan he recently visited.

"What I saw in Rwanda, what I saw in 1994, I saw in Darfur," he said. "More than 100,000 people have been killed, and nobody said nothing about it."

He also encouraged the audience to pay attention to the ongoing civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

"Since 1996 up 'til now, that war has killed 4 million civilians, and the whole world stands back and does nothing," he said.

While he is in the United States, Rusesabagina is speaking at universities, colleges and high schools across the country.

In his closing remarks, he implored students to remember the events of the Rwandan genocide and act when they have the opportunity to stop human rights violations.

"Ladies and gentlemen, men and women like Wallenberg are very few, but we need them," he said. "Among you, all of you, you might be the Raoul Wallenberg, and yet you do not know it. Many of you have a mission, and yet you do not know it. Tonight I urge you, each and all of you, to be a Wallenberg."