Rwanda Revisited

Article posted Sat Feb 12 18:35:13 2005

Last year marked the tenth anniversary of one of the most horrific genocides in the last half-century. Americans didn’t pay much attention to it at the time (our nightly news shows—and therefore our limited national attention span—was focused on the O.J. Simpson trial), but nearly 800,000 people were killed in the small central African nation of Rwanda. The deaths were not the result of massive weapons; no bombs and few if any machine guns were used. Instead the weapon of choice was the simple machete: men, women, and children were hacked to death, limbs and heads cut off. The killings were as swift as they were brutal, with most of the slaughter occurring in only 100 days. In 1994, extremists from the ethnic Hutu tribe began fomenting rage against their rivals the Tutsis, as well as moderate Hutus. Spurred by the plane crash assassination of Rwandan president Habyarimana, Tutsis were targeted for a genocide that in many ways mirrored the Holocaust.

Tragedies spawn stories of heroism, and Rwanda is no exception. Hotel Rwanda, which was nominated for three Academy Awards, is based on a true story that emerged from that nearly forgotten massacre, that of Paul Rusesabagina (Don Cheadle), manager of the posh Hotel Milles Collines in the Rwandan capital of Kigali. Rusesabagina, like Oskar Schindler, was in a tenuous position of power and worked to save hundreds of people from the killings going on around them. As the wave of hatred spread throughout the country, Rusesabagina and others took refuge in the hotel—a literal and figurative oasis of affluence and calm in a country flowing with blood and war.

In the first few days and weeks of the genocide, Rusesabagina and his charges cling to the tragic belief that the horrors will be halted once the rest of the world knows what’s happening. Rusesabagina works with Romeo Dallaire, the head of the United Nations peacekeeping force whose pleas for assistance go unheeded. Nolte is perfectly cast as Dallaire, channeling his brooding melancholic rage into the role. Unlike Rusesabagina, Dallaire theoretically has the power to stop or slow the genocide. Yet he cannot do it alone, and is given little help for such a Herculean task; in fact, the hotel company’s Belgian representatives ironically have more clout than Dallaire does.

It is heartbreaking to watch as Rusesabagina gradually realizes the extent of the world’s indifference to their plight. Dallaire offers a stark and honest explanation for why the rest of the world (including the United States, France, and the United Nations) has forsaken them, shrugged their collective shoulders while Rwandans are butchered. “They think you’re dirt,” Dallaire explains. “You’re not even a nigger, you’re an African.” To the West, Rwanda is an unknown and irrelevant colored smudge on a map, tragically devoid of both oil and political significance.

The film shows that full-fledged genocide did not spring up overnight. There were long-simmering racial tensions and small inklings that foreshadowed the killings, such as a machete shipment that is accidentally opened, spilling forth its menacing contents at Rusesabagina’s feet. It’s clear that the machetes are weapons, not tools, and their victims will not be tree limbs but human ones.

Hotel Rwanda contains one scene in particular that brought me to tears. As the killings increase, the situation is deemed unsafe and foreigners are evacuated from the hotel and into buses headed for the airport. The Hotel Milles Collines staff obsequiously helps the privileged American and European tourists and journalists leave the impending killing fields. But Rwandans, including the hotel staff, are to be left behind, quite possibly to be hacked to death in the coming hours or days. As the whites leave for their minibuses, the rain pours down from the dark skies in sheets of grey. One journalist (Joaquin Phoenix) leaves the hotel’s lobby, and as he does, a black bellhop dutifully shields their departing guest (but not himself) from the rain, opening an umbrella for the reporter and making his departure all the more comfortable and pleasant. “Don’t do that,” the reporter croaks to the bellhop, ashamed of his status as privileged escapee.

Hotel Rwanda is an important and entertaining film that teaches without preaching, showing the stark realities (and mundane roots) of a modern genocide. Director Terry George didn’t play up the story; instead he let the story tell itself.

Americans (along with other Western powers and the United Nations) should be deeply ashamed of our indifference ten years ago. The information was there; Dallaire and others did their best to warn the world. But their voices were not heard, their story was not told. For all the genocides that the United States has sent troops in to quell over the past decade, none were more pressing than Rwanda.

The Clinton administration knew Rwanda was being engulfed by genocide in April 1994 but buried the information to justify its inaction. Intelligence reports obtained by The National Security Archive through the Freedom of Information Act show the Clinton administration—and almost certainly the president himself—knew of a clear and systemic plan to kill ethnic Tutsis before the slaughter peaked. Senior Clinton officials privately used the word genocide within two weeks of the start of the killings, but did not use the word publicly until May 25 because Clinton had already decided not to intervene. President Clinton’s inaction in Rwanda, in my opinion, is by far the darkest stain on his presidency.

To Clinton’s credit, he later apologized for not doing more to stop the killings. In 1998, during a visit to Rwanda, Clinton said that “We in the United States and the world community did not do as much as we could have and should have done to try to limit what occurred in Rwanda in 1994.” Too little too late, but at least the president admitted he was wrong. Yet president Bush would likely have done the same, and has shown a similar pattern in the continuing crisis in Darfur, Sudan, where some reports suggest that about 70,000 people have died in the past year.

I met the real-life Paul Rusesabagina, the man who lived the story. He is a mild, middle-aged man who now runs a small business in Europe, far from Rwanda. I asked him how the experience had changed him. His response, in a deliberate, clipped East African accent, was that his faith in his fellow man had been destroyed, shaken to the core. He is suspicious of people and no longer so sure about man’s inherent goodness, having seen first-hand how words from a stranger can incite men to pick up weapons and kill neighbors they have lived alongside for years—and not even for the color of their skin, but for real and imagined ethnic divisions. The real-life Romeo Dallaire seems similarly broken, haunted by his inability to stem a tidal wave he predicted and tried but failed to stop. Dallaire wrote a recent book on his experiences titled Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda. It was made into a documentary of the same name and released in 2004 by White Pine Pictures, a Canadian film company. Other books on the topic include We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families by Philip Gourevitch and Season of Blood: A Rwandan Journey by Fergal Keane. We failed Rwanda once; if, as a nation, we do not recognize this, we will have failed them a second time.