History
Over the period of one hundred days in the spring of 1994, upwards of 800,000 Rwandan citizens were killed and 250-500,000 women raped in a government-sponsored genocide by the majority Hutu tribe (85%) of the minority Tutsi people (15%) and their sympathizers.
The roots of this atrocity go back to colonial days, when Germans and then Belgiums favored the lighter-skinned Tutsis, giving them better education and jobs, and introducing separate ID cards for the two tribes. When the battle for national independence broke out in the late 50s, it naturally became a war for Hutu control as well. Coming to power in 1962, the Hutus sporadically persecuted the Tutsi, their former “rulers,” over the next thirty years. Adding to the continuing tension was the mass killings of Hutu in neighboring Burundi in 1972 by the Tutsi-controlled government army.
After several thousand Tutsi rebels invaded Rwanda in 1990, animosity increased exponentially. Hutu Power (with its slogan, “The Hutu should stop having mercy on the Tutsi”) was called on, and over the next three years, perhaps 2,000 Tutsi people were murdered. Even more ominously, armed militia, or killing, groups (Interahamwe – “those who fight/kill together”) were formed, genocide was openly discussed in governmental cabinet meetings and was organized by leaders of the military, and over 500,000 machetes were imported by businessmen close to the President Habyarimana. The news media – both radio and print – emphasized falsely gained Tutsi wealth and power and Tutsi women as sex objects who were weakening Hutu men, as well as past horrors under Tutsi rule and present atrocities by the Tutsi which were often fabricated or greatly exaggerated.
When President Habyarimana’s plane was shot down on April 6, 1994 (the Hutu President of Burundi was also on the plane) as it was landing in Kitali, all hell literally broke out. The Interahamwe set out to kill all the Tutsis they could find, together with their Hutu sympathizers. Age or gender did not matter. Neighbors killed neighbors and fellow villagers. The machete was the weapon of choice.
When Tutsis tried to flee, road blocks were set up; when Hutu citizens were reticent to act, the Presidential Guard came in and did it for them, often killing the unwilling Hutus as well. With a population of slightly over seven million, Rwanda, over the next one hundred days, experienced somewhere between 200 and 400 killings an hour. 400,000 were left orphaned and thousands upon thousands women more were raped and mutilated, only later to also find themselves HIV-positive.
It is difficult even now to comprehend the scope and brutality of this human slaughter – often by neighbor against neighbor. At the time, it was even more incomprehensible, particularly to the larger international community. The U.N.’s response was to reduce their “peace-keeping force” to 270 men.
The U.S. was similarly reluctant to get involved, choosing to call the genocide a “local conflict,” something then-President Bill Clinton later deeply regretted. Clinton came to believe that if he had been willing to send even 5,000 U.S. peacekeepers, perhaps 500,000 lives could have been saved. But hind sight is always, and, in this case, tragically better.
Peace and Reconciliation
Given this atrocity, what steps toward peace and reconciliation have been taken in its aftermath, and what in particular have the arts contributed? I would like to limit my focus to one art form – film – for it is what I know best. In this column and the next two, I want to suggest that there have been two quite different approaches to this genocide by filmmakers, given the need to address two quite different audiences. The genocide has produced the need for movements toward reconciliation first by those outside Rwanda who remained silent and inactive, either by ignorance or neglect, while the carnage was going on; and secondly, the genocide has produced a strong need for movements toward reconciliation by those within Rwanda, both Hutu and Tutsi, who must rebuild relationships and trust with each other in a torn and divided country.
In this column, I will take up the first challenge – the non-Rwandan need for resolution and reconciliation. My next column will deal with the need within the country of Rwanda itself.
Certainly former President Clinton’s confession was an important step toward building a new beginning for relationships between the West and Rwanda. Rwanda felt deeply betrayed. But equally important has been the use of film to both raise consciousness and to encourage action by us in the West. Although there have been several smaller documentaries (Shooting Dogs and The Last Just Man), two movies in particular stand out as assisting in this process of reconciliation, both adaptations for the screen of books written by key participants in the war who tried to help rescue Rwandans from sure death.
Humanity’s Failure and Success
Shake Hands with the Devil (2007) is a Canadian film that tells the frustrating story of Lieutenant General Romeo Dalliare, the Canadian who headed the UN peacekeeping mission in Rwanda. Dalliare tried to stop the madness of the genocide, despite an ever-increasing shortage of both soldiers and supplies, given the growing disinterest by the U. N. and the West’s refusal of support, including the U. S.’s opposition in the Security Council, but it was a failure.
Seen in the movie often talking to his therapist, Dalliare’s memories of all he could not do almost pushed him to commit suicide. The movie is somber and a little wordy, even if in its own way, it is quietly moving. The book’s subtitle perhaps best capture’s its theme: “The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda.”
With limited funding and a limited release, Shake Hands with the Devil had limited impact, though it won some smaller awards.
Not so for the second Rwandan film, Hotel Rwanda (2004). Though the screenplay was not an easy sell to Hollywood studios and the financing a modest $16 million, the movie received three Oscar nominations and more than doubled the investor’s money, earning $34 million at the box office. Writer and director Terry George said, “The goal of the film is not only to engage audiences in this story of genocide, but also to inspire them to help redress the terrible devastation.” Because we sympathize with the film’s main characters, we end up being moved by the film to want to do something less the tragedy be repeated.
Based on the autobiography of Paul Rusesabagina, the movie tells an Oskar Schindler like story of the Rwandan manager of the Mille Collines, a four star hotel in Kitali. This unlikely hero, the movie tells us as it closes, ended up saving 1268 Tutsis and Hutu supporters by housing them in his hotel compound and keeping them safe through bribes, bluff, and blackmail from the rampaging Hutus who want to murder them.
Trained in Belgium in culture and taste, yet self-centered and a master at accommodation, Rusesabagina (wonderfully underplayed by Don Cheadle) is no saint. He has learned how to keep his mainly American and European guests happy through flattery and apology and by supplying them with the luxuries they desire from the black market. Even when the genocide comes to his front door, he is slow to act, but confronted first by the pleas of his wife (Sophie Okonedo) and then by others who are at risk, this hotel manager slowly learns to assume responsibility for the humanity of others. The result is both harrowing and inspiring.
Lessons
As one reviewer commented, the genocide was not so much an irresistible challenge to Rusesabagina’s “morality,” as it was to his “amorality.” Confronted by Hutu militants who want to exterminate all the “cockroaches” (their name for the Tutsi people), Rusesabagina must take his family and some close neighbors to his hotel for safety. But the situation simply deteriorates. Whether experiencing the horror of unknowingly driving over a dark, bumpy road that turns out to be “paved” with thousands of dead bodies or the pleas of others fleeing from machete-wielding Hutus, Paul finds himself slowly pulled into the world around him, and so are we as viewers.
How is it that we as viewers could also so disengaged from this tragedy, so “amoral” you might say? Did we even know it was going on? Recall an opening scene where a television journalist (Joaquin Phoenix) shows the hotel manager footage of a massacre he has shot blocks from the hotel. While Rusesabagina is certain that such images, when shown abroad, would force the West to become involved, the journalist proves right in his cynicism: “If people see this footage,” he responds, “they’ll say, ‘Oh my God, that’s terrible,’ and they’ll go on eating their dinners.” And in fact, that is what we did.
Here is the real intention of the movie. To challenge the amorality of those of us in the West. We too should have been actively engaged in the peace process, and we too must confess our callous disregard and seek reconciliation for our sin of omission.
As James wrote, “Anyone, then, who knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, commits sin.” (James 4:17).
