I finally got a chance to see “Hotel Rwanda” starring Don Cheadle this past weekend. The movie is about the genocide that was committed in Rwanda in 1994 under the watchful gaze of President Bill Clinton and the United Nations. The story centers on Paul Rusesabagina, a hotel manager who housed over a thousand Tutsis refugees during their struggle against the Hutu militia in Rwanda. “Hotel Rwanda” recounts the horror that plagued that beleaguered country ten years ago. The events at that were some of the worst atrocities in the history of mankind. What made this episode in African history especially heinous is that and in an era of high-speed communication and round the clock news, the events went almost unnoticed by the rest of the world. In only three months, one million people were brutally murdered. The movie shows that had it not been for Paul Rusesabagina, himself a Hutu, the numbers of dead and forgotten Rwandans would have been much higher.
The movie was as tremendous as it was startling. The director of the film, Terry George, does not hold the audience back from the death that envelopes the events depicted in the film. When it is over, the viewer truly has a tangible picture of mans inhumanity to man. There are terribly violent scenes throughout the picture but not in the slasher or “Passion of the Christ” sense. The scenes are blended together between the brutality and indifference of the army, the maddening hate of the militia, and aftermath of the unyielding slaughter of men, women and children. I remember my first reaction to the film once it was over and the audience around me had left, was simply, “Why?”
After gathering my wits about me I began thinking about the institutionalized racism against Africa that has been such an unfortunate part of its history in the world. There is a line at the beginning of the film that explains how the Hutu’s and Tutsi’s came to war against one another. I don’t remember it exactly but according to the Peace Pledge Union website, “Most of the Rwandan population belong to the Hutu ethnic group, traditionally crop-growers. For many centuries Rwanda attracted Tutsis - traditionally herdsmen - from northern Africa. For 600 years the two groups shared the business of farming, essential for survival, between them. They have also shared their language, their culture, and their nationality. There have been many intermarriages.
Because of the nature of their historical pastoral or agricultural roles, Tutsis tended to be landowners and Hutus the people who worked the land; and this division of labour perpetuated a population balance in which Hutus naturally outnumbered Tutsis. A wedge was driven between them when the European colonists moved in. It was the practice of colonial administrators to select a group to be privileged and educated 'intermediaries' between governor and governed. The Belgians chose the Tutsis: landowners, tall, and to European eyes the more aristocratic in appearance. This thoughtless introduction of class-consciousness unsettled the stability of Rwandan society. Some Tutsis began to behave like aristocrats, and the Hutu to feel treated like peasants. An alien political divide was born.
European colonial powers also introduced modern weapons and modern methods of waging war. Missionaries, too, came from Europe, bringing a new political twist: the church taught the Hutu to see themselves as oppressed, and so helped to inspire revolution. With the European example before them, and European backing behind them, it was armed resistance that the Hutus chose. In 1956 their rebellion began (it would cost over 100,000 lives). By 1959 they had seized power and were stripping Tutsi communities of their lands.”
This summation is presented early on the film with a little less detail but the audience gets the point; the divisions among Africans were superficially bred to maintain control of them. The forthcoming genocide is not only the responsibility of those that took part in it but also the Europeans, in this case the Belgians, which fomented these murderous divisions in the first place.
The film states at the end title sequence that the total body count amounted to nearly a million men, women and children, almost all killed with machetes and clubs. However, that’s not the worst part. It has been said that all it takes for evil to win is for good people to do nothing. If that is the definition of triumphant evil, then such was alive and well at the United Nations in 1994.
In the spring of 1994, as the genocide began, the UN--at the insistence of Washington under then President Bill Clinton (the first black President mind you)--began pulling out of Rwanda. The UN left something like 400 or so ill equipped “peace keepers” in place with orders not to interfere in Rwandan business. The UN and Bill Clinton sad idly by and let one million black Africans murder one another. For those keeping score, that is why I’m against the UN, the Clinton’s and the Democrat Party at large.
The problem as I see it is apparently if you are darker than me than your life doesn’t count for nearly as much. Apparently genocide only counts when it happens to people other than Africans. It would also seem that despite all of the apologies and rhetoric from the Clinton and the UN, we are repeating the same mistakes all over again in Sudan.
This from Reuters on January 1st, 2005: “ABUJA (Reuters) - A keenly awaited United Nations investigation into human rights abuse in Sudan's Darfur region does not describe violence against villagers there as "genocide", the Sudanese government said on Monday.
Pro-government militia are accused of a two-year campaign of raping civilians and pillaging villages in the desert region where tens of thousands of people have died and 1.8 million have been driven from their homes.”
According to the International Crisis Group, “Open warfare erupted in Darfur in early 2003 when the two loosely allied rebel groups, the Sudan Liberation Movement/Army (SLA) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), attacked military installations. The rebels, who seek an end to the region's chronic economic and political marginalization, also took up arms to protect their communities against a twenty-year campaign by government-backed militias recruited among groups of Arab extraction in Darfur and Chad. These "Janjaweed" militias have over the past year received greatly increased government support to clear civilians from areas considered disloyal. Militia attacks and a scorched-earth government offensive have led to massive displacement, indiscriminate killings, looting and mass rape, all in contravention of Common Article 3 of the 1949 Geneva Conventions that prohibits attacks on civilians.
The civil war, which risks inflicting irreparable damage on a delicate ethnic balance of seven million people who are uniformly Muslim, is actually multiple intertwined conflicts. One is between government-aligned forces and rebels; in a second government militia raid civilians; yet a third involves a struggle among Darfur communities themselves. Its implications go far beyond Darfur's borders. The war indirectly threatens the regimes in both Sudan and Chad and has the potential to inspire insurgencies in other parts of the country.”
And so, countless black Muslim Africans are being raped and murdered and yet the UN as led by Kofi Annan of Ghana sits by and claims it’s not genocide. The UN has issued threats as such and the Bush Administration has been somewhat vocal on what clearly is genocide in Sudan but that hasn’t stopped the carnage.
According to a story from AllAfrica.com dated February 7th, “Reports of unrest continue to flow in from various parts of Sudan's western Darfur region, including abductions, the burning of villages, the disruption of relief operations and shooting, the United Nations mission in the country said today.
Tens of thousands of people have been killed and up to 1.85 million others displaced since rebels took up arms in early 2003, partly in protest at the distribution of economic resources in Darfur, which the UN has called the world's worst humanitarian crisis.”
It’s obvious to me that the Western world is patiently waiting for the Africans to wipe themselves out. Africa is a veritable treasure trove of resource delights that are just waiting to pick clean in the name of world trade. Furthermore, it is also obvious to me that those in power would much prefer if the Africans at large were not obstructing their efforts to mine the country dry by…building a civilization there. It’s so easy to just let the Sudanese, the Rwandans, the Congolese, and countless others just destroy one another. It’s easy to reap the benefits of genocide, it’s just not politically correct to say so out loud. I think Nick Nolte’s character (a UN Canadian colonel) from “Hotel Rwanda” sums up genocide and the politics of Africa rather nicely when he stares into Don Cheadle’s face and grumbles, “You should spit in my face…you’re not human, you’re not even a Nigger!”
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