Hotel Rwanda

Africa as a continent hasn't had it easy for some time now. Rwanda has been suffering ethnic turmoil and violence dating back even beyond its days as a Belgian colony – it's not something that flared up once and went away.

Released ten years after the events it depicts, Hotel Rwanda is based on the real-life experience of hotel manager Paul Rusesabagina (Don Cheadle) during what has become known as 'the Rwandan genocide'.

As that implies, it's no film for the faint-hearted. It's a tense two-and-a-bit hours during which Cheadle's honest and good-natured Rusesabagina defends around a thousand people from the marauding militia. He has them holed up in the luxury hotel he manages for a Belgian company, pressed together in a relative oasis of calm inside the maelstrom outside. The situation becomes a demonstration of common humanity and decency in the face of human hatred – not for nothing does Rusesabagina insist on doing up his shirt and tie properly before seeing hotel guests.

While it's a bit tricky to believe completely in Cheadle's heart of gold, it's a fascinating study in human nature to see how far he's willing to go in order to save the people who believe in him – equally interesting as trying to understand the motives of the soldiers and militia.

In 1994, that militia – made up of men of the Hutu tribe – reacted to the assassination of Rwandan President Habyarimana by going out and massacring members of Rwanda's other major tribe, the Tutsis. They killed around 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus. Rwanda's population was 80% Hutu, and Hutu dominance of the radio and army is clear in the film and evident from their utter destruction of order in Rwanda. The country is upended as the gangs roam free, killing as they go, and the (largely white) UN peace-keeper forces watch helplessly.

It's easy to read a post-colonial discourse into this, especially as the hotel's white residents are evacuated along with the European soldiers who arrive for that very mission. There's a definite sense of 'us', as it were, leaving the natives to get on with it and sort the conflict out amongst themselves. We even seem to have left them our religion and weather, as the camera shows trucks pulling away from Rwandan nuns sheltering from driving rain.

Of course, Rwanda's history of violence (and Africa's, for that matter) is partly the fault of the European colonial powers (Belgium, in this case). The artificial borders drawn without regard for traditional tribal territory or local input threw together different (rival) tribes and cut them apart from their fellow tribespeople. The fact that imperialists then used divide-and-rule tactics – governing Rwanda through the minority Tutsi tribe – makes it hardly surprising that Rwanda has become a tense place.

There's more to it than that though. The Hutus are reacting against the centuries in which Tutsis ruled them, which isn't justification or a defence, but goes some way to explaining the genocide. Not unlike Hitler's Germany, Hutu propaganda created an image of Tutsis as 'cockroaches', 'traitors' and 'invaders', dehumanising them to the point where it becomes acceptable – even encouraged – to destroy a whole people. Not even orphans under Red Cross care are safe.

Ultimately, Rusesabagina's instruction that the guests must shame the international community into helping the innocent is the strongest thing to take away. The lack of intervention by foreign powers is telling, and a constant complaint of those left behind in the bloodshed. But unasked is the question of what exactly intervention (coming in the year after America's disastrous intervention in Somalia cf. Black Hawk Down) would achieve (see also: Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Korea etc).

Joaquin Phoenix's cameraman sums it up perfectly when he says that the world's reaction to his horrific footage of murders will be '“Oh my god, that's horrible” and carry on eating their dinner'. The lack of knowledge about this subject is astounding, but the fact that events like this continue happen with little reaction should shame the West.

http://hrrfoundation.org/reports/