From the centuries, world has witnessed a number of bloody wars, holocausts, carnages and cruel genocide, which shattered the lives of millions of innocent people. After witnessing the mass killings and its aftermath consequences, world has not yet learned a lesson and still on the same path of destruction. Hotel Rwanda’, a movie by Terry George, tries to convey the same message to save the world harmony and to maintain social integrity and peace, else the world should ready to witness a massive destruction. This movie is based on the one of the world’s fastest and atrocious historical genocide in Rwanda in 1994. It depicts the true events around the genocide experienced by a hotel manager Paul Rusesabagina played by famous Hollywood actor Dean Cheadle.
Hotel Rwanda portrays a strong picture of triumph of human capacity for good in the midst of evils of racism, violence and ethnic cleansing; on the one side the movie depicts the fear, trauma, sexual violence and the sufferings experienced by the genocide victims and on the other side it is about the situational leadership, courage and heroism shown by a common man in extreme odd conditions; the movie shows the fine picture of cause and effects of the any genocide upon the population as well as the fundamental indifference and lack of political will of the world, racial discrimination, ideological imperatives and motives of the power retention behind any genocide. Throughout the history, genocide is one of the most devastating human tragedy.
The term ‘genocide’, which is also known as ‘ethnic cleansing’ was first coined by a Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin in 1994 by combining the ancient Greek word ‘genos’ which means race and the Latin word ‘cide’ which means killing (Encyclopedia of Death and Dying). According to the Oxford dictionary, genocide is defined as “The deliberate killing of a large group of people, especially those of a particular nation or ethnic group”. Hence it is an intentional murder of a particular community or a race by the government for any reason. Some of the world’s worst genocides are the Darfur Genocide, the Rwandan Genocide, the Jewish Holocaust and the Armenian Genocide. All these examples conveys a big message of human rights violations and murder of humanity.
There is always a confusion between term genocide and war. Most of the people took the term genocide as a war. But both of these terms are different from each other. In their article, Olaifa and Dominic poignantly and powerfully justifies the difference between concepts of war and genocide by explaining their deep definitions with evidences and examines the genocide from many different perspectives and political topics and helped us to understand the magnitude of the killing strategy both physically and psychologically. According to them, War can be defined as a direct violent encounter between two or more opposing parties with a view to gaining access to an object of their mutual interests.
It is usually accompanied by the use of weapons such as guns, bows and arrows, machetes, sticks, biological weapons, and weapons of mass destruction; whereas genocide refers to the violent crimes committed against particular groups, with the intent to destroy the existence of such groups (Abimbola & Dominic, 31-37). The movie shed light on the reality that how the world misunderstood the Rwandan genocide as war initially. The film Hotel Rwanda depicts the true story of a perpetrated planned Rwandan genocide, in which over 800,000 innocent people were slaughtered within the three months of atrocity as Rwanda fell into political despair and turmoil.
Rwanda experienced the most extensive slaughter, a most evil moral crime, committed by the ruling Hutu government in this blood-filled century. The movie revolves around the protagonist Paul Rusesabagina, a house manager of a four star Hotel Milles Collines, who experienced this slaughter and acted as a superhero by sheltering more than 1100 Tutsis and Rwandans and saved their lives from the Hutu militia. The movie illustrates that there was an old historical conflict between two ethnic groups Hutus and Tutus, which planted the seeds of civil war which then molded into a massive genocide. There are a couple of scenes in the film, which shows the brief historical tribal background and the reasons of the genocide.
As depicted in the opening of the film, a scene shows a conversation between a foreign journalist Jack Daglish and a local Rwandan journalist Bendict. On asking the difference between Hutus and Tutsi and the reason of their conflict, Bendict replied that Belgians were responsible for this conflict. He says, “According to the Belgian colonists, the Tutsi are taller and more elegant. It was the Belgians that created the division. They picked people, those with thinner noses lighter skins [Tutus]. The Belgians used the Tutsis to run the country. Then when they left, they left the power to the Hutus, and of course Tutus are taking revenge on the elite Tutsi of the years of repression”.
In another scene, General Rutaganda reveals the brief history of the Rwanda by announcing over local radio to provoke the Hutus community to exterminate the Tutsis by announcing, “When people ask me, good listeners, why do I hate all the Tutsi, I say, “Read our history. ” The Tutsi were collaborators for the Belgian colonists, they stole our Hutu land, they whipped us. They are a minority of traitors and invaders……” (Hotel Rwanda). Historically, the population of Rwanda was constituted of three ethical tribes – Twas (hunters), Hutus (farmers) and the Tutsi (cattle raisers ), ruled by the Belgians. Since Twa tribes were very few, the Belgian colonizers concentrated on Hutus and Tutsis only.
They treated the Hutsi as ignorant, vile and slave by nature, while the Tutsi received much praise and superiority; Tutsi were the elite people and the Hutus worked under their command. The Hutus was used like slaves for the Belgian colonists and the Tutsi were made their supervisors and gained the control of all resources. Moreover, the Belgians created the more ethnic polarization by issuing them the racial identity cards showing if they were Hutus or Tutsi, thus exacerbating the ethnic separations between them. These distinctions created by the Belgians planted early seeds of angst of the Hutu towards the Tutsi which resulted in the loss of millions of lives over a period of 40 years since the independence of Rwanda in 1959 (Jean, 4).
The underlying message is that the physical and cultural differences became the root of the conflict. Hotel Rwanda points out the strong message of humanity among the evils and the situational leadership by the Paul Rusesabagina, by which he managed to save thousand lives through his managerial tactics by using his relations with top brasses in the regime, gifts and money. Paul character is about good vs. evil and his tireless efforts to save friends, family, and complete strangers from the genocide It was the Paul’s mental presence and virtuous actions only, which have proved that, even in the moral wasteland of genocide, humanity still exists and will prevail.
The slaughter started with the assassination of Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana, when his plane is shot down at Kigali Airport on 06th April 1994. The Hutu’s commanders announced the president’s death, blaming the Tutsi after the attack over the local radio station, “Our great president is murdered by the Tutsi cockroaches. They tricked him into signing their phony peace agreement, then they shot his plane from the sky. It is time to clear the great brush good Hutu’s of Rwanda. We must cut the tall trees. Cut all tall trees down! (Hotel Rwanda)”. This news lit a spark to the genocidal rage. The whole city was filled with Hutu militia ‘Interahamwe’ to take revenge from the Tutsi.
The planned genocide aimed and succeeded in exterminating not only the Tutsi community, but also Hutus who were not participating in the killing and helping the Tutsis. As the genocide starts, Paul’s neighbors and friends came to his house to save their lives, as they thought that they would be safe with him since he was a respected Hutu and had high level contacts. Firstly, he objects and tries to avoid them; finally, after assessing all conditions, he decides to bring over 1200 people to his hotel. To save them, he bribes a Rwandan military officer. He has been compared to Oskar Schindler, a German industrialist in the movie ‘Schindler’s List’, who saved almost 1100 Jewish people from the Nazis. He bribes many Hutus army officers for not only to protect his family, but other 1200 Tutsi too.
By utilizing his managerial skills of bribery, flattery, apology and deception , Paul wisely save their lives. When nobody comes forward to stop this genocide, he himself came forward and gives hope to hopeless people. He cleverly uses his emotional tactic to get help from other foreign people to get exit visas for the hotel refuges by directing them to call their relatives abroad for help. He argued, “There will be no rescue, no intervention force. We can only save ourselves. Call any foreigner you know, tell them what will happen to us. Say goodbye, but when you say goodbye, say it as though you’re reaching through and shaking their hand. Let them know if they let go of that hand, you will die. We must shame them into sending help” (Hotel Rwanda).
In the end of the movie, in order to get protection for the hotel refuges, Paul cleverly blackmailed the General Augustin Bizimungu by threatening him to be tried as war criminal and finally succeeded to cross the border with his guests safely. In reality, Paul represented as mankind’s last hope, who dared to risked his and his family’s life for thousand of other unknown people. Romeo Dallaire in his work ‘The Media Dichotomy’ extensively explored the proactive role of media in the killing of millions of people by creating a climate of fear and hostility through its active participation in the Rwandan extermination campaign. The all organs of this hate media i. e. announcers, journalists, reporters, broadcaster and media executives, etc. played a crucial part in laying the base for slaughter.
There were two radio stations and one local newspaper ‘Kangura’ in Rwanda that time. One was government owned local radio station, Radio Rwanda and other was private radio station Radio-Television Libre des Milles Collines (RTLM), which was owned by Hutu extremists. As most of the Rwandan community was illiterate, radio was like the voice of God; it was the only important means of broadcasting for the government (The Media & Rwandan Genocide, 16). Both the radio stations worked as a catalyst in the carnage and were used as a weapon by the Hutus extremists to execute the mass killings. RTLM called on all Hutus to ‘rise up as a single man’ or ‘would exterminate the Tutsi from the globe…. make them disappear once and all”.
These anti-Tutsi messages incited the Hutu community for mass participation in ethnic cleansing of the Tutsi as well as the Hutus, who were either helping them or not participating the carnage to kill Tutsi (Forges, 48). In one scene of the film, one announcer over the radio announced, “Good Hutus of Rwanda, beware! Watch your neighbor. Identify these cockroaches. Then rise up and stamp out this murderous infestation… ” (Hotel Rwanda). Hutu Leaders used violent language and the hate terms like inyengi or cockroach for the Tutsi over the radio and persuaded and incited the mob to exterminate Tutsi and moderate Hutus. They guide them on air by giving them specific directions to their hiding places like churches, hotels and mosques etc.
In another scene, the radio announces “…. we must destroy an infestation of cockroaches at the technical college…. ” And in the film, when the Tutsi were being evacuated from the Hotel Mille Collines by UN forces, the radio informed the mob about this and convinced mob to attack them (Hotel Rwanda). Under the stimulus of this broadcast, Hutu killers searched out Tutsi, moving from one house to another and killed them brutally throughout the country. Thus these scenes clearly show the power of the news media in the Rwandan genocide. Although there was presence of few foreign media journalists during the genocide, but they totally failed and ignored to show the truth to the world.
Initially, the world misunderstood the nature of the slaughter in Rwanda as the result of deeply rooted and politically fueled inter-tribal conflict, rather than genocide. But after the truth reveals, it has been found as the world’s fastest and most brutal genocide in the history. In fact, the film is sneaking the message about how the mass media has played a villainous role in genocide and ultimately telling the audience that how the media could be a curse, if misused. Every genocide or civil war is backed by some distinct motives. The major motives behind any genocide are – Power, Psychological resentment, Purification and Pecuniary gain. Rwandan Genocide of 1994 was backed by all of these motives.
The carnage had its origin for power and wealth, which once was in the hands of the Tutsis, later on seized by the Hutus after independence of Rwanda from Belgium. To retain this power, the Hutus elites planned this genocide and exercised their ‘Hutu Power’ over the Tutsis on a macro level. The director wisely linked the all main scenes of the movie in a chronological order to shows the clear picture of genocide. For instance, in one scene of the movie when the local militia leader George asked Paul to join the Hutu politics, but the Paul denied; George argues, “Politics is power and money” (Hotel Rwanda). Purification or ethnic cleansing is another major motive behind any massacre. Armenian genocide and the holocaust are the classic examples of the genocides purely effected by this motive.
This ethnic and cultural prejudice often results in the creation of ‘in-group’ and ‘out-group’ thinking, where members of a group having same race, ideology or identity treats the member of other groups as their enemies or aliens. The belief behind this is that the ‘out groups’ are pollutants and need to be cleansed for the goodness of the society. Unlike the earlier genocides held in years 1959, 1964 and 1973, in which women and children were not killed, they all were not spared in the 1994 Rwanda genocide. It is pertinent to mention that ethnic fractionalization seemed to be the main cause of the Rwandan genocide. Apart from these motives, there are other several motivational factors which are not directly responsible for any genocide, but help to accelerate the carnage e. g. ocio-cultural differences, frustration, aggression, relative deprivation, ideological imperatives, dehumanization and polarized perception indices.
In addition to all these motives, the most profound factor which fueled the transmission of genocidal ideology was the long standing and deeply ingrained ethnic differences and polarization between the Hutus and Tutsis backed by the motive of pecuniary gain by the policy makers and top elites, who commit this crime and hide behind the facelessness of regimes or governments (Dominic & Abimbola, 36-40). These arguments reinforces the film’s theme about the role of ideological imperatives and motives behind any genocide.