The Quiet Hero of "Hotel Rwanda"
by Crystal Nicholson
Every cinematic story has a hero.
"Schindler's List" had Oskar Schindler; "Amistad" had John Quincy Adams; "Glory" had Colonel Robert Gould Shaw. But the director of "Hotel Rwanda" had less glamorous options in the story of the 1994 Rwandan genocide.
Surely the hero must be American, a Cowboy Clinton galloping in to clean up yet another international mess. But Clinton's administration was too busy playing linguistic games, creating alternative words for "genocide" to avoid any responsibility.
What about the Tutsi rebels — the force which finally drove the murderous Hutus out of the country into bordering refugee camps? The victory was too-little-too-late for the nearly million innocent murdered.
The U.N. peacekeeping troops — international politics in action? Hardly. In Rwanda the trained blue-hats seemed more like impotent smurfs, crippled by their mandate not to shoot and only able to escort Americans and Europeans to safety.
Director Terry George found his story's hero in a Kigali hotel manager, a Hutu with a Tutsi wife and children. Paul Rusesabagina's story was first told in Philip Gorevitch's novel,"We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families." "Hotel Rwanda" is the first movie about the genocide since the fierce 1999 Frontline documentary "The Triumph of Evil" exposed a United Nations frozen in bureaucracy and apathy.
Rusesabagina, played by Don Cheadle, was a savvy but honest Kigali business man who ran the upscale Hotel Des Mille Collines, most of whose guests were Western press, diplomats, and African elite. The movie begins on the day when the U. N. Assistance Mission for Rwanda peace accord is signed between the Tutsi rebels and the Hutu government. That night, President Habyarimana's plane is shot down — an assassination that at the time was blamed on Tutsi rebels.
As the tension grows in the hot Rwandan city, Rusesabagina and the Western world are slow to realize the scale of the violence about to erupt. Drunken Hutus dance in the city in their uniform of brightly colored shirts. Ubiquitous radios shout that the infestation of Tutsi "cockroaches" must be stopped. Only when power-drunk Hutu soldiers attempt to threaten Rusesabagina into shooting his own Tutsi wife and children does he realize the severity of the situation.
Originally only concerned about his family and keeping his job, Rusesabagina gradually shoulders the responsibility of housing, feeding, and protecting 1,268 refugees in his hotel, always with Hutu machetes around the corner.
Rusesabagina maintains professionalism the whole time, in dress, demeanor, and command of the hotel staff with burning houses, angry mobs, and a civil war occurring only blocks away. His only emotional breakdown occurs in a beautifully acted scene of solitude when he realizes he is too distracted to correctly tie his tie. Backed by suspenseful Rwandan music, the director involves the viewers in what becomes a race against time, with the only hope of help from the West, a dream that was repeatedly disappointed.
Meanwhile, the movie portrays U.N. peacekeepers unsympathetically, with only 300 haggard men for the entire country. In the most dramatic scene of the film, U.N. forces separate a terrified crowd, sending whites to the U.N. convoys for safety while directing blacks to the uncertain shelter of Rusesabagina's hotel.
Even with weapons as primitive as the machete, the genocidaires killed at almost three times the speed as the Germans killed during the Holocaust, according to Gourevitch's book. The result was a decimation of a population. In a time when there was no safety in homes, streets, or churches, Tutsis found momentary calm at the Hotel Des Milles Collines, using the pool water to wash their clothes and wounds.
Unfortunately, this cinematic journey comes closer to the heartbreaking truths of those four months than any contemporaneous press coverage. Rwandan coverage was not lacking in frequency, but in in-depth coverage and analysis. Newspapers such as The Washington Post and The New York Times failed to explain the context, highlight the magnitude of the genocide or relate individual stories to demonstrate the raging atrocities.
"Hotel Rwanda" explains the true origins of the two "ethnic groups," while the newspapers simplified the relationship between the Hutus and Tutsis as "tribal bloodletting." The Belgians who colonized Rwanda dubbed the Tutsis a "lost Christian" race, and issued ethnic identity cards in 1933 to separate the elite Tutsis from the majority Hutus. Although a front page article in the Times in October 1997 speaks of an "age old animosity" between the two groups, the seperation of Hutus and Tutsis was a product of 1960s "race science." Times articles repeatedly referred to the Hutus as a "short, stocky, Bantu people" and Tutsis as a "tall, elegant Nilotic people," even though Rwandans themselves have difficulty telling the two groups apart.
Today western inaction plagues the civilians of Sudan, and Africa in the minds of many remains the "dark continent" with vengeance as the only law. Terry George's "Hotel Rwanda" will echo every time you read headlines of horror in the "heart of darkness," bringing humanity to the death count numbers. It is a temptation to utter the words "never again." But perhaps when the inevitable next time comes, there will be more quiet heroes like hotel manager Paul Rusesabagina.
Every cinematic story has a hero.
"Schindler's List" had Oskar Schindler; "Amistad" had John Quincy Adams; "Glory" had Colonel Robert Gould Shaw. But the director of "Hotel Rwanda" had less glamorous options in the story of the 1994 Rwandan genocide.
Surely the hero must be American, a Cowboy Clinton galloping in to clean up yet another international mess. But Clinton's administration was too busy playing linguistic games, creating alternative words for "genocide" to avoid any responsibility.
What about the Tutsi rebels — the force which finally drove the murderous Hutus out of the country into bordering refugee camps? The victory was too-little-too-late for the nearly million innocent murdered.
The U.N. peacekeeping troops — international politics in action? Hardly. In Rwanda the trained blue-hats seemed more like impotent smurfs, crippled by their mandate not to shoot and only able to escort Americans and Europeans to safety.
Director Terry George found his story's hero in a Kigali hotel manager, a Hutu with a Tutsi wife and children. Paul Rusesabagina's story was first told in Philip Gorevitch's novel,"We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families." "Hotel Rwanda" is the first movie about the genocide since the fierce 1999 Frontline documentary "The Triumph of Evil" exposed a United Nations frozen in bureaucracy and apathy.
Rusesabagina, played by Don Cheadle, was a savvy but honest Kigali business man who ran the upscale Hotel Des Mille Collines, most of whose guests were Western press, diplomats, and African elite. The movie begins on the day when the U. N. Assistance Mission for Rwanda peace accord is signed between the Tutsi rebels and the Hutu government. That night, President Habyarimana's plane is shot down — an assassination that at the time was blamed on Tutsi rebels.
As the tension grows in the hot Rwandan city, Rusesabagina and the Western world are slow to realize the scale of the violence about to erupt. Drunken Hutus dance in the city in their uniform of brightly colored shirts. Ubiquitous radios shout that the infestation of Tutsi "cockroaches" must be stopped. Only when power-drunk Hutu soldiers attempt to threaten Rusesabagina into shooting his own Tutsi wife and children does he realize the severity of the situation.
Originally only concerned about his family and keeping his job, Rusesabagina gradually shoulders the responsibility of housing, feeding, and protecting 1,268 refugees in his hotel, always with Hutu machetes around the corner.
Rusesabagina maintains professionalism the whole time, in dress, demeanor, and command of the hotel staff with burning houses, angry mobs, and a civil war occurring only blocks away. His only emotional breakdown occurs in a beautifully acted scene of solitude when he realizes he is too distracted to correctly tie his tie. Backed by suspenseful Rwandan music, the director involves the viewers in what becomes a race against time, with the only hope of help from the West, a dream that was repeatedly disappointed.
Meanwhile, the movie portrays U.N. peacekeepers unsympathetically, with only 300 haggard men for the entire country. In the most dramatic scene of the film, U.N. forces separate a terrified crowd, sending whites to the U.N. convoys for safety while directing blacks to the uncertain shelter of Rusesabagina's hotel.
Even with weapons as primitive as the machete, the genocidaires killed at almost three times the speed as the Germans killed during the Holocaust, according to Gourevitch's book. The result was a decimation of a population. In a time when there was no safety in homes, streets, or churches, Tutsis found momentary calm at the Hotel Des Milles Collines, using the pool water to wash their clothes and wounds.
Unfortunately, this cinematic journey comes closer to the heartbreaking truths of those four months than any contemporaneous press coverage. Rwandan coverage was not lacking in frequency, but in in-depth coverage and analysis. Newspapers such as The Washington Post and The New York Times failed to explain the context, highlight the magnitude of the genocide or relate individual stories to demonstrate the raging atrocities.
"Hotel Rwanda" explains the true origins of the two "ethnic groups," while the newspapers simplified the relationship between the Hutus and Tutsis as "tribal bloodletting." The Belgians who colonized Rwanda dubbed the Tutsis a "lost Christian" race, and issued ethnic identity cards in 1933 to separate the elite Tutsis from the majority Hutus. Although a front page article in the Times in October 1997 speaks of an "age old animosity" between the two groups, the seperation of Hutus and Tutsis was a product of 1960s "race science." Times articles repeatedly referred to the Hutus as a "short, stocky, Bantu people" and Tutsis as a "tall, elegant Nilotic people," even though Rwandans themselves have difficulty telling the two groups apart.
Today western inaction plagues the civilians of Sudan, and Africa in the minds of many remains the "dark continent" with vengeance as the only law. Terry George's "Hotel Rwanda" will echo every time you read headlines of horror in the "heart of darkness," bringing humanity to the death count numbers. It is a temptation to utter the words "never again." But perhaps when the inevitable next time comes, there will be more quiet heroes like hotel manager Paul Rusesabagina.
posted by The Protest at 2/16/2005
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