the Blame Game

Rating: Null/10 (8 January 2005)

Hotel Rwanda did not live up to my expectations. It was a decent movie, but it just isn't in the same category as Schindler's List.
On the plus side, I thought that Don Cheadle and the rest of the cast did a fine job (although Nick Nolte was probably too old for the role that he played). I also thought that the movie depicted the Interahamwe militia in a chilling fashion. The most horrifying parts of the movie for me were the moments showing ordinary Rwandan Hutus being incited to kill the Tutsi "cockroaches" by Radio Mille Collines.
On the negative side, I thought the movie "disneyfied" what happened in Rwanda. What happened in that country for 100 days was surreal. Hundreds of thousands of innocent Tutsi, Twa, and moderate Hutus were brutally murdered. Friends and neighbors killed each other. Doctors killed patients. Patients killed doctors. Teachers killed students. Students killed teachers. And supposed "men of God" betrayed their parishioners.
Yet Hotel Rwanda shied away from depicting any of this. There was no scene like that in Schindler's List when the Nazis cleared out the Cracow Ghetto. We see the threat of violence, and we see the aftermath of violence. But we don't see the actual evil being committed. I think that one brief series of scenes depicting a massacre would have brought home the horror of Rwanda much more effectively than this movie did. Depicted (or non-depicted) as it is Hotel Rwanda, someone might think that there was some nameless force at work at Rwanda causing some people to act in a threatening fashion and randomly slaying others.
My second criticism is the blame shifting that the movie did. It has become popular to blame the West, specifically the United States, France, and a few other countries, for what happened in Rwanda. The logic is that we knew what was happening was genocide, yet we did nothing to stop it.
I was in the American Army at the time. Yet because I was over in the former Yugoslavia (where bad things were happening at a somewhat more leisurely pace), I was only dimly aware of what was going on in Africa. With ten years' perspective, I find myself wishing that we had intervened. Even a gesture as small as jamming "Radio Genocide" would have been something.
Yet I totally reject that my country is at fault for Rwanda. The bottom line is this: the Hutus and Tutsis did it to themselves. I am including the Tutsis in the blame game because the Tutsi regime in Burundi committed enormous crimes against the Hutus living there before the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. Those killings had dire consequences for the Tutsis in Rwanda.
Assigning primary blame to people other than those who gave the orders to kill or were actually swinging the machetes is wrong for two reasons. First, it infantilizes the Hutus and Tutsis. They are human beings and have free will. Some of them did the right thing. Many more did not.
Second, who can really say that the UN, US, or any other country could have stopped what happened? I would be willing to bet had there been an intervention by US military forces, some of the people here and elsewhere who are loudly damning the US for inaction would be just as loudly damning the US for "violating Rwanda's sovereignty." Meanwhile people like John Pilger would be writing editorials accusing the US of trying to re-colonize Central Africa.
I feel no guilt about Rwanda. Yet I wish that we had intervened anyway because it would have saved lives. That would have been worth having to put up with anti-war demonstrations and idiotic statements like "this war is all about Congo diamonds, or uranium, or control of the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest gorilla safari industry."