Hotel Rwanda's cinematic compression of history

Rating: 7/10 (17 September 2005)

The historical errors in the film Hotel Rwanda will unfortunately go unnoticed by the average viewer. While the film is not billed as a documentary, the director has neglected to provide any disclaimers for the cinematic manipulation of factual events--a manipulation which is all too obvious to those who know the history of the country well.
One of the most glaring errors in the film seems to be due to the cinematic compression of time, which is often unavoidable when attempting to simplify complex events for a general audience. The General portrayed in the film, Augustin Bizimungu, did not in fact hold that position (as Army Chief of Staff) until 3 weeks after the genocide. The actual Chief of Staff at the time, Deogratias Nsabimana, was aboard the President's plane that was mysteriously downed on April 6 (no one has claimed responsibility for this crash since, although evidence points increasingly toward the country's current President, Paul Kagame, as the man who gave the order to fire the 2 missiles that brought it down). There were, in fact, 10 people on the plane, including 2 French pilots. In addition, the airplane was a gift from Francois Mitterand. Both of these facts truly call in to question the current Rwandan government's suggestions that the French military is the entity responsible for downing the plane (which in essence, qualifies as an act of terrorism under many international legal instruments).
This last statement should not, however, be interpreted as an attempt to excuse the grave mistakes that the French did make in its Operation Turquoise.
Immediately after the plane crash, which is commonly referred to as the 'trigger' that touched off the genocide, a man named Marcel Gatsinzi was named to replace Nsabimana. 3 weeks later, A. Bizimungu was named to take over the post. (Before the plane crash, Bizimungu even lacked the credentials necessary to become a general, which makes the film's portrayal of him as such even more inaccurate.) Gatsinzi, a Hutu, is now employed in the current government of Rwanda, which is dominated by the Rwandan Patriotic Front (the army that is credited with stopping the genocide).
The film further neglects to mention--not even by providing a paragraph of text that could enlighten the audience further--that the Rwandan Patriotic Front was responsible for targeted killing of tens of thousands of Hutu civilians (especially those from the North of the country) during its invasion into Rwanda in October 1990 (which instigated the civil war that preceded the genocide), as well as "after" the genocide and in the years immediately following (particularly 1997-98). The RPF currently enjoys considerable impunity for its war crimes and the crimes against humanity it has committed, and acknowledges only selected crimes.
Despite the film's compression of time, and the ahistorical consequences that arise from this, the film does provide a powerful, well-acted glimpse into an isolated part of the horror that engulfed Rwanda in 1994.
For more information about the economic roots of the genocide, read Chapter 10 ('Malthus in Africa') of Jared Diamond's best-selling book "Collapse." For more information about the genocide in practical and political terms, read "Leave None to Tell the Story" by Alison Des Forges (Human Rights Watch publication): http://www.hrw.org/reports/1999/rwanda/ Finally, if you are really serious about understanding the full context of the 1994 genocide and its international political dimensions, familiarize yourself with the research of scholars Rene Lemarchand and Filip Reyntjens (available in English).