"Hotel Rwanda" Gets The Blame Wrong
By Richard Davis (02/18/05)
If you had ever wanted to meet the devil, you could have found him in Rwanda in 1994. He was everywhere you looked. In just 100 horrifying days, nearly a million Tutsis were hacked to death by their machete-wielding Hutu neighbors and countrymen. The terror suffered by the victims was unimaginable. Children in particular were targeted. Just reading about it now tears your heart out. Why did the devil come to that place?
The movie "Hotel Rwanda" doesn’t answer that question, other than to suggest, perfunctorily, that Belgian colonists brought racism to Rwanda, an answer that owes more to political correctness than to history. Hutus and Tutsis had co-existed in a racial dynamic for centuries, as did all of sub-Saharan Africa (and everywhere else). Belgium’s brief stint as colonial administrator may have stirred the ethnic pot, but what people on this planet haven’t had their pots stirred by outsiders? That doesn’t excuse genocide.
Those responsible in Rwanda were Hutu leaders and activists motivated primarily by power, greed and revenge. They used racism calculatedly to provoke hatred against the Tutsis and to incite a virtual army of young, disaffected males, who were in ample supply in Rwanda’s overcrowded borders. Hutu instigators methodically planned the killings, ordered the implements of death, gave the commands, and perpetuated the genocide once it started. To invoke politically correct rationales now to diminish their criminal responsibility is morally reprehensible.
Filmmaker Terry George’s ambivalence toward the perpetrators can be seen in the way he depicts the slaughter. The killings occur off camera for the most part, away from the movie’s settings, as if the genocide were an uncontrollable natural disaster, like a bad storm or a swarm of deadly locusts that suddenly engulfs an unsuspecting population -- or, as one character exclaims, like a mass descent into insanity. It wasn’t that simple.
George ignores the Hutus and facilely blames Westerners because that is, in fact, the moral of the story he is telling. The movie is essentially a two-hour indictment against the West (particularly America) for failing to intervene after the slaughter had begun. That makes us complicit in the genocide, according to George’s not-so-subtle reasoning.
In fact, we may be more culpable than the Hutus themselves, because as Europeans and their descendants we’re morally responsible for our actions -- we’re the only group to which liberals assign independent agency -- and the Hutus, after all, are just victims culminating the work of the Belgians. Furthermore, our sole motivation was racism. That simplifies matters and accords nicely with George’s hit-and-run approach to the morality of the story.
Early in the movie an American newsman manages to capture some grisly footage of the carnage. Finally, the Rwandan hero of the story declares, the West will see what is happening and respond. Not so, explains the cynical newsman: “If people see this footage, they’ll say, ‘Oh my God, that’s terrible’, and they’ll go on eating their dinners.”
So what would be the correct nonracist response? Should they have jumped in their cars and raced to the airports? Should they have stopped eating? There were 35 million blacks in America eating dinners too. Were they racists? Why blame some impotent schmuck in Toledo for what Rwandans themselves were powerless to stop? George has simply employed a racist slur, both nonsensical and baseless, for the sole purpose of evoking shame and guilt in his audience.
At a pivotal point in the movie, when it becomes clear that additional Western help will not be forthcoming, George has the UN representative, Canadian Gen. Romeo Dallaire, played by a dissolute Nick Nolte, say to the Rwandan, “The West, all the superpowers -- they think you’re dirt. They think you’re dung. You’re not even a nigger. You’re African.”
That indulges Hollywood’s self-loathing, but whom is George accusing of racism? Left out of the movie was the politically incorrect fact that the person refusing Dallaire’s desperate pleas for more peacekeepers was none other than Kofi Annan, a crucial player in the decisions made before and during the crisis. An independent inquiry into the genocide in 1997 would be especially critical of Annan’s failure to act, both on warnings by Dallaire that genocide was imminent and once it had begun. He might have stopped it. Despite that, he would soon become the United Nations’ first black African secretary-general. Was he the racist George rails about?
The other primary villain in the West’s procrastination was our own Bill Clinton, America’s “first black president.” Was he racist? He would later apologize for not responding sooner, though he certainly didn’t blame his inaction on racism. He said that “all over the world there were people like me sitting in offices, day after day, who did not fully appreciate the depth and speed” of the genocide. Good point, but not good enough to make it into the movie. That would dilute the racism charge.
If the three primary actors who had the most direct role in the actual events, Dallaire, Annan and Clinton, weren’t racist, then who exactly is this “they” whose racism is so ubiquitous and omnipotent it controls the entire West and all of its leaders, including those who are black?
Presumably the “they” isn’t Western minorities, or liberals like George who continuously lecture the rest of us on our racism. It isn’t our children, of course, and our vast elderly population isn’t controlling anything. Our women seldom seem to espouse racist opinions. Our press doesn’t. Our courts don’t. Our politicians don’t. Our educators don’t. Even publicly stating a racist innuendo can get you arrested. So who are these racist overlords?
Only a liberal anti-Westerner could feel no qualms about resorting to racial smears to tell a story about racial genocide. But, as I said, such is the story George is telling.
Why did Clinton hesitate? Well, for one thing the infamous “Blackhawk down” mission in Somalia had occurred just six months earlier. Bodies of U.S. servicemen had been desecrated and dragged through the streets of Mogadishu. With that failure fresh in mind, Rwanda seemed to begin just where Somalia left off. Soon after the killings started 10 Belgian peacekeepers were similarly inhumanely slaughtered, and Belgium quickly withdrew. Were we racists for being hesitant to send our own boys to another African killing field?
In his apology, Clinton said an interesting thing: “The international community, together with nations in Africa, must bear its share of responsibility for this tragedy as well.” That’s something else George didn’t think about. Why is America and the West alone singled out for recrimination? Rwanda’s in the center of a continent. Where were its neighbors? What about nearby Middle Eastern states? What about Turkey, or Pakistan, or India. What about China or Japan? Where were the Russians? No sense muddying the blame. Keep it simple: America.
George’s anti-Western agenda mars what is otherwise a powerful and haunting movie whose actors give unforgettable performances. Viewers emerge from the theater with a visceral sense of this all-too-human tragedy. Unfortunately, they also are likely to emerge with the racial humiliation and guilt George is trying to make them bear.
So if you see the movie think about this: The people not hacking others to death were the Westerners. The one safe refuge was a Western hotel. The protectors were Westerners. The hero was a Westernized Hutu, who used Western skills to save hundreds of lives. And in real life, when the slaughter was over, he relocated himself and his family to Western Europe.
The devil, tragically, remained in Rwanda.
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