Genocide in the age of information

In 1994, as during World War II, as continues today, hundreds of thousands of people were slaughtered because they looked funny. Eleven years ago, in Africa, they tended to be tall and light-skinned with thin noses. But this rubric was often faulty, and didn't lead to nearly enough killing, so ultimately it came down to five letters stamped on a birth certificate. Tutsi. Those were the enemy. As in similar situations, looks alone aren't really concrete enough to effectively kill off an entire section of humanity, so it boils down to a word.

Jew. Kurd. Croat.

In early 1941, when Adolf Hitler began rounding up the Semitic peoples of Europe, to be killed at his leisure, America did nothing. We were later able to lessen our pangs of guilt by lamenting, through clenched teeth and fists, through tear-soaked lips, that we just didn't know. We had no idea. The humanity. The senselessness. Such a waste. It wasn't until later, we cried, until the war was over, that we knew. God, If only we had known.

In 1994 we knew, yet nothing changed.

By then we had the internet, we had satellite feeds and 24-hour cable news. We knew what was happening. The whole world saw it, and knew the name for it. Genocide. Knowing this, the U.S., Belgium and others actively lobbied for a complete UN pull out.

"Hate is not the opposite of love; apathy is." -- Rollo May

Terry George's Hotel Rwanda is a historical meditation on this idea. His tale is set at the breaking point of one of modern history's most gruesome ironies. Before the Belgians colonized Rwanda, the Tutsis and Hutus never really had beef. The Tutsis had conquered the Hutus in the 15th century, and had ruled since then. The social strata of these Tutsi kingdoms, though not egalitarian, at least allowed for Hutus in places of power. The Belgians, however, marked the taller, lighter Tutsis, with their generally slender noses, to rule absolutely, stripping the Hutus of whatever power they had and stratifying the country along a [mostly imagined] racial divide. What was administratively expedient for the Belgians created deep animosity in the Rwandans, eventually breeding genocide. But, having left the country in 1962, the Belgians didn't consider themselves responsible.

Into that tempest steps Paul Rusesabagina, manager of a five-star resort hotel in Rwanda's capital, Kigali, and the focal point of a story about people sandwiched between hate and indifference.

Don Cheadle, as Paul, assumes most of the film's emotional burden. He's kindly and understands the importance of making connections with important people, as well as the value of a bright smile, a well-greased palm and a carefully placed Cuban cigar. He believes in the power of the west and, more significantly, that having friends in places of power is akin to wielding power oneself. As we meet him, though, attending to his daily rounds at the Hotel Mille Colline, events are in motion which will destroy those beliefs.

While Cheadle works miracles, and others do well with what they're given, each character only really exists to aid the exploration of the central question: to a people powerless to protect themselves, which is more dangerous, the hatred of those who want to kill them, or the indifference of those who might help? While not lessening the culpability of the Hutu killers, George suggests that the international apathy toward the Tutsis--toward Africans in general--that sealed their fate. At least, in the case of your killer, you know who to hide from. In 1994, in Rwanda, He'd be wearing a bright shirt and wielding a machete.

This politicized focus gives Hotel Rwanda a coarseness that fails to pay proper tribute to the human toll of genocide. While possessed of emotion and real poignance, George generally opts for narrative trickery and righteous vitriol to make his case, along with a few truly hokey cinematic choices.

At one point, a mob of Hutus demand the hotel's guest list. An assistant begins pulling the data up, but Paul brushes her aside, typing with a look of both concentration and worry. Startled by what he's doing, the assistant says, almost yells [men with guns and machetes close by], "but that list is from two weeks ago."

Of course it is. Everyone knows something is up, even the Hutus. This vague knowledge gives Paul's detente real tension. But George has inserted this assistant to foil what could have been a guileful and desperate moment, giving the scene away before it can mature.

He plays a similar game with the film's themes of abandonment and culpability. As all the whites are evacuated, Jack [Joaquin Phoenix], sobbing, gasps, "I'm so ashamed." Declarations like this continually follow and overshadow Hotel Rwanda's more nuanced gestures. Immediately prior, Jack, impotent, wanting to help but powerless to, starts handing out money to the people he's leaving behind. That alone, without the explanatory soliloquy, would have been vastly more forceful.

"We think you're dirt Paul. . . You aren't even niggers, you're Africans." -- Colonel Oliver

Hotel Rwanda, though, is not primarily a work of art or high drama. Hotel Rwanda is a polemic, a critique and condemnation of former imperialist powers [you know, white people--yeah us too] who raped and robbed a continent, only to abandon those we exploited once nothing of value remained.

Late in the film, as the foreign dignitaries and guests at the Mille Colline Hotel wait to be evacuated, the camera pans the side of the chartered bus they sit in. Hundreds of worried-looking European faces stare out the windows, afraid for these people outside, whose deaths are at hand. Someone, near the back of the bus, takes a picture.

George's thesis is clearer in that moment than in any of his monologal diatribes. We are responsible, yet we do nothing. We talk of freedom from oppression, about the unalienable rights of man. We claim to be just, but we do nothing. We intervene, protect, nation-build where our interest is best served, where a prize is to be had. The suffering and squalor of the rest, unluckily born to a nation low in natural resources or strategic military value, is placed on exhibit nightly, to be browsed and digested, mined for all its shock and fear and then to be forgotten, as though merely having heard about such things is its own kind of heroism.