Allen-1994 Genocide In Rwanda

In examining the film Hotel Rwanda together with Murambi, Book of Bones, one receives the unsung portrait of genocide that has occurred in the last twenty years in the African nation of Rwanda. The genocide was sparked from a race war between the Hutu people and the Tutsi people, which have excercised prejudices against one another since the early sixties, but recieved no international intervention in their conflict until the Rwandan massacre reached body counts that were unable to be ignored. The lack of intervention on the part of Western powers is held mainly responsible for why the Rwandan peoples were subjected to such brutal injustice. It was a political struggle on the part of the Western powers to decide whether or not to send military aid. The eventual decision was indifference towards the plight of the Rwandans, and so the 1994 massacre of the Tutsis proceeded unchecked.

As depicted in Hotel Rwanda, Paul Rusesabagina (Don Cheadle) was a businessman in charge of regulating the affairs of the Milles Collines Hotel which he managed. As the situation became hostile in Kagali, Paul was forced to make several difficult decisions that hung his fellow citizen's lives in the balance. The reason for Paul's success in securing the survival of so many within the confines of the Milles Collines was his identity as a member of the Hutu race. His identity as Hutu works with and against him as the film progresses. At first this identity allows him to bargin with several prominent Hutu men of power, such as General Bizimungu and the factory owner George Rutuganda. But as the genocide begins, he is pressed with the difficult reality of being marked a traitor among his kinsman for protecting his Tutsi wife and mixed-race children. Through Paul's struggle, we receive the true horror of the Rwanda genocide as an event that segregated a people who were practically relatives into victims and victimizers. By the post-genocide period, both Tutsi and Hutu survivors were ashamed and depricated by the self-inflicted atrocities commited to their shared nation.

Cornelius Uvimana is a character faced with the difficult position of being an escapee of the conflict in Rwanda. The reader receives the notion that Corneilus must deal with a sort of 'survivors guilt' in returning to Rwanda four years after the events of the genocide. Corneilius's reasons for fleeing his birth nation were most significantly made out of instinctual fear for his own life. As a child growing up among the first acts of genocide perpetrated in the 60's, 70's, and 80's, Corneilius developed an inborn repulsion towards his violent country. As he interacts with his childhood companions Jessica and Stanely, who were both active during the 1994 genocide, he receives a sense of isolation from his comrade's exploits. Like Paul Rusesabagina, Cornelius is of Hutu ethnicity, and by the end of his story we discover that all of his relatives were murdered by his father, who was an extremist for the Hutu power movement. Again the difficulty of accepting an ethnic identity attributed to mass murderers arrives in the mind of Cornelius, who faces his guilt as being "the son of a monster."