60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

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176 development dialogue december 2008 – revisiting the heart of darkness Terry George’s overall approach may be summed up as one of evading the key issues at stake in the Rwandan genocide. 8 As one reviewer commented: One of the ways fi lmmakers have traditionally tried to make unpleasant scenarios more palatable to audiences is by changing the focus from the awfulness of events to individual acts of bravery, from the complicity of the many to the heroism of the few. Hotel Rwanda saw the opportunity to take this path and did not hesitate. (Cape Times, 10/6/2005) Many viewers will have been enticed into seeing the movie in the expectation of gaining insight into one of the most heinous crimes of the recent past. Instead, viewers come away with little real insight but a formulaic story about the triumph of the human spirit in which the focus is diverted from the dire human cost of the carnage and the disturbing questions it raises to the noble actions of a single hero and a love that transcends the chaos and brutality. Hotel Rwanda promotes a simplistic morality of good conquering evil and has very little of substance to off er by way of elucidating viewers as to why the Rwandan genocide was possible in the fi rst instance. This is not in the least to criticise Hotel Rwanda for focusing on an individual, for individual experiences can indeed be a most eff ective vehicle for illuminating broader social, even global, experiences and truths. The trick in doing this successfully is to bring into a simultaneous frame of reference localised detail and broader social structures and experience. Hotel Rwanda fails to do this through a lack of appropriate contextualisation of its subject matter and choosing to focus on a set of experiences that were atypical of the Rwandan genocide. Rusesabagina may well have succeeded in saving all of the refugees at the Milles Collines but nearly 80 per cent of the internal Tutsi population succumbed in the genocide. A large proportion of those who survived were physically maimed, many died in the aftermath, all were very deeply scarred emotionally and had little option but to continue a fraught existence as a small minority amongst a hostile majority. This is also not in the least to argue that the fi lm is not justifi ed in reinforcing the optimistic message that the actions of individuals of conscience can make a big diff erence, even in the face of overwhelming odds and the most abominable evils imaginable. After all, like its 8 The key issues would include why the genocide occurred, why there was such widespread popular participation and how one explains the ferociousness of the violence that was perpetrated. The racially motivated inactivity of the West, which George foregrounds, though important, is of secondary signifi cance in my estimation.
hotel rwanda – the challenges of historicising and commercialising genocide 177 most obvious parallel, Schindler’s List, Hotel Rwanda is based on a true story and Rusesabagina deserves to be lauded for his extraordinary courage, his integrity and his altruism. However, to communicate this message as ineptly as Hotel Rwanda does, represents a missed opportunity to disseminate a cogent understanding of the Rwandan genocide to an expectant world-wide viewership, the greater part of which has had little opportunity of grappling with the meaning of this atrocity through the popular media. This is all the more the case since the release of the movie during the 10th anniversary of the genocide generated added popular interest. These criticisms are made in full recognition that there are limits to what can be packed into two hours of viewing, to the demands that can be made on the attention span of popular audiences and that commercial imperatives inevitably weigh on a movie of this sort. Hotel Rwanda could, however, have done a far better job, given the constraints of the medium and the opportunities off ered by the Rusesabagina story, of informing a receptive audience about the Rwandan holocaust and of raising consciousness about the scourge of genocide. The feature fi lm is an extremely powerful medium and the Rwandan genocide a potentially explosive issue but Hotel Rwanda comes nowhere close to fully exploiting their potential. The particular challenge of the Rwandan genocide In explaining the Rwandan genocide one is faced not merely with the questions of how and why the genocide occurred, but crucially, also with accounting for large-scale popular participation in the killing. In his insightful study, When Victims Become Killers, Mahmood Mamdani thus stresses: ‘My main objective in writing this book is to make the popular agency in the Rwandan genocide thinkable’ (Mamdani 2001: 8). The particular challenge of the Rwandan genocide is to provide an understanding of how and why the hatred of one social group towards another, when the two had lived together for centuries, intermarried extensively and shared an identical culture, could become so virulent that hundreds of thousands of members from one group could in a three-month rampage kill over 800,000 compatriots. Most of the slaughter was conducted in face-to-face encounters involving acts of unspeakable cruelty and in many cases the victims were the colleagues, neighbours, friends, even family of the perpetrators. 9 9 Mamdani also points out that few of the perpetrators had killed before. Many of the leaders were highly educated professionals – clerics, doctors, judges – whose training militated against such abuses and much of the killing took place at sites of sanctuary – churches, hospitals, schools (Mamdani 2001: 7).
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no. 50 | december 2008 Revisiting t
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Revisiting the heart of darkness -
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Acknowledgements The larger part of
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Dennis Brutus, born 1924 in then Rh
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8 development dialogue december 200
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In short, both the understanding of
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Behind most mass violence lurk econ
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ehind most mass violence lurk econo
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Is there a south perspective on gen
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is there a south perspective on gen
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The Voksenåsen Statement Genocides
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This Development Dialogue is publis
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60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

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