60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

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178 development dialogue december 2008 – revisiting the heart of darkness Hotel Rwanda provides no real answer to this question and off ers little more than two short pieces of discourse that are meant to furnish historical background and political context to its plot. The fi rst is a voice-over from an RTLM 10 radio broadcast, presented against a black screen at the very start of the fi lm, which summarises Hutu extremist attitudes towards the Tutsi: When people ask me, good listeners, why do I hate all the Tutsi, I say, ‘Read our history.’ The Tutsi were collaborators for the Belgian colonists. They stole our Hutu land, they whipped us. Now they have come back, these Tutsi rebels. They are cockroaches. They are murderers. Rwanda is our Hutu land. We are the majority. They are a minority of traitors and invaders. We will squash their infestation. We will wipe out the RPF rebels. This is RTLM Hutu Powa Radio. Stay alert, watch your neighbours. This is supplemented by a two-minute bar-room scene early on in the movie in which a Rwandan journalist explains the diff erence between Hutu and Tutsi to a Western counterpart, Jack Dalglish (Joaquin Phoenix): According to the Belgian colonists the Tutsi are taller, are more elegant. It was the Belgians that created the divisions… They picked people – those with thinner noses, lighter skin. They used to measure the width of people’s noses. The Belgians used the Tutsis to run the country. Then when they left, they gave the power to the Hutus and of course the Hutus took revenge on the elite Tutsis for years of repression. After questioning two local patrons at the bar about their identities – one of whom turns out to be Hutu, the other Tutsi – an incredulous Dalglish comes to the conclusion: ‘They could be twins’. This elucidation of Hutu-Tutsi diff erences is grossly simplistic and misleading, and is blatantly untrue in some respects. The suggestion that Hutu and Tutsi identities are the arbitrary creations of Belgian colonialism is clearly untenable. Also, the insinuation that Hutu and Tutsi are physically indistinguishable from one another is disingenuous. While some people classifi ed Hutu conform to the Tutsi physical stereotype, some Tutsi ‘look Hutu’ and a good proportion of people fall somewhere between the two racialised ideals, there clearly also is 10 Radio et Television Libres des Milles Collines, an extremist Hutu radio station funded by Hutu extremists within Habyarimana’s inner circle, started broadcasting from July 1993 onwards. It disseminated virulent anti-Tutsi propaganda and urged on the killers during the genocide.
hotel rwanda – the challenges of historicising and commercialising genocide 179 substantive correlation between social identity and outward appearance. 11 The best that can be said of the fi lm’s depiction of the Hutu- Tutsi distinction is that it embodies the idea that identities are socially constructed. Overall, the explanation of Hutu-Tutsi confl ict provided by Hotel Rwanda does not make the genocide remotely credible. Mamdani eloquently warns against ahistorical approaches of the sort deployed in Hotel Rwanda: ‘…atrocity cannot be its own explanation. Violence cannot be allowed to speak for itself, for violence is not its own meaning. To be made thinkable it needs to be historicized’ (Mamdani 2001: 228-29). This is not to suggest that the cause of the Rwandan genocide lies in ancestral hatreds or age-old tribal antagonisms as is often suggested in the Western media. On the contrary, the manipulation of social identities by politicians and political parties for their own purposes and short-term gain in the post-independence period was central to infl aming Hutu-Tutsi animosities. The fi lm also hides from the viewer the intensifying struggle through the early 1990s for political power between factions of the ruling Hutu elite that precipitated the resort to genocide amongst extremists. Most immediately, the confl ict could not have escalated into a genocide of such scale and effi ciency without a degree of planning for mass violence against the Tutsi population as well as the mobilisation of both the state bureaucracy and the armed forces for this purpose. The Hutu-Tutsi cleavage and its intensifi cation into blind hatred, however, has a longer history than Hotel Rwanda would have us believe because it predates the Belgian colonial presence even though Rwanda’s colonial experience was integral to making genocide possible. The historical and political context A key observation of Mamdani’s study is that colonialism was the crucible in which the pre-colonial identities of Hutu and Tutsi were recast and mythologised in ways that would later contribute directly to the genocide. 12 Hotel Rwanda’s claim that ‘the Belgians created the divisions’ smacks of a ‘merrie Africa’ view of the pre-colonial past. Indeed, that assertion is patently false, for when Germany fi rst assert- 11 This is of course not to suggest that the essentialised reifi cations and racialised caricatures of Hutu and Tutsi that have actuated Rwandan politics for generations exist in reality. 12 Because pre-colonial Rwandan society was pre-literate many aspects of its history are hazy, and because competing interpretations of its past have been pressed into service for political ends much of Rwandan history is highly contested. The following synopsis, which draws substantially on Mamdani’s When Victims Become Killers, is off ered with due caution.
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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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