60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

hotel rwanda – the challenges of historicising and commercialising genocide 187
genocide more tolerable to a mass audience. It is also partly a result of
trying to communicate an optimistic message about the ultimate triumph
of human benevolence and partly a product of the decision to
focus on a case that is unrepresentative of this catastrophe.
The pervasiveness of this propensity becomes strikingly evident when
the fi lm is compared with Paul Rusesabagina’s restrained account of
the genocide in his autobiography, An Ordinary Man, published in
early 2006. Hotel Rwanda conspicuously underplays the miserable
conditions under which refugees crowded together for those 76 days
in the Milles Collines. Unlike the fi lm where Rusesabagina had a
spacious suite almost exclusively reserved for his family, in reality he
shared it with up to 40 people. It became so crowded that his wife
had to reserve a space next to her for him to sleep at night. Water and
electricity supplies to the hotel were already cut in mid-April. The
swimming pool, the only source of water, held less than two months’
reserve at a quota of 1.5 gallons per person per day. Occupants were
thus restricted to dipping the small, plastic, wastepaper bins in their
rooms in its yellowing water twice daily. In addition to drinking,
cooking and washing, this meagre supply had to be used to fl ush toilets
clogged with a build-up of excrement as well. While Rusesabagina’s
description of the situation as one of ‘people crammed together
in the rancid half-light, each nursing their own horrors’ is understated,
scenes of the Milles Collines in Hotel Rwanda too often take on
the aspect of a somewhat crowded holiday camp (Rusesabagina 2006:
110-14, 131, 139).
The penchant for romanticism is, however, nowhere more marked
than in the clumsy wrapping-up of the story at the end of the fi lm.
The improbable saving of the UN convoy from an Interahamwe mob
through a fortuitous RPF ambush is inept and the subsequent depiction
of an all too orderly refugee camp with its all too ample medical
facilities is another example of the movie’s tendency to underplay the
wretchedness of the Rwandan situation. Most conspicuously, however,
the fi lm succumbs to a cloying sentimentality with its conventionally
Hollywood ending. 34 One piece of shameless distortion is that
the fi lm’s ending gives one the impression that Paul and his family
pass through the refugee camp on their way to Tanzania and then on
to Belgium, picking up his nieces and a bunch of orphans for good
34 The fi lm conveniently neglects to inform viewers that Rusesabagina lost more than
15 members of his extended family including his mother-in-law, one of her daughterin-laws
and six grandchildren (Rusesabagina 2006: 173-75; Sunday Times Magazine
5/6/2005). See also http://www.wweek.com/editorial/3109/5893/, accessed on 24
February 2006.