'Rwanda' Turns Back to Genocide

The world has turned its back on Paul Rusesabagina once before.

In April 1994, he was manager of the luxurious Hotel Mille Collines in the Rwandan capital of Kigali. Hundreds of Tutsi civilians sought refuge inside the walls of his hotel. As genocidal Hutu extremists massed along the Mille Collines’ perimeter, Rusesabagina called for help. The US and its allies in the UN Security Council shamelessly ignored Rusesabagina’s cry. The top UN peacekeeper in Rwanda at the time, Lt. Gen. Romeo Dallaire, recounts in his memoirs: “the people in the Mille Collines were like live bait being toyed with by a wild animal, at constant risk of being killed and eaten.”

Three years ago, one-time Harvard crew heavyweight Keir Pearson ’90 learned from a journalist friend how Rusesabagina risked his own life to save hundreds of others from near-certain slaughter. The story piqued the interest of Belfast-born filmmaker Terry George, a one-time Oscar nominee best known for the screenplay In the Name of the Father (1993). George searched for a Hollywood studio that would bring Rusesabagina’s story to the silver screen. But several top Hollywood execs refused to put their money behind the film. “They all thought it was a good script, but they weren’t interested in making it,” George admits in a recent interview.

The world almost turned its back on Rusesabagina once again.

But George persevered, and ultimately he scraped together funding from foreign investors. Actor Don Cheadle of Oceans Eleven fame agreed to play Rusesabagina, and MGM signed on as the distributor. “It was always nerve-racking that the money would fall through,” the director says. But the scent of success should put George’s nerves at ease. Hotel Rwanda garnered a Golden Globe nomination for best drama Monday, and Cheadle grabbed a best actor nomination as well.

George and MGM couldn’t have picked a more opportune moment to release a film about African genocide. Sudan’s systematic elimination of Black Muslims in Darfur evokes memories of the Rwandan slaughter. But George says the timing of the film’s opening is entirely coincidental—“we made it as fast as we could,” he says. And George rightly notes that “Hotel” is not overtly polemical. “What I wanted to do with the film was let the political events unfold as they were and let people make there own judgments,” George says.

Nonetheless, almost all viewers of Hotel should come away with a few common conclusions. First, at the time of the Rwandan conflict, then-UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali described the situation as “Hutus killing Tutsis and Tutsis killing Hutus.” Dallaire calls this “the myth of the double genocide.” Indeed, the ethnic Tutsi rebels who liberated Kigali at the end of the civil war certainly did commit reprehensible atrocities. But Rwanda—like Darfur—was a one-sided slaughter.

Second, the Clinton White House’s claim in 1994 that the US had “taken a leading role in efforts to protect the Rwandan people” is the worst lie that administration ever told. Rusesabagina says that most Americans fled the country in the opening days of the slaughter. George masterfully crafts a screenplay that highlights the United States’ complicity.

Clinton’s visage appears briefly in the film—when the camera rests on a copy of Time Magazine with the forty-second president plastered on the cover. But we keenly feel his absence. And in a singularly eerie scene, State Department spokeswoman Christine Shelly is heard on TV as she tries to deny that the situation on the ground in Rwanda rises to the level of genocide. Shelly’s words roundly contradict the reality on the screen. George chooses not to show Shelly’s face—in an apparent attempt to accentuate America’s emotional distance from the horrors in the heart of Africa.

George’s crowning accomplishment is that he forces his American viewers to finally confront the Rwandan reality. He gives his audience a bit of a free pass by choosing to tone down the most jarring imagery. “You couldn’t replicate what took place in this particular slaughter, because most of it was by machete and was brutal, primitive killing,” he says.

But George was determined to win a PG-13 appalation from the Motion Picture Association. “In actual fact, you don’t see anything that’s categorically going to lead to an R rating,” George says. He shoots rape scenes in shadow. He shows piles of corpses, but he steers clear of horror film techniques. “I wanted it to be available to the widest possible audience,” George says.

The movie will likely score big at the box office, and that might make Hollywood moneymen less dismissive of thoughtful Africa-focused films. But will Hotel Rwanda redirect America’s attention to the humanitarian crises of our day? Rusesabagina thinks so. “Whenever people are informed, that has an impact,” he says. George adds that he “felt good about the notion that we would at least stimulate people to get involved and mobilize.”

Unfortunately, history tells a different tale. Schindler’s List hit theaters in March 1994—just as State Department officials were honing their foot-dragging techniques so that America could shirk its duty to intervene in Rwanda. No doubt Hotel will generate Oscar buzz. But will it increase ordinary Americans’ awareness of genocide? The outlook is grim. But George and Rusesabagina have a track record of defying all odds.

—Staff writer Daniel J. Hemel can be reached at hemel@fas.harvard.edu