"Hotel Rwanda"

[NightTrain]

In 1994, while the U.S. news media obsessed over the O.J. Simpson murder trial, the Hutu army in Rwanda was busy committing genocide against one million of its fellow citizens, the Tutsis. As if I didn't already hate the mainstream media...! :grr:

What, exactly, is the difference between Hutus and Tutsis? Seems the Hutus have the darker skin and wider noses, while the Tutsis have the lighter skin and narrower noses. You can thank the Belgians for that artificial distinction, which led directly to the 1994 Tutsi holocaust (and I use that word deliberately).

HOTEL RWANDA is based on the true story of Paul Rusesabagina (Don Cheadle), the Hutu house manager of a four-star hotel who took in 1,628 Tutsi refugees at great personal risk. I hope this film affords Mr. Rusesabagina the respect that SCHINDLER'S LIST gave the late Oskar Schindler, but I wouldn't count on it. After all, who cares about a bunch of niggers? Right??? :puke:

This is a film that raises far more questions than it answers. Unfortunately, the questions it raises are ones that I've asked at least a thousand times in my relatively short life: Why don't people learn from past mistakes? Why didn't I hear about all that horror while it was occurring? Why don't the lives of non-whites matter more to the world community? Why do people allow artificially created differences to fill them with hatred for their fellow human beings?

Sitting in the row ahead of me was a black man who attended HOTEL RWANDA by himself. Throughout the film, I heard periodic sobs and sniffles emanating from that man. I wondered if he was Rwandan, or if he knew people who were murdered there in 1994. I wanted to ask him, but couldn't bring myself to do so.

Sorry if I'm rambling, but I'm still pretty shaken up over the horrors depicted in HOTEL RWANDA. It is an excellent film that I wish everybody would see, government leaders in particular. I would not, however, recommend it to folks who are susceptible to the cinematic equivalent of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to drown my sorrows in a pint of Dove's Irresistibly Raspberry ice cream, after which I plan to crawl into bed with my roommate's dog for an hour or two. If that doesn't help me to feel better, I'll move into a fucking cave! :cry:

[Maat]

1. I just do not know whether or not I have the intestinal fortitude

to see this film or not. So sad. And the hero sounds so brave. I hope that the film gets recognition.

[Rick Myers]

2. It's a 3-B movie...

3 boxes of tissues!!! :cry:

[Schema Thing]

3. Did you happen to notice the spanking they snuck in on Clinton?

I agree with your comments btw. I think every westerner should see this movie, and I would love to see it be pushed as a "message" winner at the Academies. That "message" being to politicians everywhere: "we care, and we DO want you to use the military (and agressively too) in situations like this, dammit".

[FrenchieCat]

23. Yep....That should be the message.....

That we care enough....Not just "politics as usual"...which is all that our politicians ever seem to react to!

See the one exception (well, he's not a true politician...he's a leader), so maybe that's why he cares)....

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=104&topic_id=2960206&mesg_id=2963833

[NC_Nurse]

4. Oh Nighttrain!

I'm so sorry! :hug:

I've asked myself those same questions about people for as long as I can remember....sounds like you are as susceptible to cinematic PTSD as I am. I have to allow myself plenty of time to pull it together after seeing a film like that. I hope you regain your hope/faith soon. I agree with you that it's contemptible that our media ignores crises like these in favor of sensationalist bullshit like OJ.

Hang in there!

[Kire]

5. a white woman was sobbing behind me

I didn't wonder if she was Belgian.

[NightTrain]

8. Well then, you're a much better human being than I am!

Feel better now?

[Kire]

12. only when I'm watching 'Bram Stoker's Dracula'

sorry about all the flamage

[DrWeird]

6. If you wish to learn more about Rwanda...

see the PBS Frontline episode: The Triumph of Evil.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/evil/

[Telly Savalas]

7. Or read "Shake Hands with the Devil" by Romeo Dallaire

Here's the amazon page.

Dallaire was the head of the peacekeeping mission there and offers his first hand experience of the events in this well written book.

[Stop_the_War]

9. I will see this movie.

I will check this movie out. Although I might cry alot.

[NightTrain]

10. It's awfully powerful stuff.

Oh, and welcome to DU! :hi:

[hector459]

11. I saw Mr. Paul Rusesabagina interviewed on TV.

I don't remember the show. I don't believe it was the MSM though because I don't usually watch those shows.

He is indeed a courageous man. I wept just seeing the movie trailers so I think I will not see the movie. My heart is aching enough already.
I have my country to mourn (USA), an innocent country that my country invaded to mourn (Iraq), and the rest of the world which doesn't seem to give a damn.

[journalist3072]

13. Susan Sarandon

I think Susan Sarandon had the comment of the day, when she was on Air America Radio recently, and said that as she left the theater, after viewing Hotel Rwanda, she commented to a friend "Do you remember what we were so obsessed with then? OJ Simpson."

And she was absolutely right.

From my perspective, the thing that upsets me is that after Rwanda happened, the international community as a whole said "never again." The international community promised to never turn a blind eye to genocide again, yet they have, with the situation in Sudan.

[AP]

15. I don't know, but I suspect that the US gives a lot of leeway to foreign

countries -- the former colonizers -- to make decisions over their former colonies.

I'm not forgiving the US, but France which is a security council member (right?) and Belgium (?) created the unstable situation intentionally -- they knew that internal instability could ensure that the former colonizers could rule from afar -- that they could rule without an army on the ground.

The US will but into another country when all the UN security council members are on board, or when the country they're butting into doesn't have deeply entrenched ties with a security council nation.

But when you start talking about former colonies, forget about it.

For example, say Yugoslavia was a former french colony and RW french politicians were making money selling them arms and extracting natural resources at cut-rate prices, do you think the US would be allowed to drop bombs on it until the fascist leader got the boot? Nope. But I suspect that that's what happened in Rwanda and is probably what's happening in Sudan.

Almost all African countries try to wrestle with the legacies inherited from their colonial periods. The former masters did little to help their former subjects to adapt to the modern technologies. European powers didn't care much about the education of the millions. Colonization wasn't intended to do anything else than promoting glory of the Europeans, extracting raw materials and making the life of the masters as pleasant as possible at the expense of all those who had to dig in the mines and supply cheap labor and bullet meal during war times.

Sudan in this respect isn't a different story from many other countries in Africa. Its borders weren't restricted to any ethnic and religious borders existing before the major push of the European powers to Africa during the 19th century. Some say that the colonial powers wanted to create mix ethnic and religious empires in order to control better the indigenous populations. By forcing anyone against anyone else they could strengthen their administrative control, some argue. If this was the principle reasoning, if there was a detailed blueprint for colonization, it wasn't applied everywhere. Instead the major delimitation force of any colonial adventure was the power of some other colonial empire.

Sudan is no exception to this rule. With no clear ethnic majority and large religious minorities it was created as a British colony surrounded by friendly and not so friendly European possessions. Squeezed between French, Belgium and Italian colonial domains and some still existing independent local authorities on the east, Sudan has been administered as it was - a world of coexisting Islamic, Christian and animalist beliefs, and also of different and traditionally conflicting ethnic groups*. It's true that during the final years of the British empire London began to use this diversity in order to delay the inevitable decolonization. The result was that the former masters made the transition to independence and national unity even more difficult, in some newborn countries even impossible without some additional territorial rearrangements...


http://www.ired.com/news/mkt/sudan.htm

[AP]

14. Something very interesting about this movie is that it doesn't need...

...a white person as the lens for looking at a problem where black people are the people really suffering.

IIRC, the Biko movie that came out a long time ago (which I didn't see) was based on a book (which I did read) by a white journalist. The book is very interesting and worth reading, but there are moments in the book where the white SA journalist who wrote the book acts like the book is about his suffering and his trauma, and not Biko's and not black South Africans'.

Other movies like the DeNiro diving movie, or fictional films like Bagger Vance insist on using the suffering of white characters to tell a story about the suffering of black people.

Even the Dallaire book (again, which I haven't read) has a write-up at Amazon that suggests there might be a white man lens in it: "The gruesome experience and his futile attempts to convince the international community to intervene left him with emotional scars that still haven't healed. He tried to commit suicide, was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, got a medical release from the military, and has had extensive therapy."

Yes, that's tragic. But if I'm going to spend time getting the story about how black Afircans suffered, I'd like to spend my time learning about how black Africans suffered.

I know this sounds harsh and it might not be entirely fair to Dallaire, and the Biko author. However, it's is just so unusual for Hollywood to make a movie about race (and I think a story about the ravages of post colonialism is a story about race) that doesn't make a big part of the story how white people have suffered. The more I see it, the more sensitive I am to that phenomenon.

So, I just have to say that I'm glad that the first movie about Rwanda is from the perspective a Huttu with a Tutsi wife and not about Dallaire or some other white person, no matter how noble that person might be, and is not a story which uses black characters as props for the white character's emotional journey.

So, without seeing this movie, I'm just going to say that this fact is one thing that will increase the chance that I go see it.

[Lisa]

20. I read the Dallaire book and have seen him speak in public ...

It's very interesting, and my impression is that he doesn't present himself as being an expert on African affairs -- or try to imply that he's speaking from the perspective of Africans in the conflict. He doesn't try to make us forget his identity as a white Canadian male from a military background. This might be partly due to it being his first book, plus he isn't trained as an academic. (There are plenty of academics and journalists who try to be authoritative, even though self-critiquing has been around for some time now and lenses/hermenetics etc. are widely discussed -- but I didn't get a vibe like that from Dallaire.) The time I saw him, anyway, he confined his comments to what he'd seen from his own perspective, and didn't try to make a lot of generalizations -- he admitted that it was confusing and bewildering, and that he didn't know a lot of the things that were going on at the time. In fact, he deferred to a woman in the audience who'd lived in Rwanda in the 1980s. He portrays it more as a personal biography than as an historical text about the conflict.

Although Dallaire's been critical of the way in which they made Nolte's character resemble him (claiming that the UN guy was a composite and then inserting specific details like the Canadian flag), I believe that he's way more concerned with a negative stereotype being used to discredit his testimony (and the upcoming documentary based on his book) than with "Hotel Rwanda" having an African protagonist. He's already had to put up with being called a failure and unreliable -- actually his drinking problem didn't start until after his tour, due to the PTSD. It won't be easy for him, having to deal with more accusations by the general public that he didn't do his job because he was drunk "like that guy in the movie". And ironically, it sounds like both he and the writers are on the same side (trying to point out the shortcomings of the Western reaction, etc.).

Unfortunate, because it sounds like a solid film -- and I certainly agree with AP's point that filtering the story through a white character (and certainly a non-African) can have some major disadvantages.

[AP]

21. Thanks for that. Just to clarify, in no way did I mean...

...to demean or discredit or minimize the experiences of Dallaire.

The things I was criticizing are more the actions of publishers, producers and their publicists.

They presume that the story white people will want to hear first is the story of how a white person experienced an ethnic or racial "other's" experiences, so they'll promote the hell out of the works by those people while it takes years and a lot of searchign to fnd stories like the one in Hotel Rwanda.

On a fictional level, think "Out of Africa."

[Lisa]

26. publishers and publicists ...

Agree totally with you on that. In my work I've met a number of people in "the industry" and I have to admit that it's made me reconsider my childhood hope of becoming a writer! I once spent a frustrating couple of hours trying to convince a PR person from a major publishing house that it was indeed worthwhile promoting a book about computer espionage in a Western city -- she seriously believed that "nobody there reads much" and that "there aren't a lot of people there who use computers". And I once did research for a writer whose publisher made so many demands about tours and interviews that he didn't have time to write -- then complained about his lack of productivity! Most of the authors I've talked to are great -- it's the apparatus surrounding them that can make you want to take a shower afterwards.

I didn't realize that Dallaire's book was being discussed much outside of Canada. Up here, one of the major reasons why people have been curious about it is our national involvement with peacekeeping (and a decades-long debate about what it means for our armed forces, and our society in general). Since a former Prime Minister of ours, Lester Pearson, got a Nobel Peace Prize for proposing UN peacekeeping forces in the first place -- if there is a failure not just with our people (e.g. Somalia) but any other place in the world, it makes Canadian headlines. A lot of people I know were reading the book to find out "what went wrong with the UN" specifically -- and since they already knew what happened to Dallaire in the end, they weren't expecting a travelogue with a happy ending, e.g. "white people go and have exotic adventures".

[AP]

16. For an excellent criticism of MSM's terrible coverage of Rwanda:

read this book.

The Hearts of Darkness: How White Writers Created the Racist Image of Africa
by Milton G. Allimadi

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0974003905/qid=1105934463/sr=1-7/ref=sr_1_7/104-9681892-7820722?v=glance&s=books

[leftynyc]

17. Saw it on Saturday

I walked out numb and and very angry. Surely the blackest mark on the Clinton presidency (also the United Nations) - and here it is happening again in Sudan. I wish it were getting more attention.

[FrenchieCat]

18. Please know that Wes Clark.....

Did want to take action in Rwanda. He was probably the only one....at the time a three star General. But the Clinton Admin was too scared that they might suffer U.S. casualties in the process and were not interested nor were they all that interested in the plight of those who were losing their lives. The Admin and the Pentagon didn't respond to Clark's requests and queries, and so he went to some lower level state officials attempting to get them to bring the matter up in congress......Nothing happened.

That's why when he saw a repeat happening in Kosovo (Clark, by then a four star)he was determined that there would be no repeat.

Clark was actually retired because of his zeal to stop the genocide. The Pentagon knives inserted themselves deeply into his back and were turned just so.

Waiting for the General
By Elizabeth Drew
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16795
Clark displeased the defense secretary, Bill Cohen, and General Hugh Shelton, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, by arguing strenuously that—contrary to Clinton's decision— the option of using ground troops in Kosovo should remain open. But the problem seems to have gone further back. Some top military leaders objected to the idea of the US military fighting a war for humanitarian reasons. Clark had also favored military action against the genocide in Rwanda.

http://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001104.html
Clark was almost alone in pushing for a humanitarian intervention in Rwanda.

Pulitzer award winning Samantha Power for her book "A Problem from Hell" : America and the Age of Genocide
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/006054164...
http://www.kiddingonthesquare.com/2003/12/redeeming_wes...
The following excerpts from Power's book give the details. The narrative surrounding the quotes was written by another person commenting on the book. Note especially Power's last comment below on Clark's pariah status in Washington:

General Clark is one of the heroes of Samantha Power's book. She introduces him on the second page of her chapter on Rwanda and describes his distress on learning about the genocide there and not being able to contact anyone in the Pentagon who really knew anything about it and/or about the Hutu and Tutsi.

She writes, "He frantically telephoned around the Pentagon for insight into the ethnic dimension of events in Rwanda. Unfortunately, Rwanda had never been of more than marginal concern to Washington's most influential planners" (p. 330) .

He advocated multinational action of some kind to stop the genocide. "Lieutenant General Wesley Clark looked to the White House for leadership. 'The Pentagon is always going to be the last to want to intervene,' he says. 'It is up to the civilians to tell us they want to do something and we'll figure out how to do it.' But with no powerful personalities or high-ranking officials arguing forcefully for meaningful action, midlevel Pentagon officials held sway, vetoing or stalling on hesitant proposals put forward by midlevel State Department and NSC officials" (p. 373).

According to Power, General Clark was already passionate about humanitarian concerns, especially genocide, before his appointment as Supreme Allied Commander of NATO forces in Europe.

She details his efforts in behalf of the Dayton Peace Accords and his brilliant command of NATO forces in Kosovo. Her chapter on Kosovo ends, "The man who probably contributed more than any other individual to Milosvevic's battlefield defeat was General Wesley Clark. The NATO bombing campaign succeeded in removing brutal Serb police units from Kosovo, in ensuring the return on 1.3 million Kosovo Albanians, and in securing for Albanians the right of self-governance."

"Yet in Washington Clark was a pariah. In July 1999 he was curtly informed that he would be replaced as supreme allied commander for Europe. This forced his retirement and ended thirty-four years of distinguished service. Favoring humanitarian intervention had never been a great career move."

[julialnyc]

19. you should see the documentary "The Last Just Man"

It left me weeping.........it was one of the best films I've ever seen.

[AP]

22. People interested in African politics should also

watch the documentary Llumumba: Death of a Prophet.

[Sparkle]

24. I do plan to see this movie.

And soon.

[movie_girl99]

25. i had planned on seeing this film on Thursday

while taking the day off. I cant bear to be here(work) with all of these shrub lovers so i figured I'd spend my day educating myself on this horrible tragedy.