The Path is Clear

“In 1994 approximately 800,000 Tutsis and Hutu moderates were hacked to death in a carefully organized program of genocide. It continues to be a controversial event because of the apparent indifference of the international community to the plight of the Tutsi.”
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"If the pictures of tens of thousands of human bodies being gnawed on by dogs do not wake us out of our apathy, I do not know what will." 
Undersecretary-General of the United Nations Kofi Annan in 1994, as quoted in The East Africa 18 March 1996.


When Paul Rusesabagina went to get supplies for his hotel, he was told that a path had been cleared that would safely return him to the Hotel des Mille Colines. In a military society, one would assume that a clear path was safe from soldiers. In 1994 Rwanda, the clear path meant clear of civilians--- Paul Rusesabagina found this out for himself when he drove over hundreds of bodies thinking it was bad road conditions. At this moment I understood the progression of genocide in Rwanda and the international community’s inability to respond effectively to the crisis.

This weekend I took the opportunity to watch Terry George’s Hotel Rwanda and was disturbed by the amount of civil disobedience that ensued. In some of the most horrifying scenes, Rwandans had to see entire families be slashed and sliced, terrorized by local military leaders and brutally beaten and then killed for no reason other than their identity.

Some of the most telling scenes involved Paul, a Hutu and his wife a Tutsis who by some sort of social standard should not have been married or a reporter Jack Daglish (Joaquin Phoenix) who questioned best friends on their identity and found out that they both identified separately as Hutu and Tutsi. The differences between the Hutu’s and the Tutsi’s are irrelevant but make you ponder the reality that these people lived in measuring noses, or the circumference of the face. Also frustrating was the challenge that regular Hutu people had with accepting Tutsi’s and vice versa.

The film evoked strong emotions for me and terrified me to learn the level of apathy the Western world had to the disappearance of human rights. In the preface of this blog, I quoted Kofi Annan who stated “"If the pictures of tens of thousands of human bodies being gnawed on by dogs do not wake us out of our apathy, I do not know what will." This was a reality that absolutely no intervention by the United Nations or any other body was made while 800 000 Tutsi and Hutu sympathizers were killed. In the movie, Colonel Oliver notes that the UN is in Rwanda as peace keepers not peace makers and this was more than true as the UN kept reporting that “acts of genocide” were being committed.

It is in these moments that the international community including countries like Canada and the United States failed the Rwandan people. The United Nations refused to intervene in any meaningful way instead maintained a status quo that allowed Hutu rebels to kill an unknown number to Tutsi people with projections set at at least 800 000 with some numbers higher than one million. I understand that the United Nations is not an international government; involvement in the United Nations means the commitment of countries and governments. I also understand a country’s sovereign right to govern over its people. But something is wrong in the picture when hundreds of thousands of people are being cut up in the streets by a group of rebel soldiers. There is an immediate response that is needed because it is no longer about a government; it is about the individual who has done no crime that is being killed in cultural profiling. Paul Rusesabagina understood the dignity of human life no matter the cultural profile and took in 1200 refugees in his hotel and was their life-line in the period of genocide while the international community wiped their hands clean of any wrong doing. It is more than just wrong, it is shameful especially when governments like China had a choice to cut off supplies of machetes to the Hutu rebels and did nothing or governments in Europe had the ability to cut off supply lines and did nothing.

A UN task force should have been immediately been deployed with commitment from governments across the world to deploy these troops to restore a government and end the genocide instead of letting bodies become dog food. Human rights need to continue to be paramount and the first thing that govern bodies like the United Nations and even greater our diplomacy. What would our world look like if we put families ahead of oil? or resources over trade?

There were many shortcomings in Rwanda even within the Hotel des Mille Colines where workers temporarily refused to work under Ruseasabagina’s leadership because he identified as a Hutu even though they had worked with him for a number of year previously. The international community acted in just the same way as these workers but unlike these workers, they never changed their stance when 10, 100, 100, 100 000, 500 000 or 800 000 humans were killed. We are given a choice to use government in ways to improve society and create innovative change, with this knowledge we can also fall into a regressive state where politics come ahead of human dignity. The latter is ultimately the most dangerous because it kills diversity, openness and love and sends us into chaos, unfortunately too often government chooses chaos over sensibility.


For More information:

Hotel Rwanda. Dir. Terry George. Don Cheadle, Sophie Okonedo and Joaquin Phoenix. Metropolitan Filmexport [France] | MGM/United Artists [United States], 2005. DVD.



Up Next: Thanks to those waiting patiently about my adventures learning Swahili and reading Kenyan literature, my books arrived late from the library--- so I’m looking to write those posts this week.