Hotel Rwanda

Went to see Hotel Rwanda last Friday - seriously cannot praise this film highly enough.

It features the true story of Paul (Don Cheadle), the mild mannered manager of a four star hotel in the Rwandan capital Kigali during the 1994 genocide. When the country descends into madness, Paul and his Tutsi wife, Tatiana (Sophie Okonedo) shelter over a thousand Tutsi refugees fleeing the slaughter. When the small band of inept UN peacekeepers finally pulls out, he is forced to resort to bribing officials in order to survive.

Quite apart from being one of the most moving films I've ever seen, it was, in a macabre way, fascinating to see the sheer power of media-driven hatred if left unchecked...

Ethnic tensions between Hutus and Tutsis have never been far from the surface in Rwanda, exacerbated by the role of the Belgian colonists in separating them and making one (the Hutu majority) subordinate to the other (the Tutsis). When the Hutu President's plane was brought down in 1994, state radio was quick to blame the "Tutsi cockroaches" and instructed machete wielding militias to "cut down the tall trees". In the ensuing slaughter, 800,000 Rwandans died in the space of three months, the majority of them Tutsi; ultimately the rebel Tutsi Rwandan Peoples' Front defeated the Hutu army and thousands of Hutus fled. In the face of obvious slaughter, the International community (still smarting from the Somalia debacle) wrung its hands, actually withdrawing soldiers that had been protecting civilians (who, of course, were subsequently slaughtered).

Afterwards, the UN Security Council set up the Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda...based in Arusha, Tanzania, this has so far convicted 19 people and acquited 3; the Rwandan courts have also tried suspects, and several have already received the death penalty and been executed.

The BBC's page on the Rwandan genocide is definitely worth reading in its own right.