It’s April 19th 1994, and a genocide is taking place in Rwanda.
A year earlier on April 23rd 1993 the Holocaust Memorial Museum is founded. The museum is dedicated to the premise that the systematic slaughter of one people by another is wrong, so wrong that the American people will never allow it.
Hotel Rwanda is the true story of Paul Rusesabagina, played by Don Cheadle, the manager of a 5 star hotel who saves 1200 people from the Tsutsi genocide. The general tale is simple enough. Paul as a hotel manager of a prestigious hotel is able to exploit his contacts and his resources to buy enough time to be saved by the Tsutsi rebels that overthrew the murderous Hutu faction.
Watching Hotel Rwanda shames the west. Paul could have at any point in time saved his own skin and the skin of his family. He could have walked away from the Hotel, from Rwanda and into security. But he chose not to. And he did this not to save his friends or his family, but to save 1200 random strangers that he did not know.
Instead of Paul’s heroism the lone super-power was so determined to avoid intervening in Rwanda that the WhiteHouse spokesman said: There are acts of genocide taking place. Not that there is a genocide, but acts of genocide. Because if there had been a genocide the US would have had to intervene.
Maybe Clinton was afraid of another Somalian fiasco. Maybe we, the west, felt that it was just another bit of African’s killing African’s. Nothing to worry ourselves about.
When reading about the founding of Israel, we learn the contempt the founding fathers had for support from outside powers. They knew that if they were to depend on someone else they were to to sign their own death warrants. The moral lesson from Rwanda is the same. That if you expect outside powers to intervene on your behalf you are foolish. That the west will not intervene, but will at a later point construct a monument to your suffering.
The more I study history and observe the world, the more I wonder whether Woody Allen was more of a genius than I thought. In Hannah and Her Sisters one of his characters remarks on the Holocaust: What we should be asking is not why it happened but why doesn’t it happen more often.
On a final note, if you want to read a detailed description of the blood bath in Rwanda, I recommend the book We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda. The book does a lot to cover the details of the carnage and provides some historical context.