Hotel Rwanda

In a very brief visit to Kigali in 1998 (which did not extend beyond the airport) President Clinton described the mass killings in Rwanda four years earlier as "the most intensive slaughter in this blood-filled century we are about to leave." (Philip Gourevitch has estimated that Tutsis were dying at an average rate of 333 an hour during the summer months of massacre back in 1994. )

"In such countries genocide is not too important", Francois Mitterand had earlier observed; his government had consistently supported the Hutu Power dictatorship. Yet for those of us at a safe distance from it, the lasting importance of this most intensive of slaughters remains the set of lessons that it can teach us about individual (and international) accountability and blame.

The first challenge is to understand how this particularly virulent variety of identity politics evolved in the first place. In Terry George's Hotel Rwanda there's a bar conversation in which a local man informs a foreign journalist that the Belgians purposefully engineered two distinct tribes in the colony based on prvailing notions of racial morphology. This is at best a radical simplification of the historical background.

Before reading Phillip Gourevitch's We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families the best account I had read was Kapuscinski's. The Polish journalist's take on the context could be summarised thus:

• Unlike every other African state there is hardly any genuine ethnic diversity in Rwanda. In fact, there is just one tribe, the Banyarwanda, which is split into two social castes, known historically as the Hutu and the Tutsi
• After independence the Belgians sponsored a regime which to them looked progressive because it overturned the old Tutsi-dominated feudal system, but was in fact a wobbly and paranoid Hutu-dominated dictatorship that eventually sought a final solution to its post-colonial difficulties.

Gourevitch's version is similar but more complete in terms of detail during each key period:

• There were once two separate peoples in pre-colonial Rwanda: a stocky Bantu people from the south (Hutu) and a lanky Nilotic people from the north (Tutsi). The original inhabitants of this mountainous little country were cave-dwelling pigmies called the Twa that now account for just 1% of the population
• Whatever ethnic distinctions that originally existed were soon diluted to the point of meaninglessness as Hutu and Tutsi intermarried and came to share the same language
• The distinction evolved into a largely sociological one: identifying the place of each individual in the feudal state
• When Africa was carved up in Berlin in 1885 the borders of Rwanda, unlike many of the other colonies, essentially preserved the pre-colonial socio-political realities
• European racial science incorporated a body of ideas known as the Hamitic myth (based on the story of Noah's son Ham) which appeared to justify the enslavement of darker Sub-Saharan peoples and in this instance the right of the Tutsis to lord it over the Hutus
• When the Belgians introduced ethnic identity cards in 1933 mobility between the two groups effectively ceased
• By then many of the colonists had started to favour the Hutus whose political subjugation to the minority Tutsis seemed to echo the fate of the Flemish in Belgium
• Ethnic animus began to surge in the second half of the twentieth century, especially when rogue intellectuals allied to President Habyarimana's Hutu dictatorship systematically fostered the idea of Hutu supremacy, carefully inverting the Hamitic myth to this end.
  

As the Tutsi were traditionally herdsmen while the Hutu were poorer cultivators, Gourevitch draws on the biblical myth of Cain and Abel to throw light on this particular fratricide. Yet throughout the book he appears to struggle with the issue of blame; as an American Jew he is acutely aware of the precedents, but clearly finds this instance of mass inhumanity rather harder to pin down.

For a start there's no obvious prime instigator in the Hitler or Pol Pot mould. Into that gap step aggregate culprits - Hutu supremecist broadcasters, cynical neocolonialists, and slightly more tenuously, the 'international community' and of course, the French. Then there are all the local structural features of Rwandan society: impunity, cronyism, ethncity, feudalism, Hamitism etc. However, cultural factors such as the rise of art and technology have an solid alibi here which might lead us to question the extent of their role leading up to the Nazi Holocaust.

Gourevitch also describes how the rural populations in Rwanda run a kind of swarm-attack neighbourhood watch system (something similar operates in Alotenango near our home in Guatemala) and speculates whether the unthinking communal response to the order to "do your work" was in some senses an inversion of this social mechanism.

"If everybody is implicated, then implication becomes meaningless" Gourevitch admits, whilst insisting that those that planned the genocide intended it to appear planless − a spontaneous popular response to the President's assassination − and worked hard in the months afterwards to further desensitise those outside observers already inclined to view it as indistinguishable from the general messiness of African tribal history.

Hotel Rwanda shows us the actions of one man who joined the ranks of the righteous by dent of denying the imperative so many other Hutus chose to obey. Like Oscar Schindler Paul Rusesabagina carried an admission card to the camp of the perpetrators, and was in his professional life a similar wheeler-dealer that stored up favours with a nexus of petty bribes.

In the end Rusesabagina gave sanctuary to around 1000 Tutsis in the Hotel Mille Collines, some of them wives and family members of the Hutus Power politicians that were leading the killings outside. The hotel manager's bourgeois ordinariness belied what Gourevitch praises as a "rare conscience." It seems that many who participated in the genocide also protected some Tutsis, as if to exonerate themselves for the killings. Survivors have been inclined to blame these individuals more as their actions appear to betray an awareness of the difference between right and wrong that others claim to have lost amidst the pressure to conform.

Rusesabagina's story is made-to-measure for a cinematic narrative about these almost incomprehensible events as it takes place in comparatively civilised isolation from the worst of the carnage, yet clearly imparts the ethical choices available. His character and actions make for an interesting contrast with those of humanitarian groups who flocked to Central Africa in the aftermath and ended up being, in Gourevitch's words, "exploited as caterers to the single largest society of fugitive criminals against humanity ever assembled". $1bn was spent on the Hutu refugee camps in Zaire, a "rump genocidal state" whose occupants (many still terrorised and militarised by Hutu Power thugs) thus enjoyed an equivalent average income of twice that of the remaining occupants of the ravaged country they left behind. Many of the Hutus did eventually return, thus posing a problem that the Germans and the Jews never really had to face on a large scale - post-traumatic cohabitation.

One key piece of luck that Paul Rusesabagina and his dependants benefitted from was the government's oversight in not disconnecting his fax line. In the film we see him calling the head office of his Belgian employers, Sabena, but in fact he made calls direct to the French government, the military outfitters of the Hutu génocidaires. One of the most striking scenes in the movie is Paul's speech to the hotel's guests where he advises them to call up all their foreign friends: "You must tell them what will happen to us... say goodbye. But when you say goodbye, say it as if you are reaching through the phone and holding their hand. Let them know that if they let go of that hand, you will die. We must shame them into sending help."