Remembering Rwanda

Just recently, I came across the film titled “Hotel Rwanda”, topbilled by Don Cheadle, Nick Nolte and Sophie Okonedo. It’s a story about the horrible experience of the minority Tutsis who were murdered by the majority Hutus and this happened last 1994. It took me until recently to have the courage to watched the film however; I have read the original book where the film is based. The book was written by French journalist Philip Gourevitch and it is titled, “We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families”. The book was published in 1998 and it is in my private library since 2003. I have to reconcile myself to the different stories of Rwanda by watching the film and learn.

Rwanda nowadays is far from the horrors of 1994. Hutus are the majority of the country and the Tutsis are the minority. The rebels are the Tutsis and the turn of events became the dreaded fall of the Hutus of Rwanda but genocide claimed innocent lives. The Tutsi rebels killed President Habyarimana by shooting down the presidential plane, the Hutus went on a rampage. They were on the radio days before the shooting down of the presidential plane saying that the Hutus need to kill the Tutsis. Radios in this impoverished country are a necessity and it played a crucial role in the massive murder. Afterwards, just overnight, the rampage begun. Neighbors killing their Tutsi neighbors, using machete, they chop arms, heads, bodies; they used guns to murder little children, women, men and everyone they believed to be Tutsis. It’s the worse form of human denigrations much more, it is atrocious. They are killing the Tutsis because they claimed Rwanda as the only country for the Hutus. It’s unfair but it is the real story that came out of Rwanda. In this story, the government is the one instigating the genocide against the Tutsis.

While many in the international community are arguing at that time at the United Nations whether genocide is happening in Rwanda and unusually silent is the deafening debates at the Security Council. The genocide of Rwanda is one of the ghosts that are still haunting down Bill Clinton and the rest of his contemporaries because there was no ready international mediation policy in Rwanda. They left the poor people of Rwanda murdered right under their noses. I can also recall on that time that even we, Filipinos are guilty of non-interference. Even the ASEAN at that time is unusually silent. Everybody around the world is silent. We kept a blind eye. We suddenly became deaf. We do not care anymore. What has happened in Rwanda will forever haunt us.

Imagine driving in a road that is filled with dead bodies, what will it be? How will it be? It will not be a smooth as it can be because dead bodies are not like marshmallows that will melt once it will be dead. It is the worse form of human afflictions. In the book, according to Gourevitch, South Africa Archbishop Desmund Tutu addresses a congregation in a football field in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda in 1995 and all he could say is to hush the congregation from wailing and crying. He can not speak because the people are crying out for their loved ones, their wives and husbands, mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, cousins and friends who are all murdered in the name of race supremacy. The Hutu power the modern Hitler. The Hutus are the Armageddon and Hitler rolled into one.

The only beacon of hope in both the book and the movie is the gentleman and Hutu hotel executive Paul Rusesabagina. He worked for the Hotel des Mille Collines at heart of Kigali. He is married to a Tutsi. He is the modern Schindler. He has helped more Tutsis that could be possibly ushered into his hotel. He negotiated for their safety. He even bought them using his money and the money he got from the former hotel he worked with. He bribed Hutu military officers into protection. He feared yes, he feared that one day, all of them will be killed by the Hutu militias. He got nothing but plain courage to live one more day for his family. He sheltered a total of 1268 Tutsis in his hotel. He has lived to tell the story of Rwanda to the entire world. He shamed the French, the Americans, the British and many others, including us. The genocide of Rwanda left nearly a million corpses in the streets of the impoverished country in Africa. Their story could possibly be ours.

Hotel Rwanda and the book written by Philip Gourevitch is an unequivocal proof that men can be both disastrous and murderous when they are agitated by poverty and mis-education. The story of Rwanda is the interplay between power and poverty, between scrupulous and unscrupulous politicians, between the haves and the have-nots, between Hutus and the Tutsis. If we are not extra careful, it will be us too. We will be like Rwanda if we turn a blind eye. It’s a lesson we have to learn. It is history that gave us Rwanda now, it is history that will teach us the harshest lessons, I hope we are learning too. I pray we will remember Rwanda.