In the western world, the topic of the Rwandan genocide does not come up much. It is very rarely taught, even at university level. Many do not even know that, in a 100-day period in 1994, somewhere around one million people were massacred in one of the starkest acts of brutality in recorded human history. Knowledge of the genocide, if found, often stems from Terry George’s 2004 film Hotel Rwanda, for which Don Cheadle won the Oscar for Best Actor, due to his portrayal of protagonist Paul Rusesabagina. As the story goes, the acting manager of the Hotel des Milles Collines risked life and limb, as well as every Rwandan franc to his name, to personally rescue and protect more than 1,200 people. He braved the streets of Kigali and Gitarama, using his connections and wiles to orchestrate Hutu killers, UN forces and the president of the Sabena corporation in order to protect his charges. It is a truly remarkable story.
A story told exclusively by Rusesabagina himself.
The film is lauded, essentially, because Terry George bothered to show people that there was a genocide – just about. The most visceral scene in a film said to portray the murder of close to a million people comes from a few seconds of (real) footage shown on a television. The killing, torture and desperate flight of Tutsis, ‘moderate’ Hutus and unwitting Twa people from the carnage plays second fiddle to two hours of making Rusesabagina appear to be the African Oskar Schindler. But Hollywood loves a hero, and so he became one.
This was the cue for Rusesabagina to launch a career giving human rights talks around the world, particularly in the USA. He opened foundations to care for the orphans of genocide, and those of AIDS. Even Oprah Winfrey wanted a piece of him. Rusesabagina has often spoken of a need for diplomacy and co-operation to preclude such atrocities from ever being repeated. The hero of ‘Hotel Rwanda’ is now an advocate of peace, the winner of such prestigious human rights awards as the Presidential Medal of Freedom – bestowed upon him by George W. Bush – and the Lantus Award. He is also an international spokesman for Rwanda, a country which he does not visit – and would not welcome him if he did.
Of all the enemies to have in Rwanda, long-term President Paul Kagame is the worst Rusesabagina could have. The slanging match has stood the test of time. Kagame railed against Hotel Rwanda, claiming Rusesabagina’s self-serving account made him a false hero. Rusesabagina, despite claiming to forgive the former refugee and Rwandan Patriotic Front general, takes every opportunity to lambast the government. Not all of his claims are unfounded – Rwanda’s human rights record still leaves much to be desired – but Rusesabagina caused outrage by suggesting a retributive genocide against Hutus was in the offing. His claims against the Tutsi are disturbing, given his assumed role as their protector. In his memoirs, the interestingly named An Ordinary Man, he mused over Tutsi wives murdered by their husbands. Tutsi wives, he then claimed, were also guilty of murder. He went further, accusing the RPF of conducting a simultaneous genocide – while the RPF certainly did kill as they made their way south, Rusesabagina was engaging in victim-blaming of the highest order.
Kagame, an authoritarian leader who pushes the narrative that the RPF invasion was the sole saviour of the nation, is an unsurprising agitator. Ibuka, the umbrella genocide survivors’ society, is not. After Rusesabagina accepted the Lantus Award, an Ibuka spokesperson claimed that he was in fact a liar, one who had made currency of the horror for his own gain. Terry George sprung to the former concierge’s defence, citing a smear campaign against the subject of his most famous work.
But the claims against Rusesabagina piled up, not least from those who sought shelter in Hotel des Milles Collines. Pasa Mwenenganucye, subject to passive-aggressive movie portrayal as ‘fictional’ insubordinate hotel receptionist Gregoire in Hotel Rwanda, accused him of ejecting refugees who could not pay from their rooms. Edouard Kayihura, a survivor-turned-prosecution lawyer, released his own account that backed up Mwenenganucye’s testimony. Kayihura revealed that the situation was so dire that refugees secretly procured official orders from Sabena, the owners of the Milles Collines, as well as the Red Cross, to make Rusesabagina desist. The lawyer spoke ominously of Paul Rusesabagina’s power grab, using quotes made in the years following Hotel Rwanda to show his dangerous trait for making false equivalencies between the Hutu Power murderers and the RPF, or perhaps denying the genocide altogether. His charitable ventures after the war, Kayihura notes, had in fact benefited nobody but himself. Odette Nyiramilimo, a doctor and fellow Milles Collines survivor who, like Rusesabagina, had her story told by Philip Gourevitch as part of his ground-breaking 1998 book We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, was also shocked at the nature of his rise to notoriety.
Nyiramilimo’s problem was with the nature of the story he had told George and the makers of Hotel Rwanda. Rusesabagina’s tale, faithfully transferred to the silver screen, was almost laughably self-serving. Says fictional UN leader Colonel Oliver (a woeful parody of General Romeo Dallaire, whose desperate actions in the face of total destruction and bureaucratic incompetence deserves more credit than they are given): “You’re the smartest man here, Paul. You could run this place”. The film also shows Rusesabagina rescuing a busload of orphans – something which stunned Nyiramilimo. How, she asked George in a letter, could there have been a busload of orphans delivered to the hotel? She certainly had not seen them.
Even if Rusesabagina was a true protector of people, his role as the sole saviour rankles. For one, the UN presence at the Hotel des Milles Collines was an important deterrent. So too was the high-profile nature of a number of the refugees, which had prompted international media focus on the hotel. The collective support of the refugees, who shared everything they had, was as much to do with day-to-day survival as anything Rusesabagina provided. The film made him out to be Schindler, however, and he was loath to disagree with the sentiment. As a man whose experience of the genocide was sheltered, and his post-genocide experiences even more so, it is hard to understand why he is a voice of authority.
It is possible that Paul Rusesabagina is a genuine hero, a man who saved more than a thousand people at a time when to save even one was a miracle. Or he could have been wholly selfish, sometimes complicit, or even actively willing to endanger those who needed protection. He could be the award-winning humanitarian or a bona fide genocide apologist who equates Tutsi crimes against humanity as equal to those of the Hutu – in a time when the Rwandan government vehemently decries ethnic divisions. His stature grew thanks to a Hollywood production that cared little for how much truth his story held, but the storybook nature of it.
Somehow Hotel Rwanda has a happy ending, which is almost sickening. What movie producers fail to understand is that genocide cannot be happy, even when it ends. There is horror, and then the post-horror struggle to rebuild, or even to survive. There are not heroes and villains – particularly in Rwanda, when being a killer was the most ordinary profession during those hundred days in 1994. Some people made the choice to save others at great personal cost, some chose to save their families, and some saved themselves by fleeing. None of those choices were ‘heroic’ or ‘cowardly’, or anything else beside a bid for survival. Sometimes, we are desperate to identify individuals, and give them such labels as ‘hero’ or ‘villain’, to try to justify events as if they were a movie plot. It leads to people such as Paul Rusesabagina gaining a status, and the influence such status affords, with serious doubts over how much they deserve it.
It is nothing new to say that Hollywood should not be seen as an arbiter of historical record. But its desperation to add a narrative to events is indicative of a wider issue – that we make heroes too easily, and are often left disappointed. Paul Rusesabagina still makes his living being the man depicted in Hotel Rwanda. Perhaps, when more people outside of Africa are willing to learn more about the events of 1994 in Rwanda, his legacy will be in more doubt.
The Blurst of Times 