hotel rwanda

finally got a chance to see the film “hotel rwanda” this past weekend. i am sure that not even the filmmakers hoped to capture the scale of what happened that april in 1994, but hopefully depct scenes that, point to the real life turn of events.

for instance, the scene where all the westerners are evacuated from the hotel pointed out to me how the west wanted nothing to do with the rwandese situation beyond getting any of their people out of there. while they had the pain of somalia failure fresh in their minds, the message is that africa is such a remote, unknowable place for the west that even with such horror unfolding, african suffering does not register on a human scale.

another part of the movie that hits home is the scene when joaquin phoenix’s character dramatizes the reaction that the world would have to his images of the massacre. he correctly says that average news viewers will watch the footage, shrug their shoulders and continue eating their dinner.

this sentiment is borne out by the coverage of the time. i remember listening to radio reports of the aftermath of the massacres when refugees had poured into congo, specifically goma. i remember one npr correspondent trying to convey the scale of suffering and squalor in the refugee camps. for a number of weeks he filed reports where he roved around amid the refugees with his mike attempting to describe what he was seeing. i would hear what sounded like despair in his voice in seeing the suffering and his powerlessness to accurately convey its scale.

i remember listening to those reports in my car on the way home from work in suburban LA and while the f**ked up nature of the situation would make sad or angry, i would get home, make dinner, watch tv and go to bed, those emotions fogotten. that was my reaction and i am an east african; i had some rwandese acquantances. the killing seemed so far away that the human dimension of it all didn’t register with me. it was just another in the line of disasters that were afflicting the world that decade (in srebrenica, in grosny, in baidoa). but as in-depth reports started to get out and i got better informed on what really happened, i have grown to feel ashamed that one of the greatest atrocities of humans against others happened during my time and i did nothing; didn’t even feel something beyond temporary sadness. close to 1 million africans dead. in 90 days. a lot of them dispatched with pangas (machetes) which has to be a most painful way of dying.

i suspect that in the rush of images, and sounds we are exposed to daily, even news of the killing on the scale of that in rwanda get compressed into a visual montage of faceless seas of dark-skinned people, bundles of useless posssesions, undistinguished corpses, endless rows of temporary shelters and bloodthirsty youth. such images blend harmlessly into the media landscape of car ads, health reports, sitcoms, etc., etc., without conveying their impact on the devastation of human life.