Hotel Rwanda Analysis

From the centuries, world has witnessed a number of bloody wars, holocausts, carnages and cruel genocide, which shattered the lives of millions of innocent people. After witnessing the mass killings and its aftermath consequences, world has not yet learned a lesson and still on the same path of destruction. ‘Hotel Rwanda’, a movie by Terry George, tries to convey the same message to save the world harmony and to maintain social integrity and peace, else the world should ready to witness a massive destruction. This movie is based on the one of the world’s fastest and atrocious historical genocide in Rwanda in 1994. It depicts the true events around the genocide experienced by a hotel manager Paul Rusesabagina played by famous Hollywood actor
Rwanda experienced the most extensive slaughter, a most evil moral crime, committed by the ruling Hutu government in this blood-filled century. The movie revolves around the protagonist Paul Rusesabagina, a house manager of a four star Hotel Milles Collines, who experienced this slaughter and acted as a superhero by sheltering more than 1100 Tutsis and Rwandans and saved their lives from the Hutu militia. The movie illustrates that there was an old historical conflict between two ethnic groups Hutus and Tutus, which planted the seeds of civil war which then molded into a massive genocide. There are a couple of scenes in the film, which shows the brief historical tribal background and the reasons of the genocide. As depicted in the opening of the film, a scene shows a conversation between a foreign journalist Jack Daglish and a local Rwandan journalist Bendict. On asking the difference between Hutus and Tutsi and the reason of their conflict, Bendict replied that Belgians were responsible for this conflict. He says, “According to the Belgian colonists, the Tutsi are taller and more elegant. It was the Belgians that created the division. They picked people, those with thinner noses lighter skins [Tutus]. The Belgians used the Tutsis to run the
The major motives behind any genocide are – Power, Psychological resentment, Purification and Pecuniary gain. Rwandan Genocide of 1994 was backed by all of these motives. The carnage had its origin for power and wealth, which once was in the hands of the Tutsis, later on seized by the Hutus after independence of Rwanda from Belgium. To retain this power, the Hutus elites planned this genocide and exercised their ‘Hutu Power’ over the Tutsis on a macro level. The director wisely linked the all main scenes of the movie in a chronological order to shows the clear picture of genocide. For instance, in one scene of the movie when the local militia leader George asked Paul to join the Hutu politics, but the Paul denied; George argues, “Politics is power and money” (Hotel Rwanda). Purification or ethnic cleansing is another major motive behind any massacre. Armenian genocide and the holocaust are the classic examples of the genocides purely effected by this motive. This ethnic and cultural prejudice often results in the creation of 'in-group' and 'out-group' thinking, where members of a group having same race, ideology or identity treats the member of other groups as their enemies or aliens. The belief behind this is that the ‘out groups’ are pollutants and need to be cleansed for the goodness of the society. Unlike the earlier genocides held in years 1959, 1964 and 1973, in which women and children were not killed,