Hotel Rwanda as It Relates to Geography

Hotel Rwanda is an emotionally gripping portrayal of one man’s struggle to protect over 1000 internally displaced Tutsi people from the Rwandan genocide of 1994. The movie does an excellent job a showing a macro perspective of what the genocide and the mob rule that allowed it was like for one group of people led by a heroic Hutu man. As the story plays out it is made abundantly clear that the events that these people lived during that horrible time in 1994 were merely the culmination of a chain that had been set into place years ago. After conducting further research into the topic it is clear that the tensions between the Hutu and Tutsi shown in the films epitomize the problem of tribal tensions held throughout many African Nations. What was so striking to me after seeing the film and conducting my own research of the events that led up to the genocide were not the differences between the Hutu and Tutsi but however their similarities. When I think of genocide the more recent examples that come to mind are the atrocities committed by the Third Reich against primarily the Jews during WWII, or Stalin sending all of the intellectuals to their deaths in the notorious Soviet Gulags. In both of those examples a large majority committed the atrocities against minority people who were very different than they were; ethnically in the case of the Jews, and in the intellectual aristocracy in the case of the Gulags. As difficult as it is for us in the west to even ponder how one group of people could condemn another group of their own countrymen to their deaths is for us to fathom, we can still make some sense in that they made a separation with people who had noticeable differences. In that case of the Rwandan genocide depicted in the movie the violent machete killings done by the Hutu were done against their own countrymen who were so similar in appearance and actions that they resorted to checking the members government issued documents for proof of ethnicity.