Hotel Rwanda Essay

Hotel Rwanda
John Breymaier
Comparative Criminal Justice
Strayer University
Steven Holeman
January 30th, 2013

From watching the movie, why do you think the international community allowed the massacre to occur? The decision of the international community not to intervene in the Rwandan conflict was result of many different factors. Firstly, no country felt like they could justify sending their men and women into harm’s way in order to settle a “local conflict” in a part of the world that most people had probably never heard of and was not important to anyone’s national interests. Secondly, at the time of this conflict Rwanda had a seat on the Security Council and the Hutu led government did all it could to minimize reports of
genocide and assured the international community that their government was doing everything it could to quell the violence. These assurances by the Rwandan government gave many countries the excuse they needed to avoid having to expend their lives and resources on what would probably be an unpopular intervention. Lastly, something that was touched on by the movie was the fact that this occurred so closely after the intervention in Somalia which led to the infamous “Black Hawk Down” incident and made both the United States and the UN hesitant to embroil itself in another “local conflict”.
Did the international community have a legal obligation to intervene in the Rwandan conflict? The closest thing the United Nations had to a legal responsibility to intervene can be found in Article 8 of the Genocide Convention of 1948 which stipulated that “any Contracting Party may call upon the competent organs of the United Nations to take such action under the United Nations charter, which they consider appropriate for the prevention and suppression of acts of genocide. Thus, the matter may be brought before the International Court of Justice which may order interim measures of protection” (Schabas). However, the problem that we encounter here is that Rwandan delegation to the United Nations never asked for intervention with the goal of genocide suppression, and in fact denied reports of genocide as being widely exaggerated. While the case can be made that the United Nations Peacekeepers on the ground certainly had seen enough to justify international action they do not really have any political sway, and the Genocide Convention requires a “contracting party” to make the claim. All in all the interpretation of the Genocide Convention is broad enough for the international community to justify its inaction, legally if not morally, and it is unlikely that any case brought against them would succeed.
Did the international community have a moral obligation to intervene in the Rwandan conflict?
They absolutely did. From a personal standpoint, after having done some research on the subject, it was clear that the reports coming out of Rwanda clearly indicated genocidal acts or at least the possibility of genocidal acts which merited further investigation. Surely the reports of the United Nations own Peacekeepers made the situation clear enough to merit action, and we know that mobilization and deployment were not the issues because extra soldiers arrived in a timely fashion in order to evacuate foreign nationals. The decision not to intervene in Rwanda was entirely a political one that was made in the interest of keeping the voters at home happy, and history will reflect that hundreds of thousands died because political approval ratings were more important than the lives of a million Rwandans. At the end of the day it becomes clear that the Rwandan genocide was allowed to happen without intervention because of a lack of national interest, lack of political will, and the all too fresh memory of Rangers being sent home in body bags from Somalia.
Colonel Oliver says to Paul Rusesabigina, “We’re here as peace keepers, not peace makers.” Discuss what you think he means by this and what are his limits in trying to keep the peace. The first thing that is important to understand when looking at the actions of the UN Peacekeepers is that they are not trained to be an army as we normally understand it.
An army is designed to influence events through force and the threat of force, whereas the UN Peacekeepers are designed more of like a police force that is supposed to protect the interests of the United Nations. With that in mind, peacekeepers were sent to Rwanda with the purpose of aiding the fledgling government and protecting foreign nationals, and as such were not equipped to handle the job of fighting of a country wide insurgency even with the help of the Rwandan military. It literally took everything that had just to protect themselves and the foreign nationals they were charged with. Next, we see that their rules of engagement were so strict that you practically had to be dead before you could fire back, and even then you could not use that force to protect anybody who wasn’t a fellow Peacekeeper or a foreign national. Unfortunately, the Peacekeepers were not adequately trained or supplied to deal with this type of situation and with the political situation being what it was in the international community they were unlikely to get what they needed to fight the militia. It should be clear that the Peacekeepers who were there did all they could with the supplies, manpower, and mandate they were given and what was really needed at the time, as stated in later years by President Clinton, was 5,000 US
Marines.

References Schabas, William A. "Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide - Main Page." Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide - Main Page. N.p., n.d. Web. 30 Jan. 2013.
Hotel Rwanda. Dir. Terry George. Perf. Don Cheadle, Nick Nolte. Metro Goldwyn Mayer, 2004. DVD.