Prejudice And Racism In Rwanda

One of the main methods, present often in the film, that was used by the Hutu power organizations to demonize the Tutsi in the eyes of their Hutu neighbors was radio broadcasts. As mentioned earlier, the RTLM was a Hutu power radio that was a wide-spread form of communication that reached the ears of almost all Rwandans that had access to a radio. These broadcasts were the main mobilization tool for encouraging Hutus to rise up against their Tutsi oppressors. However, they were not often explicit in their calls to violence and demolition. Tutsis became associated with other labels, most commonly cockroaches and trees, that were used to allude to the ethnic group in order to both be somewhat discrete and to let the Tutsi know that they were considered less than human in the eyes of the
Hutu rebels. In Hotel Rwanda, a RTLM broadcast is played after the announcement that the Rwandan Hutu president’s plane was shot down. The broadcaster said, “Our great president is murdered by the Tutsi cockroaches… It is time to clear the great brush good Hutu's of Rwanda. We must cut the tall trees. Cut all tall trees down!” Much of the radio broadcasts called for violence against Tutsi in this way, with the “tall tree” label alluding to the belief that Tutsi were distinguishable from Hutu in terms of height, with the Tutsi being tall and slender and the Hutu being short and stocky. It is through this persistent rhetoric that made Hutus believe that their Tutsi neighbors really were their enemies that needed to be stamped out like cockroaches or cut down like trees. Other complications, highlighted in Hotel Rwanda, that arose due to the rigid ethnic boundaries solidified during the 1994 genocide was that of mixed marriages and multiethnic children. While Paul Rusesabagina was a Hutu, his wife Tatiana was a Tutsi. While ethnicity is passed down paternally in Rwandan society, making Rusesabagina’s children Hutu, simply being associated with a Tutsi or having Tutsi family members made some Hutus targets. In her analysis of the intersections of ethnicity in terms of multiethnic Rwandan children during the late 1980s and early 1990s, Lyndsay Hiker claims that “[Hutu political leaders] promoted ‘Hutu unity’, deployed an anti-Tutsi rhetoric and emphasized racial ‘‘purity’ as a key component of Hutu identity.” Therefore, Hutu men who married Tutsi women, the most common instance of marriage across Rwandan ethnic boundaries, were considered traitors to the Hutu cause since they engaged in sexual relations with the ethnic ‘other.’ However, since paternity can sometime be ambiguous, having the ethnicity pass through the paternal line can leave some children without a definite ethnic category. However, discrimination was not just present between Rwandans during the 1994 genocide.
Racism also played a major role in the responses of global organizations and other countries, or lack thereof, during Rwanda’s time of crisis. Perhaps the most prominent example from the film is an exchange between Colonel Oliver of the United Nations, based on the real-life Canadian Lieutenant-General Roméo Dallaire of the UNAMIR peace keeping force, and Rusesabagina. When Colonel Oliver and his troops are escorting foreign visitors safely from the hotel to the airport and Rusesabagina asks why they will not take Rwandans as well, Oliver responds, “You’re dirt. We think you’re dirt, Paul… The West. All the super powers. Everything you believe in, Paul. They think you’re dirt. They think you’re dumb. You’re worthless…You're black. You're not even a nigger. You're an African.” Seeing as there were UN troops on the ground in Kigali in the spring of 1994 and the genocide continued without any real response or substantial reaction, it is clear that the international community, while acknowledging the atrocities being committed in Rwanda, barely made any moves to intervene or help the people of
Rwanda.
As depicted in the film, the main mission of international organizations and foreign countries were to get their own people out of Rwanda and out of harm’s way. This refers back to Barth’s argument that “a dichotomization of others as strangers, as members of another ethnic group, implies a recognition of limitations on shared understandings, differences in criteria for judgement of value and performance, and a restriction of interaction to sectors of assumed common understanding and mutual interest.” Based on this aspect of ethnic boundaries, those Western countries were quite typical in their response to the situation in Rwanda. Those governments believed that they first had a duty to their own people and therefore made it their first priority to help them before anything else. After that, they perhaps saw sending their own troops to intervene on a situation that, while terrible, did not directly affect them and did not want to put their own soldiers and countrymen in harm’s way by returning to Rwanda to help those who were not considered “one of them.” While this lack of aid from the international community can be interpreted as a humanitarian issue that countries should be ashamed of, their actions can be justified based on the human social tendencies highlighted by Barth.