Opinion
Hotel Rwanda – learning from history, not Hollywood
‘If we are ever to have any hope of ending genocide and
similar atrocities,’ researcher Kjell Anderson wrote, ‘we must first understand
them.’ Anderson’s remark may state the obvious but as history keeps repeating
itself, it cannot be said often enough.
In the first week of the genocide against the Tutsi in
Rwanda, from 7 April 1994 onward, foreign journalists dutifully reported the
systematic, one-sided nature of the violence: elite units of the Rwandan army
aided by youth militias going from house to house killing unarmed Tutsi
civilians; separating groups of people to kill the Tutsi, killing Hutu
with a stereotypical Tutsi appearance, etc.
The violence was nevertheless interpreted as chaos,
anarchy, and flared-up tribal strife. Such explanations echoed the
propaganda of the extremist leaders who washed their hands in innocence by
portraying the acts of genocide as random violence committed by angry mobs and
disobedient soldiers who escaped their barracks. It was as simple as it was
effective. No foreign power wanted to risk its soldiers in yet another chaotic
tribal war in Africa. The United Nations pulled out their peacekeeping force
and the world averted its gaze. By the time everyone realized what was taking
place, most of the victims were already dead.
Today’s journalists
know as little about genocide and propaganda as their colleagues in
1994. They are not familiar with the key elements of genocide, are unable to
distinguish genocide from traditional warfare, do not recognize subtle forms of
genocide denial, and recycle extremist propaganda as ‘the other side of the
story’. Craft journalism is no longer a priority. Present-day news coverage is
a matter of suggestions and emotions, opinions and judgments, political
preferences, and activism. Structured research and a rational approach to the
evidence, have become the exception rather than the rule. Depictions of
historical events in popular culture replace reality, at least with this
subject matter.
Hôtel des Mille Collines
“It’s truly a shame what happened to the ‘Hotel Rwanda’
hero,” an investigative journalist wrote on Twitter during the controversy
surrounding Paul Rusesabagina last year. The tweet referred to a background
article on a public broadcaster’s website expressing the same sentiment. It
caught my attention, not because it was stitched together from unverified
assumptions and emotions, but because it mixed up the chronology of historical
events even more than usual.
The law of cause and effect had apparently gotten in the
way of a good story, so the sequence of events was adjusted instead of the
narrative. In science fiction, the timeline is frequently manipulated as well,
but in those cases, the hero will spend the rest of the story desperately
trying to correct the unforeseen consequences. In the real world, there are
consequences too, but when it affects the lives of ordinary people in faraway
Africa, as in this case, nobody loses sleep over it.
To journalists, history does not exist. Only the movie
exists. Hotel
Rwanda, a 2004 Hollywood film, runs for two hours, long
enough to internalize the message displayed at the start: ‘This is a true
story’. Ironically, the scene that follows is entirely fictional, but it
convinced most journalists that the movie was a historically accurate
documentary. It demonstrates the magic of Hollywood as well as the gullibility
of (not only) journalists.
What matters is not the facts but the beautiful actress
Sophie Okonedo who says, in a romantic scene in the film set in South Africa,
by candlelight and with a glass of wine, to her handsome co-star Don Cheadle:
“You are a very good man, Paul Rusesabagina”. A true story. One that
happened in Johannesburg ten years after the genocide but when you’re in a dark
movie theatre, participating in the shared experience of a cinematic illusion,
you don’t think like that. It feels real, therefore it is true.
To the chagrin of many, the rescued hotel guests
contradicted the illusory truth projected on the screen. The ‘ungrateful’
extras of the hero story remind us of the fact that the hotel manager was an
actual person, not Don Cheadle in the movie, but a man of flesh and blood whose
character traits included some unpleasant ones. The survivors were joined in
their criticism of the film by other witnesses such as Romeo
Dallaire, the commander of a few hundred UN peacekeepers in Rwanda who
refused to abandon the mission. Some of these men were stationed in the hotel
at the time.
The facts are documented. They were reported by
experienced war correspondents. Dallaire described them in his situation
reports. Correspondence has been preserved. There is too much to mention and
verifying the information requires little effort. On 15 May 1994, for instance,
journalist Mark Huband reported in The Observer that the hotel
manager ‘threatened to throw his guests out, because they have not paid any
bills’. Other newspaper articles mentioned the real heroes: the small group of
peacekeepers and United Nations military observers who camped out in the lobby.
However, the media did not respond to reason. Oblivious
to the paradox in their argument, they speculated that the criticism was a
smear campaign organized by the Rwandan government. This assumption overlooked
the fact that the information of the witnesses already existed before the film,
a fact that excludes the possibility of the information being generated, for
whatever purpose, after the film premiered in 2004. Even today, the international
media collectively recycle the irrational assumption that 19 years ago served
to retain a false belief. In the minds of these journalists, the history of
1994 still begins and ends in 2004.
The irrational accusation levelled against the former
hotel guests is more than just an insult to the people concerned. It shows that
the members of the media who suspended reality in 2004 to accommodate a
Hollywood script have yet to return to earth. Another consequence of the
knee-jerk reaction of ‘ulterior motives’ to rationalize the information of the
survivors is that it has become the default attitude whenever a journalist is
confronted with substantiated criticism. I will provide a few examples of this
behaviour from my own experience. Again, note the blunders with chronology and
causality.
Some events
On 7 September, 2021, I published a review
of the book ‘Do Not Disturb’ by British journalist Michela Wrong.
She responded
in a South African newspaper on 18 July, 2021.
That’s right: seven weeks earlier. I had not written a single word
yet, but Wrong already claimed that my review was ‘part of a very efficient
state propaganda campaign’ of the Rwandan government. The journalist who
interviewed Wrong did not question the accuracy of her accusation, published
it, and afterwards resisted the reality that the review did not exist and that
my work concerns the facts of history, not contemporary politics. I was forced
to lodge a complaint with the South African Press Council to be granted a
rebuttal.
In the Netherlands, we have media watchdogs too, but
their attitudes are more like Wrong’s and that of the Hotel Rwandafans,
than their African colleagues. A case I submitted to the ombudsman of the Dutch
public broadcasters last year, about a pattern of serious ethics violations in
programmes related to the genocide against the Tutsi, was ‘solved’ by replacing
the entire case file with an unrelated question I had sent by email two months
earlier. As weird as this may sound, more relevant to the discussion of this
article is that the written defence of the criticized broadcaster contained no
less than twelve accusations of the ‘state propaganda’ kind.
My response to such accusations is always the same: Would
it matter? Would the facts change? Facts have no ‘side’; they are what they
are. Anyone can look them up and judge for themselves.
But therein lies the problem, apparently. To give
alternative histories an appearance of plausibility the facts must change, the
chronology of the events must be reversed, historical footage must be
manipulated, official documents must be misrepresented, and fake experts must
be presented to confirm the illusory truth. Otherwise, such stories would stop
making sense.
And then what? Would these journalists start consulting
the archives, reading the academic literature, doing some actual research
themselves, and informing themselves about the elements of genocide? Would they
learn a few lessons from the past instead of moulding it to fit a false belief?
Oh my, what a crazy idea!
Jos van Oijen is an independent researcher from The
Netherlands who publishes on genocide-related issues in various online and
print media. His writings on Rwanda, genocide, and research on roape.net can be
found here.
Source: www.roape.net