Rwanda is among the African nations that have been experiencing a major ethnic tension. After the nation attained its indendence from its colonizers, Belgium in the year 1992, the nation underwent an ethnic crisis which resulted into violent attacks. The attacks were massive between the Tutsi minority group and the Hutu majority group. The impacts of the ethnic tension resulted in several Rwandese people especially the minority Tutsis group migrating to the neighboring nations as refugees. Later in the year 1993, a civil war broke out in the nation after Tutsi attempts to invade the Hutu majority failed. However, the following year, the Rwandese then president who was a Hutu ended up being killed in a plane crash when he was flying over Kigali. The blame was placed on the Tutsi group and this led to a massive war between the two groups again. Several producers have tried their best to capture all these events to enable people to understand the history of Rwanda as a nation and elaborate more on why there are several Rwandese refugees across the world. The film titled Hotel Rwanda is a perfect example and this paper evaluates the ways in which it captured the history of Rwanda as a nation putting more focus on the attention that it offered to the refugees.
Hotel Rwanda is based on a true story where the producer and director Terry George has exposed the courage of one of the men who managed to survive during the genocide in Rwanda which was sparked after the death of their president. Paul Rusesabagina is a rich business man who owns a hotel known as Saban. Though he is a Hutu, he married a Tutsi something which has been a challenge for him as the Hutu extremists brought several friction about the issue. However, with the death of the president, the political tension in the nation became worse and Paul together with his family would observe the manner in which his neighbors were being killed during the early periods when the genocide began.
It is revealed through the film that this war was unbiased apart from the fact that it mainly focused elimination of the Tutsi group in the nation. Rich people such as Paul could bring the Hutu extremist with alcohol and money with the main intention of offering his family protection. However, with the eruption of civil war, he could no-longer use his power to keep the family safe. He, therefore, decided to move his neighbors and family to the hotel where they could feel safe. When the people saw this, several decided to arrive at the hotel majority of who moved from the UN refugee camps that was already overburdened with people thus they could not receive massive care, shelter or protection. This is an indication that the international protection system was not as effective as anticipated because of the high number of refugees that they had to take in for protection due to the genocide and civil war in the nation.
The state sovereignty and the IDPs camps were also overburdened because thousands of the refugees looked up-to them for food, shelter and protection. In this regard, Paul was left with no choice but to begin conducting humanitarian acts. He took it upon himself to care for the refugees at the hotel while at the same time ensure that the hotel continued to function as a business premise not to draw any forms of attention from the Hutu extremists.
To make matters worse, the UN Peacekeeping forces which are an international organization that could have helped in bringing back peace in the nation were not in any position to come up with an effective action. All the foreign people were targeted except the Rwandans. All the attempts to evacuate the refugees by the UN forces also turned out to be futile. The UN decided to withdraw some of its ambassanders who had come to Rwanda to maintain peace in the nation. Many of the foreign governments rather offering help to the Rwandese people were only concerned about their citizens. They could send troops to come and help their citizens to evacuate the nation majority of who had taken refuge in Hotel Rwanda. It was clear that the international community could not do anything to help Rwanda thus decided to abandon them.
It was now the role of the citizens such as Paul to try to talk sense with their government to ensure safety of the people. Paul went and pleaded with the Rwandan Army General to offer some assistance his efforts also became useless. However, after a short period of time, days after Paul blackmailed their General to accuse him of being a war criminal; he managed to allow the UN convoy to escort the refugees out of the hotel. Through their journey, Paul, his family and other refugee met along the several refugees who had retreated which depict how the situation in the country had turned out to be worse than anticipated with several IDPs everywhere in the nation.
In conclusion, the film Hotel Rwanda has clearly shown the ways in which sometimes in the midst of war and terror, the international organizations can decide to abandon or withdraw their help because the situation has become worse. Nevertheless, the impact of this leads to massive damage with an increase in IDPs and refugees across the nation some of which without any form of proper protection.