The world is much wider than we think. No mater how advanced media sends news to all the countries in the world, its eyes are limited and therefore not all events have been known to us. Since there are countless happenings, world’s vision cannot focus on all of them. Instead, it catches events that are significant, profitable, and important. The problem is that we sometimes neglect events that humans must care morally.
Hotel Rwanda brings up the past, which we must have cared. It ended up being terrible memory, though many people still do not know about it. We, who did nothing but watching beside, are the one big cause that resulted setting fire to it. Sometimes, ignorance can be a ‘sin.’
In 1997, capital city of Rwanda (Kigali) was in chaos after being freed form Belgium. Hutu and Tutsi continued to have trouble. It seemed like peace was regained by the peace agreement by the President until he was murdered. Hutu blamed Tutsi for his death and started to ‘clean up’ Tutsi breaking the peace agreement immediately. They killed many Tutsi, even the children. The slaughter drove Rwandans into fear. In middle of this massacre Paul, the manager of Mille Collines, was there being busy of welcoming and entertaining influential people at hotel. He unexpectedly ended up hiding Tutsi in the hotel. Watching the people (whites, influential, diplomats, etc) leaving from him one by one and realizing he is alone, he determined to save all the Tutsi, including his wife.
The movie is based on facts of saving 1268 people in 100days and it is like human drama. However, it does not focus on impressing audience. It views the opposite side of the impressive fact, which is cruel and cold-hearted. The first thing that angered me is Hutu’s outraged madness. They seemed they had waited for the moment when they were freed from Belgium and started oppressing Tutsi. They do not even treat them as human calling them ‘cockroaches.’ It reminded me the Holocaust occurred during World War II. After some scenes it was hair rising to watch their colorful clothes. Moreover, the differences between Hutu and Tutsi were very small and unnoticeable and thefore Hutu’s madness looked more unreasonable. The results of their hatred were the innocent children trembling for fear and countless corpses lying on the street.
However, we must fear people’s ignorance thinking the genocide as ‘none of their businesses than the madness and hatred of Hutu. Over 1,000,000 populations were found dead, but media never paid any interest nor try to plan to stop the slaughter. The outsiders (people of neighboring nations) might have thought it was just a small fight between two ethnic groups or they might have felt the death in Africa is not considered as death for them.
In this situation, neglected Rwandans died only because they are descents of Tutsi without any help. Paul was not expecting to be ‘heroic’ by saving 1000 lives in this situation. He did not expect applaud from others nor being hero. He ran into dangers because no other people (ex: whites) can help except themselves. When his people were dying and there is no one to help, he could only trust himself. Again, Paul's action was not ‘heroic’ but to ‘survive.’
In the situation when they may be killed at anytime, the people leaving them and neglecting their situation were much more sorrowful than Hutu attacking them. Since it was not ‘they cannot save,’ but they ‘do not save,’ ignorance may be much brutal than the massacre.
We could not know how many sacrifices and death is contained in the short word, ‘Rwandan genocide.’ Maybe we did not want to know. Not only the movie simply shows one’s courage, but it also rebuke the sin called ignorance.
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