I watched Hotel Rwanda!!

I watched it in my global issues class-It was so intense! The plot of the movie seems as though it was so hollywood-ized but it was based completely on the Hotel that Ruse ran.

One of the things that I noticed was that the people, when they weren't in any immediate danger, kept themselves pretty busy, and for the most part seemed to be having fun. The children were shown running around outside and putting on talent shows. This shows the audience that even in times of crisis, people, most often children, will find the good.

We also watched one of the special features, in which Ruse took a camera crew with him on his first trip back to Rwanda since the genocide. He visited a living memorial to the genocide. There was a french "reservation" type deal where something along the lines of 75,000 people were slaughtered. The site was kept in the exact condition it was left in. There were rooms after rooms of skeletons, with one room being solely children. They then talked about how the French soldiers were trying to cover up the genocide, so they took corpses and buried them in a heap in an empty spot. Then, they grew grass over the plot and made a volleyball court.

Ridiculous huh?

The movie was really good though, well acted and well put together.

More notes from Samantha Power

Background: The UN Deployment
-Dallaire believed the UN embodied soldiering, service, and sacrifice.
-Had served as the commandant of an arm brigade that sent peacekeepers to Cambodia and Bosnia.
-Though he was involved, he didn't see combat until he was called for Rwanda.
-Rwanda is the size of Vermont, with a population of eight million people.
-Before independence was gained from Belgium, in 1962, Tutsis were priveledged.
-After independence, 30 years of Hutu rule led to discrimination and constant attempts to systematically cleanse Rwanda of Tutsis.
-In 1990 a group of exiled Tutsis, who had been forced to the Ugandan border, invaded Rwanda.
-These exiled people were reffered to as the Rwandan Patriotic Front
-In 1993, Tanzania helped the two groups come to a shared government agreement called the Arusha Accords
-This made it so the government governed with Hutu opposition parties and The Tutsi Minority
-The UN would be in place to provide a secure environment.
-The rwandan Government & Hutu extremists didn't agree with the Arusha agrrement because they felt that under its terms they had everything to lose and to fear, and nothing to gain.
-The Hutus were afraid that the Tutsis, who had been discriminated against & systematically destroyed, would govern in similar matters.
-By 1992, Hutu militia purchased 85 tons of munitions as well as 581,000 machetes; one for every third adult Hutu male.
-In 1993 Mujawamariya asked outside forces to come to her country to keep outbreaks at bay.
-Des Forges was one of twelve who spent 3 weeks interviewing Rwandans about the savage attacks.
-March report in 1993 showed that 10,000 Tutsis had been detained and 2,000 had been murdered since 1990.
_Government supported killers had executed atleast 3 massacres of Tutsis.
-The CIA warned that there may be ethnic violence
-A CIA report found that 9 million tons of small arms were transferred to Rwanda.
-In 1990, The Hutu paper entitled Kangura or Wake Up! published the ten Hutu commandments:
1.) Every Hutu should know that a Tutsi woman, wherever she is, works for the interests of her Tutsi ethnic group. Anyone who does the following is a traitor:
--Marries a Tutsi woman
--Befreinds a Tutsi Woman
--Employs a Tutsi Woman
2.) Every Hutu should know that our Hutu daughters are more suitable and consientious in there role as women.
3.) Hutu women, be vigilent and try to bring your husbands brothers and sons back to reason
4.) Every Hutu should know that every Tutsi is dishonest in business
5.) All strategic positions, political, administative, economic, military, and security, should be entrusted to a Hutu
6.) The schools must be majority Hutu.
7.) The Rwandanese Armed Forces should be exclusively Hutu. Members of the militia shall not marry a Hutu. We haved learned our lesson.
8.) The Hutu should stop having mercy towards the Tutsi
9.) The Hutu must constantly counteract the Tutsi propaganda, and be firm against the common enemy.
10.) Every Hutu must spread the ideology.
-Tutsis were portrayed as devils, and compared to the rule of Pol Pot, calling them the "Black Khmer."
-Threats against the Tutsis didnt generate western hype, but were more important in the Foreign Broadcast Information Service.
-Dallaire, upon entering Rwanda was told that it was a place of peace and that a UN official would be there the whole time.
-The US was unenthused about sending UN missions to Rwanda
-When Dallaire asked for 5,000 soldiers he was told no, but once he trimmed it down to 2,500, it was granted.
-In 1993 when Dallaire finally took post in Rwanda, we was sufficiently unbacked by almost everyone.
-The outbreak of the need for assistance in Rwanda came at an inoportune moment in time.
-The US owed half a billion dollars to the UN and had no interest in deepening the debt
- The US used a checklist to make sure there was no los, involvement, or damage.
- Dallaire's mission was run on hand-me-down equipment from Cambodia
-When medical supplies ran out, Dallaire was told there was no funding for more.
-In December, Hutu militia began to threaten massacres, and the Radio Mille Collines began to broadcast that UN officials were to be considered accomplices of the Tutsis
-In January of 1994, a Hutu informant told Dallaire how the Hutu militia was being trained. According to him, the troops could kill 1000 Tutsis in 20 minutes.
-The informant offered to give specific details of holding spot for weapons in return for passports and protection for his wife and family.
-By the end of February, Dallaire claimed to be "drowning in information about death squad attacks," and the US did nothing.

We're studying the Rwandan Genocide in one of my classes

And there is an entire chapter in our book "A Problem From Hell"- America and the age of Genocide about it. We have to take notes on each section, so I'll be trying to post all of my notes here for you-

We'll also be watching Hotel Rwanda in class, which I'll post my notes on as well

Here are my notes for the first section, "'I'll Never Be a Tutsi Again'"

(Just as a side note, the chapter opens with the most disturbing picture I've ever seen. It's of Rwandan people, who have been killed, floating down the Kagera river. It's absolutely horrifying.)

-On April 6, 1994, the Rwandan president was murdered in a plane shooting.
-His death, according to Colenel Theoneste Bagosora, meant that the government had fallen and the military was in charge.
-The military's first actions were to put a curfew into place, along with roadblocks around the capital.
-The Hutu radio station, Radio Mille Collines, began calling the Tutsis Inyenzi, or cockroaches, and claimed them to be the target.
-American officials, who were unsure if the president's death had in fact occured, conversed about the probability that widespread violence would soon occur.
-Alison Des Forges was America's most knowledgable insight into Rwanda; without her, the country could barely figure out the ethnic differences between the Hutus and the Tutsis.
-Des Forges was a specialist in Rwandan culture and was closs friends with Monique Mujawamariya, who was a member of the Human Rights Watch.
-Monique sent a warning to the Human Rights Watch weeks before telling them that anyone who gave the president trouble, was basically as good as dead.
-Monique was killed at gunpoint under the order of Bagosora, asking Des Forges to care for her children.
-The prime minister, who rightfully after the death of the president had become head of the state, was to be transported by the UN to Mille Collines to broadcast for peace.
-The prime minister, along with all of Rwanda's modern politicians were murdered systematically.
-The peacemakers who had been sent to help the prime minister to the radio station were savagely mutilated, to the point that their bodies couldn't be numbered.
-The radio station then became a way for others to know who was on the list to be murdered. Tutsi and moderate Hutu names, and adresses were read on air, so they cuold be found more easily.
-It was obvious early, that this was going to be a genocide by the systematic, and not spontaneous murder of all Rwandan Tutsis.
-The deaths in the city were commited by mostly technologically advanced weapons such as grenades and automatic weapons.
-In the country, firearms were the most common, until more and mroe Hutus joined the battle. At that point, knives machetes, and masus(clubs with nails pointing outward) became the operative weapons.
-There were checkpoints where fleeing Tutsis would be killed all at once.
-Families consisting of intermingled parentry had tough decisions to make.
-The military was willing to kill anyone who was not a Hutu, including children who's fathers were Tutsis, even if their mother was a Hutu.
-In 100 days nearly 800,000 Tutsis were murdered.
-Before the plane shooting, America ignored many warning signs, and denied the attempts to strengthen the peace keeping mission.
-The Clinton administration refused to send troops to stop the massacre.
-They did not jam the Rwandan radio station, and allowed the Rwandan ambassador to the UN to remain.
-Washington demanded that the peacemakers be removed from Rwanda, and refused the allowance of UN reinforcements.
-Taking the same path as the Somalian genocide, America watched on the sidelines.

hey!

Just to answer your last questions--He and his wife split for completely personal reasons, having nothing to do with the countries divide. And his upstanding business buddies were people that stayed frequently at the hotel; people who owned corperations and were high up in social standings. No one person is specifically mentioned, they're all kind of clumped together.

I completely agree

When i read that ruse wanted to work in a church, i was a bit suprised because it is hard to believe that in times of such destruction and harship, i dont think I would be able to even believe in god, let alone work in a church.

End of Chapter 3

"If advancing in the world is viewed as a form of treason, then we are all in truoble."

As happy as Ruse was in the last post, he and his wife split while he attended the college of hospitality. He legally got custody of their three kids and once he was working at the hotel Mille Collines again, remarried and had another child. Soon thereafter, he was moved to general manager at the Hotel Diplomates, which is a smaller, but no less prestigious branch of the hotel Mille Collines.

The end of the chapter serves to tell how Ruse became acquainted with many of his upstanding business buddies.

Chapter three for the most part, I feel served the purpose of getting the reader to a point of understanding Ruse's life before the main events of his story. Without this grasp, the rest of the stroy might not make any sense.

Chapter 3 continued...

After getting married to the only woman he ever loved, Esther, Ruse and his wife went to Yaodunde so he could study religion. After a while of study, however, Ruse realized that this was not the course he wished to follow in his career. He and his wife then moved back to Kigali so he could pursue some other field of work. Kigali resembles Washington DC in the sense that it is a capital city placed in an unbiased section of the country, so as not to upset any of the people. When Ruse, Esther and their two children moved to Kigali, Ruse vowed that he would stay there no matter what.

This shows responsibility in Ruse, because though he came from a very specific part of Rwanda he chose an unbiased and reasonably more safe place to raise his family.

In the middle of the chapter Ruse recalls that a childhood friend of his got him a job at the Hotel Mille Collines, and soon he was so good at his job at the front counter that he was offered a scholarship to a college of hospitality.

In this chapter, Ruse also establishes another damaging seperation among the people of Rwanda. The northern Hutus(the Hutus who come from the north most sections of Rwanda) felt themselves better than the rest of the Hutus.

Chapter 3

The opening of chapter 3 begins with Ruse explaining that in every underpriveledged country in Africa, there is one high class hotel, built to accomadate guests sent to take care of difficulties such as AIDs and starvation. According to Ruse, one nights stay is roughly equal to that of a year of salary for a worker at that given hotel.

While I knew conditions were bad in most parts of Africa, I had no clue that it could be that hard to make money. I cant imagine being charged for a hotel room, and then finding out that the person who brought me my coffee in the morning would only make 1/52% of that in a week. Its incredible.

Ruse goes on to say that for Rwanda, their hotel was the Hotel Mille Collines. The description of the hotelfits exactly how we as Americans would expect it to. But by the standards of mud houses that Ruse has set for his reader, the hotel's description is almost overbearing.

The hotel has been called the shadow capital of Rwanda because it is here that most of the international dealings took place.

It is here that Ruse tells his audience that he became a hotel manager by accident, and that his whole life he was told to become a man of the church.

Also, it is here that I learned that the child whom I thought could have been Ruse in the second chapter, was in fact, not Ruse. He explains in this chapter that when a baby is born in Rwanda, their family picks a special last name specifically for them (which explains why many Rwandan families have different last names.) It wasn't until he was 13 that he was baptised and chose the name Paul. I guess I was wrong :-/

To answer as many of your questions as I can

The Tutsis were originally in power, but the Hutus realized, after the roman catholic priests from Belgium came, that the way they were being treated was wrong. They then began a revolt against the Tutsis, which put them into power (This all is really confusing, even in the way it's written in the book)

And I agree with you that the Belgians waited far too long to step in on the massacring of the Hutus, but in actuallity, they didn't really step in. For the most part, the Belgians just gave the Hutus the idea of revolting.

When the Tutsis were in power, there were constant and gruesome massacres of the Hutus. In order to try and show some compassion, they punished some of their own race(the Tutsis) by killing some of them, and kicking the younger ones out of school (Gerard)

The reason I think that Paul Kagime could be the author is that, in the book, the child is taken by his mother. And because Ruse's mother was a Tutsi, maybe she was taking him with her on the run.

If I missed any questions you had, just let me know and Ill try to answer them as best as I can:-)

Ending chapter two...

Ruse goes on talk about The uprising of the Hutus. The uprising started with Catholic church of Belgium sending priests to Rwanda to convert them. They replaces the rightful leader of the mwami with a handpicked leader who converted himself, and most of the country to catholicism almost overnight. It was then, that people began to feel sympathy for the Hutus, because most of the preists from Belgium were part of the Flemish race that had long been abused in a similar mannor in Belgium. Slowly, the power shifted from the Tutsis to the Hutus, who were savagely killing thousands of Hutus as a form of revenge for the damage tehy had caused in the past. Thousands of Tutsis fled to countries on Rwandas border. Ruse goes on to say that one of them was a small boy named Paul Kagame. But, I have a feeling that it was him as a small child, with a different last name.

Ruse continues to explain that the many Tutsis who had been chased from Rwanda began to organize guerilla attacks on the people of Rwanda. They were given the name "cockroaches" because they struck at night and were difficult to defeat in combat. This word, he says, began to be a term used to describe the whole race, and was as indesent as the "N" word, commonly used in America. As the killings became more frequent, the Hutus of Rwanda made it their job to kill any Tutsis they could find.

Ruse continues by talking about how Gerards background and being removed from school affected their relationship. He says that though he tried to remain his friend, there was constantly an air of anger between them.

Ruse's relationship with Gerard goes to show his audience, that though they found nothing wrong with their freindship when they were young, it became more obvious to them that their relationship was not going to be as easy as they thought. This shows the audience Ruse's difficult journey from being a carefree child, to a person who can barely stand to be in the presence of an old friend, for the air of envy and the distancing reality of who they are is almost to great to bare.

Further into chapter two...

Ruse goes on to talk about his best friend. Gerard (Ruse's best friend) was kicked out of school because the government felt the need to punish the Tutsis for the amount of Hutus that had been savagely massacred. They used the slaughter of a few Tutsis to compensate for the horrors of what was done to the Hutus, for the sake of showing sympathy. This is what Ruse sites as his first encounter with the discrimination that tore his country apart. This shows his audience that though there was turmoil in his country, the children of the country had no knowledge of the boundaries that their history dared them not to cross. In Rwanda, ethnicity is passed along the father's blood line. This separated Gerard and Ruse because Gerards father was a Tutsi and Ruse's father was a Hutu.



"I cannot tell you how much I loathed myself that day for having been lucky. It was the first time I became aware of myself not as "Paul" but as a "Hutu." I suppose this is an dark epiphany is an essential rite of pssage for anyone who grew up in my country..."



This section of the chapter shows the reader the similarities between the horrors of Rwanda and something, which in comparison seems much more light, such as rascism in America in the 60's. In both cases, children see nothing different between themselves and the people they surround themselves with. And again in both cases, the adult influences in their lives are the ones to poison their minds with ideas of "ethnic superiority."





The next chunk of this chapter talks about the Berlin Conference and its affects on Rwanda. Rwanda, at first was given to Germany, but because it was not on a coastline, and had little natural resource, Germany had little or no interest in persuing their rule in Rwanda. Rule was left up to the royalty of the Tutsis. It wasn't until Belgium gained control after World War 1 that Rwanda saw change. The Belgians, Ruse goes on to explain, wanted the most profit with the least amount of work. So, they used the royalty of the Tutsis to separate "the haves from the have-nots." Scientists were sent down to decipher a solid way of differenciating the two groups, and discovered that the nose lengths in the two groups was on average, 2 and a half millimeters different. Ruse explains that in 1933, each person was given a book which served as an i.d, and a death certificate for many. The separation of the Hutus and the Tutsis was bashed into the minds of citizens in every area of their lives, as well as in the work force. Hutus were seen as only fitting to work in the fields, while Tutsis could do as they pleased for work.



This "false" separation of the two races goes to show that the masses will believe as they are told, and that as time goes on, what is said will be taken at face value and not questioned.

Oh, I'm sorry

I didn't tell you anything about the Hutus and the Tutsis-that's my fault. Ruse goes on to say in that chapter that the Hutus and the Tutsis were separated by an invented history. The custom in Rwanda is to keep the historical stories and documents as well as sacred poems and stories in a place where only the royal officials, called abiru can see them.
The separation started because of the "election of the king." The king wasn't chosen by bloodline, but by birthright. It was said that the new king would be born holding squash seeds in his fists. It is the job of the abiru to reveal his identity when the former king has died.
This lead to the separation of the Hutus and the Tutsis. The two groups separated because they both felt that the king should be hailed from their grouping. This "artificial political" separation has no real meaning to it. Ruse points out that they share the same language, the same religion, and the same homeland. They have everything in common, and are inevitably part of the same race.

This is what causes the "randomness" because it wasn't the "white men" who were commiting the crimes and causing the revolution, it was both the Hutus and the Tutsis, only fighting because they were told that one was better than the other; without there being any real evidence.

Basically it would have been like if our English class split itselfs into two groups the, ChaChas and the WiggaWiggaWomms, because Ms. Clapp and Mr. Brown told us that we were different, and they told us that one was more worthy to pass the AP exam. Then all of a sudden, everything became separated, and the next thing you know, George goes on a ChaCha killing spree.

Does that make it any easier to understand?
I can try and explain it further if it doesn't.

Post soon
Casey

Post post post!!!!

I'm so so sorry for the delay in my posts!

The beginning of chapter 2 focuses mainly on how the uprising segregation of the two races affects Rusesabagina(who I plan to from here on in posts refer to as Ruse just for times sake) during his childhood. He describes an event that happened when he was five years old. Strangers came to his house, with luggage and his father told them that they werelcome to stay. The first night. his family joined the strangers outside in the courtyard. He viewed this as an adventure because he was sleeping under the sky with people whom he had never met. These people, he learned from his mother, were called the Tutsis. This was the beginning of the segregation of the Hutus and the Tutsis. His adventure ended when he found out that the reason they were sleeping outside was because the Tutsis who were staying with them were running from the Hutu Revolution of 1959, and there was a serious possiblilty that their house could be set on fire during the night.

This really gives the audience an insider look at the complete randomness that was the segregation that happened. It made no sense to the people who were surrounded by it, especially the kids.

I promise promise promise to post more this week!!!