Canter Bridge

Hotel Rwanda shatters complacency, so long as—in the words of Nick Nolte’s UN coronel—we don’t ‘gasp and then turn back to eating dinner’.

Don Cheadle turns in a memorable if unpolished star turn that anchors this survival tale.

That’s precisely what Hotel Rwanda is: a survival tale. A true one, to be sure, and not unlike many that remain unrecorded and unthanked because their own heros perished among the million corpses left behind by this most inexplicable genocide.

I use the term inexplicable advisedly. Hotel Rwanda movingly registers the uncommon heroism and presence of mind by which 1200 of them survived. What it does not attempt to do is to explain the causes of the tribalism that turns neighbor against neighbor in places like Rwanda, Bosnia, and—dare I say it—Indianapolis?

That’s a far different story, and one that is receiving careful attention from friends like Dr. Abel N’jerareou, living practically next door to Rwanda in Francophone Africa.

We are all tribalists at the core, an almost hard-wired instinct that becomes lethal over and over again when the family tribe upon which we settle our hunger proves too small for the design. Hotel Rwanda alludes to the same when ‘family’ becomes the explanation for doing nothing as the first neighbors are hauled off screaming and bloodied into the night.

Might tribalism also go some way toward explaining why nations that have the power to intervene in episodes of genocide so seldom do so? Even that amalgam of nations so easily charged with the role of international sheriff that we call the United (sic) Nations?

When the mostly white Europeans are escorted out of the Hôtel des Mille Collines by rescuing forces and Nick Nolte’s idiosyncratically but powerfuly performed UN coronel asks for something strong at the bar and levels with Don Cheadle’s hotel manager Paul Rusesabagina ‘these people are not here for you’, one realizes anew that tribalism is not an African phemonenon.

Critics of armed intervention except in the most extreme cases (a definition convenient enough to fairly never occur) do well to consider whether chaos is a force that—once loosed and allowed to run wild—can ever be contained to those populations where it first gains its grip.

Hotel Rwanda reminds its living-room viewer that there is evil and that it kills men, women, and children fairly indiscriminately. To say nothing of red and yellow, black and white.

The nation of Rwanda is well on its way to achieving its goal of a ‘new Rwanda’ where the ‘unfortunate facts of history’ are relegated to the past via footnoting them in the brochures for its fabulous gorilla safaris. Tensions remain. Rwanda will soon be something other than synonymous with machete-driven massacre.

The next news will come from somewhere else, where this morning neighbors of diffferent tribes chat over coffee and biscuits.