"We Think You're Dirt"

James K. Glassman in AEI looks at the world's blind eye toward Rwanda and now the Sudan. Interesting history, is that the Europeans had a hand in creating this mess long ago, but now refuse to help solve the problem and prevent more bloodshed. This article is a must read.//JW sends.

I'm no movie critic, but the best film I've seen this year, without a doubt, is Hotel Rwanda. It's so good, I saw it twice in a week, including once in the company of my 12- and 14-year-old nephews, who left the theater as edified, angry, uplifted and drained as I did.

The film, directed by Terry George, is the true story of a Europhile hotel manager who simply wants to raise his family without complication and to do his job with “style.” Suddenly, thrust into a moral crisis, he rises to leadership and saves the lives of 1,268 adults and children during the genocidal slaughter of nearly one million minority Tutsis by Hutu militias and soldiers between April and July 1994, as the world sat on its collective hands.

Unfortunately, Hotel Rwanda is not nominated as best picture for this Sunday's Oscars (8 p.m. Eastern on ABC), eclipsed in the judgment of the Academy by such clunkers as The Aviator. But Don Cheadle is up for best actor, Sophie Okonedo for best supporting actress, and George and Keir Pearson for original screenplay.

Cheadle, who was terrific in little movies like Boogie Nights, is finally getting the break he deserves, but Okonedo, the daughter of an English mother and Nigerian father, is the star, in a performance that's frighteningly real.

I hope they win, but I'm just happy that the TV audience, few of whom have seen the movie, will be able to get a look at even a couple short clips.

Cheadle plays Paul Rusesabagina, the manager of the Mille Collines, a luxury hotel in Kigali, Rwanda. He's a Hutu and his wife Tatiana, played by Okonedo, is a Tutsi. These racial distinctions are even more artificial than most. Through intermarriage over centuries, the races were largely merged--only to be resurrected in opposition in 1863 by a loony English anthropological theorist named John Hanning Speke.

As Philip Gourevitch shows in his superb 1998 book on the genocide, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, Speke's ideas were exploited by the Belgians when they took over Rwanda after World War II, putting the Tutsis (who, according to Speke, were racially superior) in charge. The Hutus began their revenge on the ruling Tutsis in 1963, after the Belgians pulled out.

Massacres and expulsions of Tutsis by Hutus proceeded, on and off on a relatively small scale, for three decades, until April 6, 1994, when Hutu extremists engineered the death of the Hutu president in a plane crash and blamed it on Tutsi rebels. Then the butchering of civilians, including small children, began, with machetes as the weapon of choice.